Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10

Summary

Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10 – Detailed Summary

Release Date: January 29, 2025

In episode 917 of "Windows Weekly," hosted by Leo Laporte with co-hosts Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, the trio delves into the latest developments surrounding Microsoft, focusing on upcoming earnings, Windows updates, Microsoft's burgeoning role in the gaming industry, and the broader implications of AI advancements. The discussion is enriched with personal anecdotes and expert insights, making it both informative and engaging for listeners.

1. Microsoft’s Windows Updates and Patch Tuesday Previews

The episode begins with Paul Thurat highlighting an unusual occurrence in January—apparently, the month has seven weeks this year. This anomaly facilitated an early preview of Patch Tuesday updates, designated as "Week D Preview Update" (00:39). Thurat explains that these previews allow both enterprises and consumers to assess upcoming patches before their official release.

Paul Thurat [03:23]: "There's always an update. Yeah, don't. And if you thought your career was something else, it isn't. It's updating all your devices."

Leo and Paul discuss the perennial nature of software updates, humorously codifying it as "Thurat's Law," emphasizing that updates are a constant, often leading to user frustration.

2. Deep Seek AI and Microsoft's Investment

A significant portion of the conversation centers on Microsoft's investment in Deep Seek AI (36:11). Paul Thurat elaborates on Microsoft's substantial expenditure—approximately $20 billion each quarter—on AI infrastructure. This investment aims to fortify Microsoft's dominance in the AI sector, particularly through Deep Seek.

Richard Campbell brings attention to industry reactions, noting notable stock movements and Microsoft executives' responses. The hosts debate whether Microsoft's heavy investment signals long-term strategic positioning or poses risks due to the high expenditure.

Leo Laporte [36:56]: "There's something to be said for the fact that this is good news because less expensive AI means more AI in more places."

3. Microsoft Becomes the Biggest Game Publisher

Transitioning to Microsoft's gaming ventures, Paul reveals that Microsoft has surpassed EA to become the largest game publisher globally, with $465 million spent on Microsoft games in December alone (115:36). This milestone is attributed largely to the success of flagship titles like "Call of Duty."

Richard notes that a substantial 64% of this spending was directed towards PlayStation platforms, underscoring Microsoft's expansive reach across different gaming ecosystems.

Paul Thurat [115:28]: "So that's why they spent the almost, you know, the tens of billions of dollars, whatever the figure was, to buy that company."

4. Account Security and Personal Experiences

A poignant segment features Paul sharing his personal struggles with account security, particularly his ordeal with being locked out of his YouTube channel (79:18). This narrative underscores the vulnerabilities inherent in centralized account management systems and the critical importance of robust password practices.

Paul Thurat [82:54]: "I've got to figure this out. This is going to be a thing for me this year."

Leo and Richard empathize with Paul's frustrations, discussing broader implications for users who rely heavily on single-point authentication methods.

5. AI in TWiT’s Future Programming

Looking ahead, Leo announces the rebranding of TWiT's "Intelligent Machines" show to focus more sharply on AI topics (28:21). The hosts express excitement about featuring experts like Ray Kurzweil to dissect the realities and myths surrounding AI advancements, including Deep Seek.

Leo Laporte [29:05]: "We're trying really hard to find somebody who can talk about Deep Seek knowledgeably."

6. Microsoft’s Earnings Preview

As the episode progresses towards its conclusion, anticipation builds around Microsoft's upcoming earnings report. The hosts speculate on the potential outcomes, expecting strong revenues but also increased scrutiny on AI investments.

Leo Laporte [35:32]: "We totally got this. We got this."

Paul anticipates discussions around Microsoft's AI expenditures and their impact on profitability, suggesting that while the short-term might see stock volatility, the long-term prospects remain robust.

7. Closing Remarks and Community Engagement

In the final segments, the hosts encourage listeners to engage with TWiT's community through Club Twit, highlighting benefits such as ad-free listening and exclusive content. They also briefly touch upon additional tech topics, including PowerToys updates and developer tools, before signing off.

Richard Campbell [139:22]: "So this is now all Diageo for better or worse."

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft’s Strategic AI Investments: With billions poured into Deep Seek AI, Microsoft is solidifying its position in the artificial intelligence landscape, potentially reshaping market dynamics.

• Dominance in Gaming: Microsoft's status as the top game publisher marks a significant achievement, driven by high-profile game titles and a broad platform presence.

• Ongoing Software Updates: The inevitability of Windows updates remains a focal point, symbolizing the continuous evolution and maintenance of Microsoft's operating systems.

• Account Security Concerns: Personal accounts highlight the critical need for secure and reliable authentication mechanisms to prevent lockouts and data loss.

• Future of AI Programming: TWiT’s pivot towards more in-depth AI discussions signals the growing importance and interest in understanding artificial intelligence's role in technology and society.

This episode of "Windows Weekly" offers a comprehensive exploration of Microsoft's multifaceted endeavors, balancing technical analysis with relatable personal stories, thus catering to both tech enthusiasts and general listeners seeking informed perspectives on current technological trends.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell's here. Actually, Paul's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's in London. Pay no attention to that. They're here for Windows Weekly. Microsoft's earnings are coming out. We'll have an early peek at what Microsoft said. We'll also take a look at the big deep seek reveal. Is this good for Microsoft? Maybe not. Or maybe it is. Plus, did you know that Microsoft is now the biggest game publisher in the world? All that more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurat]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurod and Richard Campbell. Episode 917 recorded Wednesday, January 29, 2025. There is no 10. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft and we have two contestants on today's show.

[Paul Thurat]

Pick me. Pick me.

[Leo Laporte]

Bachelor number one, Mr. Paul Thurat raspberry from thurat.com. he is in Mexico City. MXC MCX, CDMX. CDMX, which, as I say, that sounds.

[Paul Thurat]

Like a bike race thing or not.

[Leo Laporte]

It does, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurat]

It's not. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like you're in the mud.

[Richard Campbell]

Isn't that that new designer drug? Oh, look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's Richard Campbell and he's in London.

[Richard Campbell]

Back in London.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the show you're there for, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

It's NDC London, which I've done for many years.

[Leo Laporte]

NDC stands for the Norwegian Developers Conference.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is why it's in London, obviously.

[Paul Thurat]

Of course. How embarrassing for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure there's a reason Norwegian developers conferences in London.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they know their main shows in Oslo, but they've expanded over the years, so now like this. Call it NBC and. Yeah, nice. So we're. And we're in the convention center. So I'm literally in view of Westminster Abbey and big.

[Leo Laporte]

How fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, you're down.

[Leo Laporte]

You're down there by the Elizabeth Tower.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I flipped the camera but it's so dark here. You just see nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Just open the window. So when Ben, Big Ben tells the chimes times, the Shoals will know.

[Richard Campbell]

No, yeah, that's you. Do you hear it during the day? We don't hear it at night.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's no good. They turn it down at night. Just ring it gently. Pianissimo. Good. Well, we're good. It's good to see you both in your. In your world travels. I'm back here in California hoping you Know that we don't slide into the ocean and today. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Or burn up. One of the other.

[Leo Laporte]

Or burn up. Well, that's kind of a. There's a sequence, you know, you burn up, then you slide into the ocean.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a perfect storm, so to speak.

[Paul Thurat]

You burn, then you drown.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So what do you want to start with? Windows 11, I think. Yes.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. All right. I mean, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What's going on?

[Paul Thurat]

Anything else happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, because January apparently has seven weeks in it. Yesterday was Patch, not Patch Tuesday, the Week D Preview Update day, which come to think of it, we need a better name for. But the Tuesday of week D, I guess, whatever. Anyway, which means we're previewing the Patch Tuesday updates we're going to see next month. Right on. On Patch Tuesday in February. That's how the months work. Okay, so we.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. This is interesting. I didn't know they did this. They do a preview of the patches to the Insider folk.

[Paul Thurat]

No, this is so. Well, they don't always do it in this order, but the way this is supposed to work is. And it did work this time is the week before. These builds will go to the release preview channel. So if you're inside a program, you test them. Presumably you've tested these features in other channels. I say presumably because I don't see any of these on my dev channel build box. But you know what, let's not worry about that right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's for enterprises. So that the IT department can say, well, is this a breaking patch? Right.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, I mean, in a non cynical way, I think it's also for consumers because that way they'll get this in front of some eyeballs.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And who gets this?

[Paul Thurat]

So you go into Windows Update and there's a checkbox you can click that says give me first look at whatever updates. Whatever it says.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I didn't realize Patch Tuesday patches went in there.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, previews of Patch Tuesday patches. So if you just went to Windows Update today and hadn't checked that box, you'll be presented with this update. So you could get it if you want to Right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I apologize. I suppose everybody knew this and it's just. I'm the first one to hear you say that.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, no, it's not a big deal. It's. Yeah, I wrote a. As part of my. When I came here to Mexico, I have some computers here. I have an Apple TV and speakers and I have a little stuff. And in going through the rigmarole of updating all that it occurred to me that I have too many things I need to update all the time. It's crazy. And the kind of theme of this.

[Richard Campbell]

You're probably running your own update server at this point, Paul.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. You could right now open up Windows Update and Windows, you will have an update. You will. There'll be like a secured definition, like. Absolutely, you will have one. You could open your Android phone and go into, you know, right click play my item, my, my apps, whatever it is, you will have app updates. Same thing on iOS. I went into my Apple TV, sat down, turned it on, you know, general software updates and it said we checked for updates two days ago. I thought there's no update here, check for updates. Oh, there's an update. Yeah, because there's always an update.

[Leo Laporte]

Always an update, always an update. So Paul, we should call this the rat's law. There's always an update.

[Paul Thurat]

There's always an update. Yeah, don't. And if you thought your career was something else, it isn't. It's updating all your devices.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always an update.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really true. Every time you get something new in the mail, it has to be updated before you can use it.

[Paul Thurat]

Don't get me wrong, the system we have now, Windows specifically, is much better than it was years ago. Remember we used to have service packs and then every once in a while it'd be too long between service packs, so they would do like a cumulative roll up or whatever they called it. And it's better. There are cumulative updates now. But still, you know, I have computers that have been sitting here since the beginning of November. They did get the November patch Tuesday update. So by the time I came here, I'd have to look at the dates. But I want to say there were maybe two patch Tuesdays. But if not there was one. But then there was a pre, you know, so all of these computers had firmware updates, driver updates, you know, like this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurat]

All of them had several updates and then all the app updates. It's crazy. Anyhow, this is one of those. So this one came out yesterday. Oh, there's actually two. So there's one for Windows 11, one for Windows 10. The Windows 10 version is pretty basic. This is a just basically the new Outlook app that everybody loves so much, replacing the Mail, Calendar and people apps. Right. So that's happening. And then I'll just wait for someone to say, but you promised us no updates. Because they did. But that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Thorat's Law. There's always another update, even when they promise otherwise.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So the Windows 11.1, I would say in the scheme of patch two or. Well, this is a preview. But next month's patch Tuesday, which will be the first Patch Tuesday with new features of this year, not particularly major. There are improvements to taskbar previews, meaning when you mouse over it, it pops up that little preview box. If you're using an app that has a camera capability and can use Windows Studio Effects, you'll get an icon down in the system tray, the one in here. Just this morning, this was driving me insane because I reinstall Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Ignore me.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, the mouse cursor disappears, see if there's an update. Oh, there's an update. Oh. I'll give you three ways to look for updates, all of which. Well, not all of which. Both of which, or three of which have some overlap and you will have updates in all three of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and because I'm on Parallels, I have Parallels updates first. Yes. You can't win, can you? It's just. Yep.

[Paul Thurat]

So if you use Windows 11, there is one big weird update that. Not big, but one weird problem that was introduced 24H2, which is that the mouse cursor disappears and it usually happens when it turns into the I beam cursor for text insertion. And I run into this all the time. I don't know if I mentioned this, But I use PowerToys has a tool that's. I think it's called Find My Mouse. Where you hit the control button twice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I use that. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

I use it every day now because I'm. Apparently, it makes me feel like I'm blind.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it fix the disappearing cursor and brings it back?

[Paul Thurat]

No, it just shows you where the cursor is. But the preview update we got yesterday does have a fix for this bug, apparently. So we'll see. Well, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple does the same thing, only you shake your mouse, the cursor gets big.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. Actually, that's not a horrible idea either. That's interesting. That might actually be a feature of.

[Leo Laporte]

Windows now that you see that I'm always losing my cursor. Right. So I shake it.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm going to look at that now. I wonder. I think that might be a. Let me see.

[Leo Laporte]

That happen in Windows.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's a little Windows Security. Microsoft Defender.

[Paul Thurat]

No. So they have a feature where you can turn on mouse tail. Hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I stopped using that in the 1990s.

[Paul Thurat]

If you press and hold on the control key, you can show the pointer as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've done that. That I use on Winders.

[Paul Thurat]

That takes a little while, though. Well, no, that's okay. I see. Yeah, I like the power toy one better. But anyway. Yeah, you got to find the mouse cursor so we get stuff done. I don't know. Anyway, so I wouldn't call this a momentous month or anything for updates. Certainly not in the scope of some of the baloney we went through last year, but whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks like Thurat's law is not holding.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm up. Oh, it's holding. If you haven't looked, you definitely have updates. No, you have. I mean, you do. You just do. Like I must.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? I just must.

[Paul Thurat]

So there are two other places you have to look though, right? And we'll also have updates. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

The app Store too, Right? There's always updates in the app Store. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Bottom left, downloads or that wouldn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

Where it downloads.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep, right there.

[Leo Laporte]

And then get updates.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay, but here's my favorite one. You could get these both up to date. Right. Everything's done. There's no more updates. And then open a terminal window and do Winget update. You will have updates. Oh, you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

There were updates available. You're right.

[Paul Thurat]

Every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Every time. This is so Wingate. So, okay, I understand the store does apps from the store and Windows Update does system apps. What does Winget do that's different? Is it additional apps?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So Winget can update apps from the store and from its own web based repository. Meaning they essentially downloaded from the web. Yeah, but the weird thing I've seen, I'm trying to document this is you could check for updates in the store and you're all done. And then you check in Winget. Sorry. And it still finds updates that are store based apps. Like, come on, guys. It's kind of insidious, but that's whatever. If you have OCD or ADHD like I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing.

[Paul Thurat]

This is a nightmare.

[Leo Laporte]

The advice should be don't just ignore it and let it update itself. Right.

[Paul Thurat]

That should be the update when someone insults me. But you know, the thing is, I find it hard to let those things go.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, I mean, ideally we're ocd, all of us, and we do. That was Lisa yells at me when I say there's an update, because she says, why didn't you tell me? But she wants to know too. Everybody wants to know.

[Paul Thurat]

My wife used to drag the little dialogue down to the corner. So she Wasn't in her way. So one day she's complaining about something was wrong with the computer. I said, what's all these little windows in the corner? And she's like, I don't know. They were popping up about something.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm like, yeah, you have to update your computer.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good that we're married to normal people.

[Paul Thurat]

It's a little balance.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little balance in our lives. If you're wondering, Richard has fallen off the face of the Earth because he is at a conference and everybody's using the Internet. So I suspect because he didn't dial right back, he is off to the hotel. So he'll be back in one form or another. He'll be back.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. One of these things. I'm actually curious, I'm really curious what he thinks about this, because he just did a show about this. But we will get there in a moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Since last week, there were three insider builds, one each to Dev Beta, and now today, Canary. Not a lot of updates, but some cool ones. And then I think it's the dev build.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, crap. Now Edge wants me to know what made 2024 memorable.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Speaking of updates, you got to go into Edge and update that, too. That's another one. The apps that have their own little update thing. Yeah. Edge is coming up. Actually, you might want to update that right now, Leo, because we're going to talk about Edge in a second.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I do not need this PowerPoint presentation on why Edge is so great. I really don't.

[Paul Thurat]

Stay inspired, Leo. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So update that thing because. And in fact, I have yet to see.

[Leo Laporte]

It says it's managed by my organization.

[Paul Thurat]

Sure it is. Your organization.

[Leo Laporte]

It's me. It's me.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. That's always a great sign. Let me see if this one's up to date. Yeah, this one's.

[Leo Laporte]

You know why it says that? I think is because I did that little hack to activate it. And I think that that's one of the side effects of that, is that now it thinks I'm in an organization. My own, of course, but.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Because. Right. Because I set up basically an effect, said I have an activation server and I'm activating you. That was the hack.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. So that means some guy in India can probably change the settings in your computer anytime.

[Leo Laporte]

Great.

[Paul Thurat]

Let's just send something down to the KLMs or whatever they're called. Okay. I don't know why we don't have a picture of this in my article. But the dev channel one is kind of fun because the they're changing it so the battery icon in the tray actually has colors. So when it's charging in a good state it'll be green. When it's in energy saving mode it'll be yellow. And it makes you wonder why they didn't do this like I don't know, 10 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Literally. Yeah, color. The color in the trash.

[Paul Thurat]

Well and plus you can at a glance kind of tell how your battery's doing a little bit easier than you know. If you're familiar with Windows 11 especially and probably 10 2. I guess the battery, that little battery icon, you could look at it and say yeah, that looks about what, 33% and you mouse over to go 77%. You're like not even close. So actually having like a color thing is kind of nice. Yeah, I don't know. So that's cool. And then in the, yeah, the beta channel, they are experimenting with some new UIs for that snap. It's actually not technically Snap. Well, it's a feature of Snap layout. When you mouse over the Maximize restore button in a window, it pops down like the possible layouts. They're looking at maybe doing this in different layout basically. So that's kind of cool. And then what was the one today? Is dun dun dun canary built? Oh, this is the. Well, this is what we've already seen elsewhere. So there's so much information now in the default home screen in File Explorer they've created tabs for the things that used to be just come down in like a single view so you still have quick access at the top. Those are those folders that are over in the navigation pane. And then you have different. Now they're tabs, but they used to be different sections. So things like recent items, favorites, shared. Right. And so now those are actually on tabs. They've been improving the shared one in particular. I don't remember the exact details honestly, but I think it works. I think it makes more sense. If you're in a business, you'll see more information there. But if someone, if you do a lot of file or Folder sharing in OneDrive, those things should show up in there as well. Okay, not that exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

But how do we can make it more exciting? I don't know. Makes it more exciting.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm of mixed mind on this, right. Because the last year and a half I'm going to call it has been incredibly chaotic. So yeah, maybe the fact that it's a lot of stuff calmed down for A little while, maybe it's not such a bad thing. I think it's going to churn up again though, because there's a couple things that just happened that are kind of interesting and I think point to something else. So Rafael, who we all know tweeted the other day, or whatever we're calling that now that Microsoft is removing DevHome for Windows. So DevHome has always been a little curious to me, but it's still in preview. I want to say Microsoft announced this two years ago at Build, and the idea was that Microsoft wanted to make Windows like the best choice for developers. It never made sense to me that DevHome was installed by default on all Windows 11 installs. Yeah, no, actually I'm seeing a message Now. It says DevHome will be going away in May 2025 and a subset of its features will be moved to new places. So I gotta be honest, that makes sense to me because a lot of this stuff is about you setting up an environment as a developer and then you can clone it and put it on a different computer, that kind of thing. But I feel like developers already have workflo. Like I don't know that they need this kind of hand holding. But there are a couple of features in here that are actually really interesting and would be useful more broadly. And one of them is that ability to have an REFS drive, which is a much faster file access for your developer projects. And so it would help you set up this REFS developer drive. So I suspect that's just going to. That'll be one of the things I think that's going to come just to Windows. But they haven't said anything about this yet other than the little warning banner that we see today. So yeah, May 2025, that's when build is going to be. So that makes sense. I mentioned earlier Richard did an episode recently, they did an episode on. NET Rocks about Dev Home just an episode or two ago. So that kind of stinks.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if they knew above devhome. Isn't that funny? Is there going to be something else to replace the functionality?

[Paul Thurat]

They're not saying, but yeah, given the timing, I. What they're going to do is just pull in or pull out, I guess some of the features that were in Dev Home and only in Dev Home and just make them part of Windows proper. Because like I do, like I'm. I guess I'm a technical user. I mean, I set up a Winget strip that does all my app installs. I think Developers do that kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

So I don't know. I've never. When I sign into Visual Studio code, I sign in with my GitHub account and it syncs all my settings and then it just install. It just installs all the extensions I use, for example. Developers have these things. They don't really need another thing and they certainly don't need it to be part of Windows, but I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's basically a GUI to show you your git status, your.

[Paul Thurat]

IT does that kind of stuff. There's some utilities, there's that. Like I said, the refs developer drive thing was kind of a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a different file system than ntfs.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, this was developed, I want to say during Windows 8, back at a time when the Windows team was busy trying to erase the past, but never. It never put out. Yeah, it never. Well, it never. They never really. They never replaced every single feature in NTPS, so they could never actually replace NTFs, but they did keep working on it.

[Leo Laporte]

And it is a resilient file system.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it is better for certain things and one of the things it does really well is quick file access. So it's good for developer projects. Lots of small, small files.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

But the other thing that's in there that I'm kind of hoping will come just to winget is they had. You could make what was called a YAML meaning YAML as opposed to XAML or. Yeah, xaml.

[Leo Laporte]

X aml.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, YAML. You could make a YAML configuration file for all of the stuff you wanted to install with winget. And when I saw that two years ago, I thought, okay, this is how winget's going to improve. Because there are. Winget is great, but it doesn't do anything around automatic updating of all the apps you install. That's why you to go check, as we talked about earlier. And it doesn't do anything around app configuration at all. So I was kind of hoping that that was what that was going to turn into. So when they say that some of these features are going to just appear in Windows, I'm wondering if that isn't going to be one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess refs. I mean that's a copy on write file system. Right. It's a resilient file system. Databased seems it's a modern file system. In other words, it seems like they should finish it.

[Paul Thurat]

I mean, I'm with you.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that crazy? Am I crazy talk? This is where Microsoft really suffers by this being slavish to Legacy is you can't. For instance, one of the big things that Refs doesn't do is win 32 API support or complete support.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it has to do everything the other one does first.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Then you can replace.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it doesn't fully support Legacy.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's better.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, we suffered through. We had fat. Fat. Well, fat 16 as we once called it, fat 32 and NTFS. And one thing was good for another, but not the other. And now today it's all NTFs, no problem. So we got there, but it took what, 30 years? I feel like. I feel like RAFs will happen. I think it will.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

But yeah, it's not quite there yet. Yeah, so this one came out of nowhere in a way. But back at Ignite, Microsoft announced a bunch of features for Edge for Business.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

So the. It's not really a unique product, but when you sign into Microsoft Edge with your work or school account, you get these additional features related to management and so forth and also separating personal and work related stuff. Right. Okay. I don't think it's that interesting, but whatever. But one of the several features they mentioned then was something called a scareware blocker. And this past this week they announced it's available now in preview, but it's for everybody. It's not actually just for Edge for business. So if your Edge is up to date, Leo, you can, you have to enable it. And it's one of those things where it's. Obviously they have the Smart screen Defender technology for protecting against these kind of scareware things, but that's good for known scareware threats. This will use heuristics and AI to kind of examine what's happening in the browser. And if it looks suspicious, they'll pop up a thing and say, hey, this looks suspicious. Things that make it look suspicious are it goes full screen and they start playing a lot of warning sounds and it starts asking you for your bank account information, that kind of thing. So if you go, where is this?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm in the settings.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So if you. On the left side there is a Privacy search and services.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Second item down.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Scroll down to security the section and if you have this, it will be the second item down is Scareware Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

Defender, Scare Smart Screen. No, that's Smart screen, which is scary by itself.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

It took me a couple of days actually. This is the first time I've actually.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not up to date then, in other words?

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I updated by browsers and didn't see it. Immediately. So sometimes you actually have to quit the browser, come back, or even reboot, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I can do that. Let's try that. Let's just quit it.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, Edge is tricky because it's kind of a hoist.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I have to update. I'll be back when Richard returns.

[Paul Thurat]

So before you go, before you reboot, though, you should make sure that Edge is actually up to date. Did you do that?

[Leo Laporte]

How do I do that?

[Paul Thurat]

All right, so go into Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I closed Edge. Let's reopen it. Okay.

[Paul Thurat]

That dot, dot, dot, menu up in the top.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Bottom. Second one from the bottom.

[Leo Laporte]

Settings.

[Paul Thurat]

Second from the bottom. Yep, that one. And I can't really read it, but. Oh, sorry. Third one from the bottom. It should say help and something.

[Leo Laporte]

Help and feedback.

[Paul Thurat]

And it should say something. Check for updates.

[Leo Laporte]

Report on, send feedback.

[Paul Thurat]

Report about Microsoft Edge. Maybe do that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, maybe do that one. Checking for updates. Wow, that's a long way to go. Presumably this would do it automatically, eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

I will.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it will do it automatically eventually. Yeah, yeah, everything's.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want you to be a seeker in this case. They want to. They hit it pretty effectively. It's like three menus.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't just find it. But I think that's part of the. I think that's part of the point. Right. It's brand new. They're testing it, they want to get feedback, they want to make sure it's working the way people think, et cetera, et cetera.

[Leo Laporte]

So as soon as my Edge is fully updated, I will go to Privacy, Search and Services under security.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, actually, as soon as it's updated, you should reboot your computer. And then. Anyway, then, then go do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And by then Richard will be in Oslo and we can continue with the.

[Paul Thurat]

Show only because that will ensure the Edge actually restarts fully. Because sometimes you close Edge, it's just parts of it still running. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

A multi hydra problem. Yeah. And then since this is a browser story, neither one of these are particularly huge news or anything like that, but it's a couple of, well, browser company related things. So Vivaldi put out a new version of their browser on the desktop with even more personalization features, which is crazy, but okay, that's cool. And then Brave Search did. Or Brave, who makes Brave Search. And the Brave Web browser added a way to. Or a feature called Re Rank, which is a way for you to, as a user, customize how search rankings work. Meaning you will see the Sources you want the most toward the top of search results and or not see the results or the I guess the sites or whatever that you don't want to see. So you don't have to use it obviously. But if you feel like you're searching for something in particular, like look, I only want to search from a certain whitelisted group of places. You can do that. So it's kind of interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, nice. It also works with or helps the answer with AI feature that's built into Brave Search because it will generate more concise answers based on your curated list of search or ranked search. Ranked search sources I think is the term that thing. Okay, all right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which do you use now? Are you still a brave guy browsing?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I mean overall I am. I've been using Edge a lot lately. Not because I like it or certainly not because I hate myself. Although you can make that case. I'm just trying. I have to update the book and I've been using. It's one of the things I don't like about Edge is how much you have to customize it per PC. It doesn't remember so many settings, so it's kind of annoying. And then there's the whole tracking Microsoft Force usage thing. But it's fine if you, you know, do your work. But yeah, I mean Brave is still to me the, you know, the way it's just the simple. You just get it. It's super Spartan ui, super safe by default.

[Leo Laporte]

So just to reassure people, I have done all that. You said updated Edge. I did the update reboot. It's still not there. So yeah, this, it's a slow rollout or something.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. This was my experience as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Kev has it in our discord. Our club member Kev, who is a very wonderful fellow, says he just enabled it. That's probably something you should enable. It seems like a good thing.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I mean I feel like this is mostly beneficial for people like our parents and our non siblings and friends. Yeah, but I mean still. No, definitely still. But I mean like if, if that sort of thing popped up on our.

[Leo Laporte]

Computers, we'd know better. I think like we like to think.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, like we're not going to be fooled into giving credit card numbers because someone like in a full page web screen tells us there's something wrong with our computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I think we're probably, we're probably smarter than that. I would one hopes.

[Paul Thurat]

But yeah, you can't. I mean there's no, there's no Reason to complain about it. It's a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Let us pause. We do have a nice AI section I do want to talk about. Keep Seek with you.

[Paul Thurat]

I might actually just skip over this till he's back, just to be sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he'll be back. We have an ad, so I'll do the ad. And with any luck, Richard will be back because we want to talk about AI a little bit. We will, and I should mention this, be talking about it also on Twig in an hour. But starting next week, Twig is rebranded. We're renaming Intelligent Machines and AI will be the focus of the show. No longer this we can Google, but we are booking Ray Kurzweil for next month. He's the guy who coined the term intelligent machines. What we're going to try to do besides covering what's going on is get experts in the arena. We're trying really hard to find somebody who can talk about Deep Seek knowledgeably.

[Paul Thurat]

I have a tip at the end of the show that might be of interest. It's Microsoft centric. Yes. But he's, you know, good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're making a list and checking it twice. We definitely want to get experts on. And, you know, I'm not an expert. You know, Jeff covers AI. He does a show on AI with Jason Howell. You know, Paris is a smart woman, who's who, and the information is very much connected with a lot of these stories. But we want to get some people who are actually working in the field on as well to help us understand it better. So that's going to start next week.

[Paul Thurat]

I think having an AI focused podcast makes tons of sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think all of our shows these days have a lot of AI, as does this one, because it is the.

[Paul Thurat]

Mostly begrudgingly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's part of why I want to do a show about it. Is this real? Is it not? Is deep seek BSing us? Likely. But is there some value there?

[Paul Thurat]

But does that matter? Well, so we'll get to this. We're going to talk about this because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have it on my phone and I've been using it and.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, me too. And it's like, yikes. I know, it's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

We used it yesterday for show notes for one of our shows. I think security now, because we've been using AI to do show notes for a while. We've been using.

[Paul Thurat]

And then you found out there was a version of the podcast that went out in China before you were even done recording it.

[Leo Laporte]

China knew all about it. No, actually, Anthony was very Impressed, he thought, he said this is better than what we've been getting. So it's very interesting. But Microsoft has a little bit of a complaint about it. We'll get to that in just a little ironic. Ironic. Isn't it ironic? You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We will be back in just a moment. Our show today brought to you by those great folks, Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. I actually spent some time talking with Melissa a couple of days ago. They've acquired and built up a very, I think mature and powerful AI side of their business. We'll talk more about that in the future. Some really interesting stuff going on. So they've been the address experts since 1985, since before AI was a twinkle in Demisa CBs I but they have, they still do that but they've added so much to their capabilities. It's really kind of remarkable. And now they've actually, they're now supporting and you can see this in the Melissa Marketplace integration with many of the apps you already use. And it makes sense instead of validating your customer addresses after the fact, doing it on entry. So for example, if you use Shopify, Melissa's address validation is an app in the Shopify App Store. And that is really the way it should be. Shopify plus merchants get access to that critical data quality tool directly from the address expert. Among other things, you can get real time address validation. So as a customer enters it into the commerce portion of your site, they're immediately notified if the address has errors or needs correction. Often it is on data entry that these first these bugs, you know, these errors crawl in and that can be a problem. If you shipped to the wrong address, it will reduce your return rates. And by the way, Melissa is not just a US or Canadian company. This app validates addresses in over 240 countries and territories. That's pretty much everywhere. Standardizing them according to the local postal regulations, that's really important. You know I just found this out. They don't have street numbers in Venice, Italy. So if your address validating and you need to know this is Venice. Oh okay, we're going to do this the way they do it and that makes, you know, a huge difference in deliverability. Even if Google Auto Suggestion is enabled, Melissa's app can correct and standardize addresses better than Google. Adding missing components like postal codes, ensuring compliance with local formatting rules. As in Venice, they're different in every country. It's CAS and SERP certified. The address Engine is certified by the United States Postal Service, by Canada Post. So you're, you're getting reliable validation, of course, for all your North American addresses, but as I said, worldwide, you also get. This is really cool. And this is again, this is in the Melissa app on the Shopify App Store. So install this in your Shopify Pro and the app provides a warning on the thank you page. You know, that comes up after the, you know, after the order is placed if there's a potential issue with the shipping address, which means the customer has one more chance to update their information before you process the order. I can't tell you how much I could have benefited from that. I want everybody to use this in their Shopify plus store. Shopify plus merchants can easily install the Melissa address validation app to improve customer satisfaction, avoid the costs to you associated with returns and redeliveries. Now, you may say, well, do I want to add another data place? But you should know Melissa treats this information as gold. It is securely encrypted for all file transfers. They have built their information security ecosystem on the ISO 27001 framework. They are GDPR compliant, they're SOC2 compliant. I mean, they really take this seriously. So you don't have to worry. This is something absolutely safe, secure and powerful. You really want this. It's just one of many things Melissa does. Get started today with 1000 records clean for free. You can try the API right there at the website. Melissa.com twit m E-I-S-S a.com twit in the weeks and months to come, we'll be talking more about some of the new stuff that Melissa can do with AI. It's really impressive. Melissa.com Twitten works with your Google and Microsoft platforms too. Melissa.com/twit okay, yeah, let's talk about. All right, let's talk about earnings, Paul, as we wait. When Richard gets back, we'll do the AI segment. Yeah, so for now, 4:00 at Eastern when the markets close, which is about.

[Paul Thurat]

An hour and 15. So, yeah, I would say before the end of the show, we should have at least a quick peek at that and then next week some more. But I.

[Leo Laporte]

Any thoughts? Right now their Stock is down 0.68%.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. So that's part of the whole deep seek story. There's the impact that it's had on stock prices and I learned something actually as part of that. So I'm looking forward to talking about that. But their earnings are going to be gangbusters. Right. But now there's going to be new scrutiny on the amount they're spending on AI infrastructure and I might argue it's a little overdue. This is a company that's been spending 20 ish billion dollars every quarter just building the infrastructure, which is again a big part of that coming conversation about Deep Seq.

[Leo Laporte]

But when we get to this, I'll mention this, but there is something to be, I think there is. Certainly Nvidia is tumbling because of. But I think there's something to be said for the fact that this is good news because less expensive AI means more AI in more places and in all likelihood more use. Which means it's actually, I mean if, well I'm not, I don't, I'm not allowed to, I don't allow myself to invest in tech stocks. Yeah, but I, and I'm not giving anybody advice, but if I were, I think this would be time to buy, buy, buy, not sell, sell, sell. I think this is short sighted on the markets.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I, it's, it's the early days. I, this is part of the whole conversation. Steven Sinofsky had a really interesting thing on Twitter, X whatever about how this is, how disruption happens. This was always going to happen. No one thought it was going to be the Chinese per se, but the whole business model of big tech is spend an incredible amount of money that no other companies can spend to build out an infrastructure that no other companies could build out to maintain your dominance and continue into this new market. And to my simple kind of ape brain, what that is saying is when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. Right? And so no one at Microsoft was like, hey, how could we do this a lot cheaper? You know, I mean they were like, this is their competitive advantage. They were going full bore. So maybe this causes a little bit of a reset. But it always, not always, but many times usually takes a company from outside of that industry to disrupt it. You know, Apple with the iPhone, Netscape.

[Leo Laporte]

Not necessarily a bad thing is all I'm saying. Obviously he's going to Satya and the CFO will be asked about this in the analyst call. Do you think they'll be cagey or cagey?

[Paul Thurat]

Well, yeah, that's a good question. So again, we're going to talk through half of the steep sleek thing now because it's hard not to. But let me just tell you the part of the story I didn't. The thing I learned in this because I cover all these earnings but I'm not like a stock or Money guy. Like I don't really understand these things. And it was interesting to me, like the more. On Monday morning all the big story was like how at the end of business on Friday, all the big tech AI companies, like the stock had all dozedived. So when I looked at that on Monday morning, I went through three or four of the companies like Google, Microsoft. Well, OpenAI is not a public company, but whatever, like whatever they were. Oh, Nvidia. And except for Nvidia, the stock price drop for each was single digits. 5, 6%, whatever. It wasn't that bad. Oh good, he's here. So we can just go right into it. But Nvidia was 11%, I'm going to say something like that. And I thought, you know what this company is worth, whatever the number is, kajillion dollars, they could weather this kind of a hit easily. Not a big deal. So I wrote whatever I wrote and then the day happened and I'm reading and researching throughout the day and at the end of the day there was a story somewhere where they were trying to explain this historic stock market event that occurred that day. And I'm like, okay, hold on a second. Because when I looked at this, it was like 6%, 11% at the most. I'm like, what are they talking about? So the history that was made Monday was that Nvidia, which has at the time was one of the top three companies by market cap. Right? Their stock price dropped by, let's say it was 11% because it is when I looked at it. But whatever it was for the day, it was 11% because of the overall value of their stock. It was the single biggest drop in value in a single stock in one day. In the history of money, it's never been that. In fact, by an order, well, not an order by a factor of two. The second biggest drop by total value is less than half of what Nvidia lost that day. So that's actually more to do with.

[Richard Campbell]

The value of Nvidia than it is the significance of the drop.

[Paul Thurat]

So we haven't really talked about deep seek yet, Richard, but we were kind of walking into it sideways. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is by the way, the best way to walk in.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes, definitely. Coming inside, probably with a blindfold on. So yeah, like Satya, Nadella, Sam Altman and Nvidia all released statements of some sort or talked about this to some degree. And all of them were in their own way telling. But the Nvidia one, which I thought was very interesting, was they basically came out and said look, we just want to remind everybody that all of these reasoning services, these LLMs require Nvidia GPUs and these guys used Nvidia GPUs. Yes, they were prior gen whatever stuff they could get from before the H1.

[Leo Laporte]

Hundreds which are, which are allowed in the, in China around the chip block. But they did something very clever with them.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And they wrote in fact their own low level code to allow the inter process architecture. So they're very smart. They just were smart. But you know, there's something in.

[Paul Thurat]

Well driven by necessity. Right. And that's how this stuff happens.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's great.

[Paul Thurat]

Life will find a way. Like yeah. When you are met with restrictions whether they're artificial, like the export restrictions we have in the United States are just natural whatever it is or you're a.

[Leo Laporte]

Syllabic kind of a haiku or a sonnet. It makes you more creative.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. No, but it does. Right. That's where the innovation is going to come from. It's not going to come from a company that's protecting its business model. Right. This is why Google didn't release some of this stuff years ago even though they could have because they looked at the impact it would have on search and they're like we can't do that. Even though it would have been kind.

[Richard Campbell]

Of a. I also wonder, you know the. They're master espionage folks too.

[Leo Laporte]

So what don't we know and this is really important to point out is you can't just take this assertions as unface value. Oh, it only cost us $6 million. I think that's 6 billion.

[Paul Thurat]

Well okay, but in a, in a Robin Hood sense, I don't. Maybe one of you guys will remember this. This is a month or two ago and it's a little overly simplistic but someone somewhere had said, here's an idea. These AI companies are all stealing content from everyone. If you can prove that they've stolen content to feed their engines and now they're making billions and billions of dollars on this. Just open source them. Let's put that back in the public domain and have it benefit everyone. And there's a naive kind of part of me that's like, yeah, that actually sounds like a pretty good idea. And so did the Chinese just do this? Maybe, you know, maybe, but certainly don't know the truth. No.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think we also need to be clear about definitions because it's really open source, which is a phrase meta started using is not an accurate description of this in Fact, the Open Source initiative says it's not open source. That means you could look at the source code, the training. There's two ways you can be more open about what you're doing. What did you train on? Which nobody at this point is admitting.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay. But neither is OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

No, very much not. In fact, they were started with the notion that they were and they quickly decided, no, we're not going to tell anybody how we did this. And then there's the second part of it, the tuning, which the weights. And that is really what it should be, open weight, not open source. I think open weight means you're saying here's what our weights are and deep seek is open weights. Meta is open weights. Open AI is not open weights.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

There's, you know, Microsoft complained, as did OpenAI. Oh, that it's pretty clear.

[Paul Thurat]

As I said to Brad this morning, let me get you. You stole a tv, got home and someone stole it from you. Yes. And then you went to the cops and said, you will not believe the injustice here.

[Leo Laporte]

They used a process is pretty clear called distillation, where you train your AI by interacting with somebody else's AI, asking it questions, looking at the answers. And you can do that a very rapid pace with AIs, obviously much more.

[Richard Campbell]

Rapid than you could, which is how the original GPTs were made anywhere where they still had people reviewing the answers and ranking them to build up a better training.

[Leo Laporte]

It's perfectly fine. That's what is normally done with an AI and that's the tuning. In fact, I have a friend whose company does this and you tune it for the task. If it's coding or if it's generating protein folding, you tune it for that task. And you could do it in a manual fashion, often you do. But you can now also do it in a mechanical fashion with distillation. I think this is, it's fair game as far as I think it's concerned.

[Paul Thurat]

It's fascinating. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is what you want, which is everybody learning from everybody else getting better and better.

[Paul Thurat]

Right? Well, it's what we want, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, not what these closed source companies.

[Richard Campbell]

You do have to debate what was the motivation to release this thing. Because they don't care about the income from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. This is not a money well, it's destabilizing. They got what they wanted. My position is destabilizing only in the short term. There's something in economics called Jayvon's paradox. In fact, let me pull it up here so I don't misquote it. This is the Wikipedia article and it says when technological resources. Technological advances make a resource more efficient to use, thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application. Exactly what's happened here. However, as the cost of using the resource drops, overall demand increases, causing total resource consumption to rise. Jevin noticed this in 1865 with coal efficiency. The increased efficiency of coal led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. I submit that's exactly what's going to happen here, which is why I'm bullish.

[Richard Campbell]

Same thing that happened with oil, right?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We continue to consume more and more oil. We use it dramatically more efficiently than we do.

[Leo Laporte]

And we know this in California because our. It's pretty funny. Sad, but funny. Our California utility says, well, we have to raise rates because you guys are too efficient.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not making enough money.

[Paul Thurat]

What are you doing? Like putting energy back into the grid. What is wrong with you?

[Leo Laporte]

They got mad, said, they said you guys have cut down your consumption. So they've had six rate increases in 2024 trying to make up for reduced consumption.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that California might not be the greatest place to live.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it here and I'm not moving, all right. Unless it's to Mexico City or Oslo.

[Paul Thurat]

Or London Place where they back over to crush it down with a. With a garbage truck. I'm sure that's super efficient.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I think it maybe is a short term market destabilizer. Clearly it is because all I was only a day.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm already talking to people who quote unquote bought the dip.

[Leo Laporte]

I think honestly, and again I said this before you came back, but I don't invest in these stocks and you should never take stock advice from me. But I would buy Nvidia right now because it's a bargain.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Relatively speaking. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's already on its way. It's already recovering. So yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

So this all comes out of the discussion about tonight. Microsoft's going to release its annual or quarterly report rather.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh good. Because then we'll know what to talk about next week.

[Paul Thurat]

I have to tell you, it's a preview up earnings.

[Richard Campbell]

You know that. That FBI like break into the room meme where they all store, you know this match FBI. I just had that happen to me at the convention center. What those guys were clearly on to.

[Leo Laporte]

They Are you, sir, are you doing a podcast?

[Richard Campbell]

Literally. You must clear the meeting building immediately. Immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't. You don't have to go home. But you can't stay here. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. And they.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Richard Campbell]

And the Internet is off.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, it's a better connection here in your hotel.

[Richard Campbell]

I think you're totally right. Yeah. I mean, I can. I don't have as much room. I didn't have time to tune the rig, but at least I got the audio, so.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And Paul was. You should know, did not want to do the Deep Seek segment.

[Paul Thurat]

There was a lot of water treading while you were gone.

[Richard Campbell]

But I think you can make your way through Windows there, friend. Pretty sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, have either of you used Deepseek yet?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Very impressive.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm actually really impressed with it. So I've used it mostly for some of that programming stuff because it's something I can kind of compare fairly easily and it does a fantastic job with that. And I think the presentation is better too, if that means anything.

[Leo Laporte]

I love. And this is 01 does this too. But I love watching the thing reason.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Or appear to reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it seems to be talking to itself. I asked it, for instance.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm sorry to interrupt. They should train it just on. I almost says substack, not substack. What's that? Stack overflow. So every time you ask it a question, it would just respond with, I don't know why you want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you ever want to do that?

[Paul Thurat]

It's like, could you. Do you have the answer? Because if you don't shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

So I asked, how do quantum computers work? It thought for 43 seconds, but instead of letting you sit there looking at a blank screen, it shows you the processes. It's thinking.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So it starts. Okay, so I need to explain how quantum computers work. Where do I start? By the way, it's English is excellent. I remember from my classes that regular computers use bits which are zeros and ones. Quantum computers use something called qubits instead. But what's a qubit? Exactly. Wait. I think qubits can be both 1 and 0 at the same. Anyway, it asks. It's almost a Socratic dialogue with itself that it develops the answer and then at the end it gives me what I thought was a really good answer.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe supposed to down a quart of hemlock.

[Paul Thurat]

It's like in the old days where you had to keep someone on the line so you could trace the call. It's keeping you connected so it could find out.

[Richard Campbell]

Spinning ball. But instead.

[Leo Laporte]

So what language did you give it and how did it do?

[Paul Thurat]

Paul C Sharp. And specifically Windows Presentation Foundation. Because I'M looking at things that are related to certain UI objects that are in that particular framework, et cetera, et cetera. I'm trying to automate some things and, you know, I've already asked these questions of. I get. Well, GitHub Copilot, which is. I don't even. I'm not even sure if it is OpenAI. I guess it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Might be, I think, isn't it?

[Paul Thurat]

Is it not? I can't remember. But look, I've had. By the way, I finally. I've been talking about how great that product is. I finally had one. This is pretty good for me too, because I'm not a professional developer, but I wanted. Visual Studio will do this thing where it says it'll give you a little flag and you click on it, says you could write this line of code in a more efficient fashion. We could condense it down to something that's less readable, but maybe more efficient, whatever. So in the past, I would avoid that. These days, I embrace it. If you have GitHub Copilot installed, it's GitHub Copilot doing that. And it took this giant line of code and was like, slug it down into this little thing. And I'm like, that doesn't look right. And so I kind of ran through a couple loops with it. I'm like, this is completely wrong. So I just stepped through it, you know, trying to parse what it was doing, and I'm like, this is exactly the opposite of what I asked it to do. So I finally. I finally found an example of it just outright wrong. Like, just wrong. So that was interesting for me. But the. There were some key things I had tried previously in GitHub Copilot because there's the stuff built into the editor, which is kind of an extension of IntelliSense or whatever we're calling that. But there's also this thing on the side, like a chat box. Right. And so you can say I need to create a class in C sharp that will hold these things and has these kind of constraints. You spell it all out and it blurts out whatever it blurts out. And honestly, I really like the Deep Seq stuff so far. I mean, so far it's been good.

[Richard Campbell]

Scott Hanselman was doing a presentation today, and he pulled out the Google Gemini Live and basically ordered it. Hey, whatever I say, say it back to me in Spanish. Except when I speak Spanish and say it back to me in English.

[Paul Thurat]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

And then basically was both sides of an ordering a burrito. And I realized that's not an unusual translation tool. Those been around for a while, but normally you have a UX to configure that you want to do this. Described it to it. It went okay and then just started doing it. Lends itself a sense of entity. That is, it's still software, but it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. The thing Rich or Leo was just reading was like the little bit. It's like when I was in class and I remember this. It's like, what do you remember? What are you talking about? You know, you're not a person. But. Yeah, but I, I, that's interesting because I, I feel like the attempts to make like personal digital assistants, like Cortana or Siri whatever, kind of fell flat, you know, it was just like you kind of understood. You were, you weren't really fooled by it for the most part. Maybe my grandmother was, I don't know. But mostly no. Whereas I, I feel like we're starting to fall for a little bit here. Like, it's kind of, it's getting better.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like, that stochastic parrot is really kicking butt.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Richard, real quick because this was in the Windows segment and you weren't here. I know. You just did an episode about Dev Home on I guess Net rocks.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurat]

And they've deprecated it and removing it in April, in May from Windows. Did you know anything about that?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I didn't know anything about that.

[Paul Thurat]

So based on the timing, I'm assuming. Well, they also mentioned that some of the key features are going to be there.

[Richard Campbell]

Must be somewhere else.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I'm assuming. Right. So I Dev Home as a product, to me, never made a ton of sense, but there's a couple of things in there where it's like, yeah, actually this is very useful. So I bet those are the things that. And it will probably be built, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Would imagine, but I mean, the big complaint that came from it is that it's expensive.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. No, sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, sir. We're talking about two different things. You did a thing on Dev Box. Yes, I'm sorry. They did not. I'm talking.

[Richard Campbell]

We were talking about Dev Home.

[Paul Thurat]

My apologies. Sorry. Yeah, okay. Not the same thing. Okay, never mind.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Dev Box is standing around, but Dev Home is going away.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay. Yep. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay. Deep sync.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Richard, if you'd like to go away and do something else for a while and we can rewind and then we'll start over.

[Paul Thurat]

I know. Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Whoops.

[Paul Thurat]

I do recommend because I guess I just do this now with him. Stephen Stavsky. Wrote a long piece on Twitter X about Deep Sync that I think is worth reading, regardless of how these things fall out.

[Richard Campbell]

Along with his book.

[Paul Thurat]

Along with his book, I recommend both. But, yeah, as far. But as far as Deep Sync specifically, I. Honestly, his take, I was like, yeah, no, this. Like, this actually makes sense to me. I think he's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you, can you summarize?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it was. Well, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

I know he wrote 18,000 words.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, he did. So, no, my. I sort of said this earlier. It was like the. And I paraphrase and make it super simple for my own stupid brain, but, you know, with big tech and AI and all the. The big infrastructure buildouts and everything, you. Once you go down that path and you see it as a competitive advantage, you don't really think about doing it differently because doing it this way benefits you so much. You only have a couple of companies that could possibly compete with you. You've put yourself in a rarefied tier away from the rest of the planet. It's the perfect business model. So it takes someone else to. And he said, look, no one. I never knew it was going to be a Chinese company, but I always sort of figured that some company would come in under the radar and say, we got to look at this a different way because we don't have those resources. How else could we solve the same problem? And basically this was kind of like a proof point for that kind of thinking, like, that this was always going to happen. It was just a question of when and I guess who was going to be doing it. So it's interesting. I tweeted or whatever this. I have no remorse whatsoever for Microsoft or OpenAI complaining that someone just stole their preciously stolen information. That's too bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's mocking.

[Richard Campbell]

A little hypocritical just a little bit.

[Paul Thurat]

I just. Give me a break. It's unbelievable.

[Richard Campbell]

So that is not. That is not the stone you wish to throw in this glass. Glass.

[Paul Thurat]

It's unbelievable. But they're doing it so last. It's funny because last week now feels like a million years ago in AI terms, right? Because. Because the big story last week that Leo was surprised wasn't kind of the main story was about how Microsoft allowed OpenAI to go off and court other cloud vendors for infrastructure, essentially, whatever, as long as Microsoft said no first, right? It was like, oh, my God, does this mean anything? You know, and so I ended up. I went back after the show and I kind of looked into it more and wrote more about, or wrote about it kind of formally And I didn't really come away with a different opinion per se, but I sort of see this, or certainly at the time saw this as an evolution of not just their relationship, but the way that AI will kind of occur out in the world. And now this has happened and it's like, yep, it's happening again. So when you think about, like the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI and how it's weird, you know, frankly, it's a little strange. They had their flare up last a year ago November, and Microsoft spent much of the past year opening new divisions and organizations around AI and bringing in other things, and almost like they're trying to make all their AI sort of plug compatible with other models. Satya Nadella referred to LLMs as a commodity. And now you could make the argument that Microsoft may be able to use Deepseek as leverage against OpenAI or is another option, you know, not, not meaning literally use Deep seq, but say, okay, well, we could do that. You know, we could do what they did. It might lessen their dependency on OpenAI.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I mean, I don't know how dependent they are on OpenAI at this point anyway. They've been right long before OpenAI was courting other cloud companies. They were happily working with Mistral and a whole variety of other LLM sources. When we talked about that being just from a point of view of an FTC threat showing. No, it's not that. We have a special thing with open AI. We'll work with anybody. So, you know, none of this is news.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, should we get Stephen Sinofsky on the AI show?

[Paul Thurat]

I wonder. Maybe let's, let's baby step into that. I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm probably going to reach out to him sometime.

[Leo Laporte]

You're his, you're his biggest fan. All right, you get. He did.

[Paul Thurat]

He would, he would not describe it that way, but we'll. Well, I would like to talk to him. So let me, let me see what happens first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you get him first.

[Paul Thurat]

No, I don't like that. I mean, I, but I feel like I have to do this kind of personally or separately.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And then if you, if you want to mention there's this other show right after ours, you could be on our show and stick around.

[Paul Thurat]

He should, you should definitely have him on that show.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is a good, this is a really interesting. Take this. Yeah, I wish. It's very possible. Does he post this on a blog instead of.

[Paul Thurat]

So usually he has a subset blog.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know why he posted that to X instead of just putting it on his blog, but I don't know why.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, he felt there was a certain reach to it or something. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

That definitely is a reach to it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd be interesting to see if Deep Seek is open to licensing through Microsoft. Much less Microsoft would do that. You know, we're busy trying to. They're, you know, busy attacking.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the embargoes would prevent that would be my guess.

[Richard Campbell]

More. More or less. I mean, considering they kept Huawei out of 5G, I suspect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not going to have a whole lot of movement on this thing, but.

[Leo Laporte]

It does Microsoft have a China? Microsoft, China.

[Richard Campbell]

They certainly do.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well that would be a way to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean they have. And they have multiple entities there. Like they have dev teams that work within the larger part of Microsoft and then they also have their sales offices and business with China.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what the real wake up call might be not so much an AI wake up call as the, as a reminder that China has some pretty good coders. China has some pretty good technology. China is not like some third world country that we're competing with here. This is a superpower.

[Richard Campbell]

They still qualify as a developing nation by economically, yes, standards, but certainly they have a large pool of people to work from.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they're very smart.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're largely controlled by a single individual who's decided that AI is important.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They can prioritize that way. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. We're, we're soon going to be in the same boat.

[Richard Campbell]

So we see that, we see this in, in their space program as well. Like their rate of development on the space side has been extreme. And it's because an individual is able to say for an indefinite period of time you will spend money on this and get a station going. And you know, they built that station in, in four years. It's unbelievable. Yeah. But they just, it turns out if you throw a giant pile enough of money at it, you can have it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's going to be the argument, by the way, for us having a kind of monoculture, as it were, to compete.

[Richard Campbell]

That is an advantage. It's just as long once that person doesn't think it's a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's really nothing you do.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no recourse. It's not like you could say, hey, wait a min.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And they do have a nasty habit of putting people in jail that disagree with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And apparently the first thing everybody asked Deepseek is to show him a picture of TM and Square.

[Paul Thurat]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Which it doesn't do. Right, right.

[Paul Thurat]

Unless you download it locally and run it locally. It does.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it does. You can run it locally.

[Paul Thurat]

It's the app that's interesting. It has the censoring built into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're linked on a Raspberry PI just to show it was possible. It is good. But it will run on a PI.

[Leo Laporte]

4 and it will tell you what happened on the Tiananmen Square. That's interesting.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. This. Yeah, this. Yeah. This factors into my tip at the end of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

But yes, as I remember, it said, I am chat GPT at one point.

[Richard Campbell]

There's that.

[Paul Thurat]

I love it. It's wearing like. It's like Norman Bates with the wig on and it's like, everything fine. What's the matter? I'm chatgpt. What?

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Very interesting, Very interesting.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. This is, man.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we knew this would. We live in interesting times. Right. We knew that this was going to be. This AI thing was talking about a.

[Richard Campbell]

Company tripping try, you know, trading at 50 times PE ratio and it's going to take a hit when anything threatens it. G. I wonder why.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like it's. It's. Nvidia's valuation is insane and.

[Paul Thurat]

And it's been riding high so long.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And so uninterrupted. It's interesting. But, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure it's going to come back because this was an overreaction. And again, I think a certain number of people that went, oh, this is a useful over overreaction. Let's buy the dip and back to stock trading as gambling rather than as investing in companies.

[Paul Thurat]

It's only a matter of time before I'm running this on my Commodore 64. It's going to be great.

[Richard Campbell]

And your Commodore 64 is running in your Apple watch. Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know now, according to Steven Sinofsky, why the Norwegian developers conference is in London. Because even though Norway doesn't need it because it has considerable oil wealth, it raised its wealth tax to the highest in Europe and its capital gains to the second highest in Europe. So the influx of Norwegian millionaires continues. They're moving to the eu.

[Paul Thurat]

Where did you find this?

[Leo Laporte]

Weirdly, Steven Sinofsky's.

[Paul Thurat]

It's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Twitter.

[Paul Thurat]

That's bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Most of them moved to Switzerland.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. But you know, something is expensive when Switzerland is the cheaper option. Yeah. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. That's a good point.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Home of the $30 latte Norway used.

[Richard Campbell]

To have the most expensive Big Mac in the world for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that part of your research, Richard as well?

[Paul Thurat]

Locally sourced beef?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I keep an eye on the big man crisis. I bet Tokyo's back in top again, which is normal. But for a while there, Norway, they have a bit of a rough time.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, three years ago when you asked me what's it like going to Norway, it's like I need. I. I feel like a burger and a beer and it's going to be 50 bucks.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's now it's like 4:35. So they really took a hit.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know where to go here. So would you describe the weather in London as comparable to the weather in Mexico or why?

[Richard Campbell]

No, comparable to back in Vancouver. It is gray and raining.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This is why we have a conference in January. And when my wife does not come with me, it's like, what are you doing in London in January?

[Leo Laporte]

That's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

I want a miserable weather. I'd stay home. And she did.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurat]

Okay, blah blah, blah blah blah. Okay, so just a couple of quick wrap up stuff things on OpenAI or an AI so OpenAI last week it's been kind of a flurry of small announcements out of OpenAI. This was before Deep Sync but announced operator. This is their agent based technology for ChatGPT. Right now it's only an option in that really expensive 200 month tier or whatever it's called, but they're going to bring it to everywhere. Obviously they want to test it with a small group first, but this is the technology that will go off, you give it instructions and works on your behalf of the background. And every once in a while we'll pop up and say, hey, we booked a flight or did whatever it was you asked us to do.

[Richard Campbell]

I got your thing you wanted.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, that's pretty. So that's cool. And then I just, I've not used it and I probably won't but I. And this isn't in the notes per se, but I got an email from Google about Android Studio. Their latest version has whatever the feature's called, Gemini something, something built in, much like copilot in GitHub, GitHub copilot in visual Studio. Right. And then right in the wake of the Samsung announcement, which I guess was last week, and that also feels like a million years ago, I'm having trouble with time here. But as they did last year, there were a couple of features that Samsung announced that came from Google for their phones. And then Google came out and said, yeah, don't worry, we're bringing a bunch of this stuff to our phones as well. And so there's a set of Gemini features that are coming to Android broadly and then a set of features that are going to come to Pixel handsets specifically and those are all supported versions of Pixel, so Pixel 6 and newer and the big one, I think there's a bunch of it you mentioned Gemini Live, there's some improvements to that and, and deep research integration and Circle to search improvements. But I think the big thing here is actually extensions, right? And these are the things that give you the ability to complete tasks across in their case, first and third party services. Right. So you could, they've had extensions I think for a little while but now they're supporting multiple extensions so you could have it. I don't know, I don't know what you would do this exactly but you know, plug in Spotify and YouTube Music and say I want, you know, whatever it is, a playlist of blah, blah, blah, whatever. So I think this is the type of thing that's going to make this stuff just, I think more broadly useful to people. And then I also got an email from Google because I'm a workspace customer that they're bringing NotebookLM to workspace right. And I have the cheap workspace, like the low end tier, the starter tier. I think I have six accounts, whatever, so I don't usually get much, but actually the standard version of NotebookLM is coming to basically all tiers, including mine. And then they have something called NotebookLM plus, which is gonna come to workplace standard and better, and I actually know the difference.

[Leo Laporte]

But you've used Notebook LLM.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, yeah. In fact, I made a podcast out of a Steven Snofsky blog post, remember?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Paul Thurat]

Quite a while. It was pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah, it's. It's actually really impressive. So I don't know. Yeah. I will say the one thing that has not changed with all this stuff is that AI is just like an assault. It's just happening and happening and happening. You just, you can't escape it.

[Richard Campbell]

Trying it. They're trying to find the killer product.

[Paul Thurat]

I think it's doing it in a way in the sense that like, no one, you know, would buy a particularly word processor for their superior spell checker necessarily or whatever. But, you know, back in the day. But I, I do feel like it's just hitting everywhere. You know, it's a.

[Richard Campbell]

It's this win by a thousand cuts. Right?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not any one thing. It's all these things eventually said, you're going to miss one of them enough, you're going to hang around with a bunch of them.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep, yep. So if you're one of those guys, and if you are, you're my age, roughly, and you've been around a while and you're tired stuff, and you're getting ready to retire, you got to get over it because AI is happening. And I would just, I'm not saying like, embrace it fully, but you have to get past the this is not real. It's a phase, it's a. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, this is shall pass.

[Paul Thurat]

It's not passing. It's going to be part of everything.

[Richard Campbell]

It's. We're on a path of rationalization. Right. Like, yep, this seems to be the year that, that we hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment.

[Paul Thurat]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That doesn't mean it's over. That's when you start to climb out. It's like, I think the series of features that you're figuring out here is to find the value because they. I haven't seen anybody find value. I can't find the case study. Right, right. Except for GitHub Copilot.

[Paul Thurat]

So I think the re. Yeah. That one they've actually come up with data. Right, is what you mean. Yes. Which they have. And data.

[Richard Campbell]

I could go. I can now talk to other product teams. You have other companies that have nothing to do with this industry about what their life is like post GitHub copilot and it's this 25, 30% productivity boost.

[Paul Thurat]

The thing is, you could. Yeah. And look, you could go to Anthropic or OpenAI or now Deep Seq or whatever. And it feels so random. Like, you might assume that like a GitHub copilot product might be optimized for Microsoft technologies or something. It's not. It's very broad. But I have really. I could find out answers for things about C from Cloud with Anthropic OR Mistral or OpenAI or now deep Sync, which I have done. And. Yeah. It's just everywhere, you know, it's incredible. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody's trying, even the Chinese government.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. That's right. I will say it's more believable that the Chinese were able to get this done than, say, the Russians. Yeah. If that means anything.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I. I agree.

[Paul Thurat]

That's kind of interesting to me.

[Richard Campbell]

We do need a Putin seek, don't we?

[Paul Thurat]

The Putin AI. Everything just goes like, it just turns around. So he's the hero of whatever story and, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The answer is always a quote from Dot W ski right.

[Paul Thurat]

In 1968, when Putin was leading the charge for. Wait, what?

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly with Mr. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. Richard's in London, Paul's in Mexico City, and you're wherever you are. We're glad you're listening.

[Richard Campbell]

I am in the Curio.

[Leo Laporte]

You're in. Is that the. That's a good name. Is it the Old Curiosity hotel?

[Richard Campbell]

We overlook MI6 here. Like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how fun is that?

[Richard Campbell]

That's very special.

[Paul Thurat]

That's a little dicey. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it always blows up in James Bond movies.

[Richard Campbell]

We're right beside the explosion side here. And then he went offline again.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be. No, that wouldn't be funny. That wouldn't be funny. So the earnings, one o'clock, half an hour from now.

[Paul Thurat]

We totally got this. We got this.

[Leo Laporte]

So if we just slow down a little bit, guys, you have a shot.

[Paul Thurat]

I've got the Microsoft investor site open just in case. I'll refresh from time to time. Time.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you. You probably don't need to do this, but do you listen to the analyst call? Don't you?

[Paul Thurat]

Yes or no? I read the Transcript now, but yeah, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a better way to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

If you don't have your agendic AI read it for you, give you.

[Paul Thurat]

I mean, I'm probably only a matter of time. But just summarize this. It's like they made a buttload of money, you know? Yeah, they're good.

[Leo Laporte]

What are the learnings here? Yeah, make a lot of money.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's fun to make a lot of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think there'll be any surprises? Anything we should be watching for?

[Paul Thurat]

No, I think it's going to be more of the same across the board. I think all the little weak areas like Surface are going to continue to be weak. Xbox hardware will continue to be weak. We've got some really good news about Xbox software though, by the way, which we'll be talking about. Okay, that's probably going to be great. But that was. That's been true with Activision Blizzard. Right. And then. No, I think if you look at across the company, I think, I guess the things I would look for a. I want to see the exact figure on AI infrastructure build or cap X whatever. But I also want to see if they try to rationalize any profits or. Well, not profits, but revenues from AI and very explicitly. Which they've done. No, not really so far.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know they will probably. Will they address. Go ahead, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Until it's a 3 comma number of revenue, they're not saying a thing.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I mean, listen, having listened to and also read these post earnings conference calls, people are maybe a little too polite and maybe that's why they get on the call. I don't know, but I feel like someone needs to be like, hey, I don't mean to be the wrench in the gear here, but it looks like you're spending a lot of money. Could you talk about that a little bit and explain when that's gonna, I don't know, pay off? Because you are a publicly held company, it's reasonable to, you know, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

They know they're not going to get a straight answer if they ask.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. Well, they're the argument on, you know, they were. Otherwise they were going to take this cash and do stock buybacks.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay, I'm glad. So I literally was just going to say there is a thoughtful response to that and that's exactly what you just said, which is there's risk to this, but it's also high return probability. Whereas when you buy stop, there's nothing lower return than stop. It's like we have a lot of money.

[Richard Campbell]

I run out of ideas. I just have money.

[Paul Thurat]

We're doing nothing with your money. Like this is something, you know, investor. Look, you can be too aggressive. But investors want to see.

[Leo Laporte]

But investors like buybacks too because it.

[Richard Campbell]

Increases direct revenue for them.

[Leo Laporte]

The value of their.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure, but they don't actually need that revenue. They'd rather make more money later than, you know, less money now. And the big thing is the AI hype has been useful for moving municipalities so forth. Like there's going to be a real pushback against new data centers. And the AI hype and we're making our country competitive has gotten them able to get zoning through to get more data centers built. So even if the AI thing doesn't need them, they're still going to need these data centers eventually. This is a time thing.

[Paul Thurat]

I live in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, which is a nexus of shipping lanes and now by.

[Richard Campbell]

And several variations of Makunji.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes, that's right. Three. At least three. And our area is inundated by Amazon type warehouses. It's just in trucks on the roads all the time. I would give anything for those facilities to be data centers because there would be no trucks. Yeah, listen, there are better. You know, I'm not saying it would be a net better.

[Richard Campbell]

Better neighbors.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, they would. Well, they would be. I mean unless there was a nuclear explosion because that's how they're paying for it. But what are powering it? But I don't know. I would much rather have those be data centers.

[Richard Campbell]

Need to come to my nuclear talk, friend. That's not what's going to happen. Yeah, but I'm with you and I do think it's a really interesting point that they. This is a physical investment facilitated by the urgency around AI that is valuable to the company regardless. Are they going to overspend a bit on it? You bet. Would they read it going to be able to get all those locations more slowly? Possibly not.

[Paul Thurat]

Right? Yeah. I mean. Right. I mean even given. Even if you think deep sync is the end of the earth or something, I mean, do you. Would you go back in a Monday morning quarterback sense and say they blew it by doing what they did? No, what they did was actually smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

It's the right thing for the company and for its shareholders.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, the downside risks are low and the upside is significant.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And it really does beat the heck out of a stock buyback.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh my God. Yeah. Not even close. Yep, that's exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you're Apple now.

[Richard Campbell]

We just need to do 30 more minutes of this and we can have the earnings.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I didn't mention this, but I am wearing a number of devices which record. This is the PLOD note taking thing. This one, you have to explicitly tell it. Okay, I want to record this conversation so it's probably legal and it sends it to either Claude or ChatGPT. This thing is the B computer that's always recording.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have as good an AI on the other end though. I applied. I'm going to try to talk to these guys because I'm curious what their plan is because I think at least in California you can't just record everything, can you? Going on around you? It's a two party state, which means you have to get the other party to agree.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, Alexa's always going, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's not recording, it's always listening.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, this is like in others you see someone on the street and take a picture of them, they're like, hey, what the hell are you doing? Like you're on the street. I can take a picture of you.

[Leo Laporte]

Duckess. I mean I, I love this because.

[Paul Thurat]

That may vary by right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's dopey. It doesn't. Yeah, but, but as it gets smarter and I think that that's the whole idea. I have seen the output of plot and it's quite good. It'll do mind maps of your conversation.

[Paul Thurat]

And oh my God, my, my thing would be suicidal. They'd be like, what are you doing with your life? Like, what is this? You seem to talk to yourself a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

I want her.

[Paul Thurat]

Are you okay?

[Leo Laporte]

I want, I want an assistant that's always listening, always available, always talking. I can say, who's that guy? What do you think about this plan? And I think it would be great to have that. And I don't think we're too far off. When I look at the outputs of things like Deep Seek, I feel like Deep Seek is my little buddy.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I mean as far as storage and stuff, like if they're just taking text of what you're saying, you could store an almost infinite amount of that in anything, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Right, yeah, it records, sends it off. You can save it or you just get the transcript.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, of course, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You're little.

[Leo Laporte]

We know Deep Seek sends it all to China, right?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Look, I just want the question about C sharp. I don't care where it goes. Could you just.

[Leo Laporte]

Who cares? Solve the problem, not a spy.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that the TikTok nation made it very clear they do not care.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody cares. Honestly. Maybe the way you know somebody was a spy is if they didn't have any of that stuff.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes. What do you. What do you have to hide, sir?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, that's the giveaway. Oh, I only carry a dumb phone because.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, those people, like, everyone back away from this guy. What's going on?

[Richard Campbell]

Me and my STARTAC are very happy with each other.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. There are a lot of shows about spy craft and stuff. I've just finished the Agency, which is a wonderful show. And he's always buying burner phones. Everybody's buying burner phones all the time. They don't.

[Paul Thurat]

I love when. I love when that's in like movies and TV shows. Because I have never in my life even considered buying a. Like, I don't even.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I'm saying. If you're buying a burning burner phone, if you're not wearing an AI pin, it must be a spy or a drug dealer. One of the. Exactly. Yeah. You're up to. You're up to no good.

[Paul Thurat]

That's classic.

[Leo Laporte]

I think. Did you talk about Microsoft closing the Experience Center?

[Paul Thurat]

No. So there's two minor Microsoft stories. One is a story out of Windows Central. Zach. I believe that Microsoft will come out with smaller Surface Pro and laptop models with Snapdragon chips. Lower end ones.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope they ask Satya about Snapdragon versus Intel. I think that's very. That's really interesting.

[Paul Thurat]

So intel, by the way, will also be releasing their earnings if it's not today, any day now. And yeah, we'll see. I'm sure the new CEO is like, Right, well, they have an interim CEO, I guess, but I'm sure they're on the straight and narrow now. They got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi. Oh, yes, we're here to talk about the last quarter.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, exactly. It's like. Is this a funeral? What's happening?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's all Pat's fault.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, it's all Pat's fault. Anyway, I don't really care about smaller surface anything, so I don't know why they're doing that, but whatever. And then I'm interested in more snakes.

[Leo Laporte]

Snapdragon.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I am too, but I. But I'm also interested in more Snapdragon. Awesome. Snapdragon. How low can we go? So, yeah, let's see. How powerful can we do like a next gen with graphics and everything?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

You want an ultra 2, right?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yep. I wanna. I want the Next one. Not like crappier versions of the existing one. So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

I said experience center is about a 20 minutes walk from me. I should probably pop down. Going to be gone in another week or so.

[Paul Thurat]

Is this. I've been to a Microsoft store in London. That is it Camden. What was the name of that place? I think that's something. Yeah. So at the time it was. I thought of it just as a Microsoft store, I guess, but when they closed all their stores, I guess they kept maybe two open as sort of marquee stores. Not technically a retail store, but it is a retail store. Like you can, you know. Yeah. So that one was one of them. And now it won't be. They're closing in February.

[Richard Campbell]

So he said on January 29 There that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the last Microsoft store?

[Paul Thurat]

I. I mean they don't even call them that anymore, but yeah, pretty much. I think I.

[Richard Campbell]

Experience centers.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Like the, the old stuff's there. Yeah, I think they did. Which is what makes it the store. Yeah. To the store again. Well, they use a little differently. Yeah. Like the New York store. Location.

[Leo Laporte]

Experience. I don't have money.

[Paul Thurat]

Was they. They kept it. I'm not sure if they still have it today, but they kept it as a place where customers could come and have meetings and stuff and get hands on with devices and whatever. But it wasn't a store. Like you couldn't buy stuff there after the closing.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not a store.

[Paul Thurat]

That's not a store.

[Leo Laporte]

Somewhere you go.

[Paul Thurat]

You make it sound so obvious. You know when you say it that way, it's kind of. Kind of obvious.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're getting ready for the Xbox segment. How about that? That's gonna be the excitement of the hour, ladies and gentlemen. And then in 24 minutes, Microsoft's earnings. So do it really slowly. Paul. Paul.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, actually, if you want. This sort of impacted Richard slightly. But one thing that happened to me over the weekend, which. No. Which grew into this incredible just event. Friday morning I got up and we. I was, I was with Richard and Puerto Vera, I was gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes.

[Paul Thurat]

Fly back and you know, we got our stuff ready to go, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And did a little bit of work. And the guy who does our news, Laurent texted. He says, hey, there's something up with the TikTok. Not TikTok, Twitter account. Some you have to go in and agree to something, blah, blah, blah. But it's like the two FA is still on Brad's phone. Whatever. And I was like, okay. I was like this is not a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

I will, I'll handle it, man.

[Paul Thurat]

So the four of us went down to wherever to have breakfast and we're standing in line and my phone buzzes and it's Brad. And he says, hey, I can't post the video we just recorded to YouTube. I've been locked out for some reason, so could you go in and just re add me as a manager or whatever? I'm like, yeah, sure. So we're standing there, I'm doing this on my phone and I can't get into my YouTube account. So I'm like, okay, let's get. And I'm like, yeah. And I'm like, I gotta go. So I went back to the room and without going, I ended up writing a 5,700 word article about this event, which involved YouTube not helping me in the slightest and locking me out of my corporate channel, which I also have a workspace account attached to with six accounts and not helping me in the slightest. And to get this account back, the short version is something on the back end changed and they reverted to like the old owner of the thing. And because that person was not responding to an email, they just turned it off one day. They didn't tell anybody, they just turned it off. The site was still there, the channel, but they wouldn't let anyone in. Right? So they said, all you got to do is go back to have [e-mail] okay this. And. And I'm like, they, I, I have been separate from that company for two years. I. We made this switch may two years ago. I own it. I am literally the business owner. It is my name. They were not listening, so I had to go back. And the short version is the old owner of the company, the still owner of that company, brought back an email address that hasn't existed for two years, gave me the password, I got in, but then I had to do a 2fa whatever. And Brad had this. So the first one, it said, go to your authenticator app and then give me the code. And I'm like, great. But there were other options. And one of the other options was a phone number, but it only gave me the last two digits. I checked Brad's phone number, it was those two digits. I'm like, brad, you're going to get a code. And he did. And I was like, nice. And then I got in and then I went to change the owner back to me, which again, almost two years ago we had done. And I said, you got to do a 2fa. I'm like, no problem. But that time there was not an option. It was only authenticator. So I went to Brad and I said, listen to me. And this is like, depending on the answer of this question, I'm never going to get my YouTube channel back. I don't suppose somehow in Google authenticator you still have this two year old account. And he's like, let me check. Let me tell you, the 10 seconds that took was a freaking eternity. And he came back with the code and I was like, oh, my God. Yeah, I only got into this thing through the grace of God.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So that didn't happen until the inertia.

[Richard Campbell]

Of Brad Sam's updating stuff. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So I switched it all back and then I got an email from YouTube and they were like, we'd like you to fill out this feedback form. And I was like, I'm going to fill the hell out of this.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yes, I will tell you.

[Paul Thurat]

I, I, it was unbelievable. It was just so horrific. And there was more going on. It was other things. But, but there was a moment where I had trouble also with my business PayPal account, where you're getting 1099s and stuff. When we arrived in Mexico from Puerto Vallarta, it was a domestic flight, no problem, no customs. We made our way out. Quickest thing in the world. It was wonderful. And I'm standing there on the curb and I'm calling Uber. And at first it was fine, and then it did this weird loopy thing and it was like canceled. And then do it again, but now it won't show me a price. And I was like, am I, am I under attack? I'm like, what is this? Like, is something going on? You know, I had a moment where I was like, I don't, I'm not sure I'm okay here. Like, this is really possible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So I, Steph, I was like, stephanie, could you call the Uber? And she's like, yep, it's like, he'll be here in two minutes. And I'm like, oh, man. Like, like, what is going on? But anyway, I, it was not a identity attack, thank God, but it was just a bunch of weird coincidences. But, Richard, if you were wondering if I was, I don't know, overreacting or whatever, when I left for breakfast on Friday morning, I can assure you I spent the rest of the weekend freaking out, trying to get my thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I saw the calm version of you on Friday.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it got worse and worse. I literally said this. I was on the plane and I was so strung up from this. I was like, I don't know. It's going to take me hours to calm down from this. I am freaking out. And everything you think you own can be taken away from you in one second. You know?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, one of the requirements I had for myself to actually start moving all my stuff down365 is a local backup of it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Because. And so if I got locked out of the account for whatever reason, at least I have a snapshot that's no more than a day old.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I separate for. No, I guess, tied to this. We were now in Mexico City. It must have been Sunday or something. The two of us, my wife and I were going to take an Uber and I was talking to her about this, and I said, you know, if I get hit by a bus right now, which honestly, at this point I would take. I feel bad that you, or maybe someday the kids will not be able to figure any of this out. I use a password manager like you do. And the thing is, I'll go to, with my business especially, there are certain services I pay for and use or whatever, but I'm not on them every day. I don't think about them, whatever. So every once in a while, somewhat deliver it or something will be like, you got to do something, whatever. So I go to the site, I'm like, okay. And I'm looking at it like, I don't even know how to log into this thing. So, you know, you click in the box, you're like, maybe the password manager comes up and it doesn't. You're like, all right, I guess I'll try Google Next. You know, So I try the Google account and actually usually that does work, but I feel like I need to document this. And I also, I think I want to back out of the times where it's a. I don't know how you would do this, but kind of unwind it because it's such a convenience to sign in with a, an online account like Google or Microsoft especially. But you see it sometimes with Facebook and Apple and whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

But usually you have a locus point of failure. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And a random. Right. So if I, if I have accounts at like 200 services, sites, whatever, 75 of them are going through my Google account, which is a corporate workspace account. They could just flip a switch today, and I'll never get back in any stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

And I, yeah, I've actively gotten rid of all of those, everything through the password manager.

[Paul Thurat]

I, I'm gonna, I, I, I literally Made a to do to work on this. I'm not. It's not something I can finish this weekend or whatever. It's gonna take time. But I think, I think this is necessary. This is a problem. Like.

[Richard Campbell]

And your wife's not on your password manager, right?

[Paul Thurat]

What do you mean? Like she's not using the same one and can't get into my stuff, that.

[Richard Campbell]

Kind of thing, right?

[Paul Thurat]

No, not right now, but that's going to change. We've.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I've. I've got her using the family account on bit Warden so that we have all the household accounts in a shared space so that we both have access to them.

[Leo Laporte]

There's also in most password managers a feature where you can designate a.

[Paul Thurat]

Like a life. Like someone who. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And they can request. The way it works, I think for Bitwarden is that they can request access to Bitwarden and I'm informed if I don't respond.

[Paul Thurat]

So here's a weird thought.

[Leo Laporte]

Like in a day or five days.

[Paul Thurat]

Or a week or whatever, even given everything you guys know about security, right? Anyone would tell you a 2fa off of a phone number is insecure for some reason, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. We all know this.

[Paul Thurat]

We all know this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

But here's the thing. Let's say I'm out in the world and I'm in Mexico and I get robbed and someone steals my phone or lose my phone, whatever it is. I could walk into a store, buy any phone, 200 bucks, doesn't matter. I'm using a Google fi esim downloaded to the phone. I use Google Authenticator for almost everything. I. If I. I will get my phone number back and anything I do through Go Google Authenticator instantly. Like getting my. Recovering my phone number is easy, right? Recovering an online account might be impossible, you know, So I get it. But I mean, and I'm not. I'm literally not saying everyone go back to MM or SMS or whatever it is. MMs, SMS, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the point is it's easy for you and it's easy for a bad guy to get your phone number.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm just. Look, nothing's perfect. I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's.

[Paul Thurat]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really a rule in security. If it's convenient and easy, it's less secure.

[Paul Thurat]

No, I. I understand. I don't mind a little bit of work on my part.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm more concerned with, well, a. I got locked out. Right. So to this day, I. I've yet to get into my PayPal business account to get the 1099 for my taxes. And I think it's because I'm in Mexico. I spent 40 minutes on with the phone so far.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it probably is because you're in Mexico that makes it suspicious.

[Paul Thurat]

It's unbelievable. Yeah. So, I mean, I have VPNs. I can make it look like I'm, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they know you're on.

[Paul Thurat]

I know, I know. But I. I went. This is a separate. But tied into all this. I. Because I couldn't get in, they were like, we have to go through this extra security thing. Scan your id, scan your face. And then I did. And they're like, yeah, we can't let you in. I'm like, guys, the system is broken. I don't understand. I. How much do I have to give you to prove that it's me?

[Leo Laporte]

The good news, though, is that the method Elon used to make Twitter only barely break even. He's about to apply to the federal government. So this is going to be an exciting time.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm glad you brought up Twitter. So I mentioned the first thing that happened on Friday was Laurent saying, hey, by the way, we got to do something in Twitter. And it's not my Twitter account. It's like the Thorat.com Twitter account. Right. And I. But that's yours, is it? So I haven't been able to get into it. So I went through. If you try to go to Twitter support, if you ever.

[Leo Laporte]

There is no. It's an you a poop emoji.

[Paul Thurat]

This is what I was told. Eventually, they. They said you have to pay for Twitter premium or whatever for us to even think about what you're asking us.

[Leo Laporte]

At least they're honest about it, because frankly, that's probably true.

[Richard Campbell]

Google got 20 bucks. Maybe I'll.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm paying for six accounts at Google. So they didn't help me in a slight latest. So I hear you, but that did not buy me anything. Not a thing. So, anyway, I'm sorry to rant there.

[Leo Laporte]

But just Google support is via Python script.

[Paul Thurat]

Nice. I'm stuck in a loop.

[Leo Laporte]

Twitter support doesn't even have that.

[Paul Thurat]

Twitter support is just go to 10 and there's no 10. You know, it's like all this stuff is so convoluted, it's unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think you could say this is in shittification, But I think maybe it is also that we have decided to really rely on technology.

[Paul Thurat]

Like, too much.

[Leo Laporte]

A little too much.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I'm. Yeah. I mean. Yes, you just said it. You said it. You said you Were talking about convenience versus security. We all choose, right? Well, not all, but most people choose convenience. I think there's a happy medium, but I think my happy medium might be shifting to never where possible. Or at least for things that matter. Not use the account that could lock me out later. Like have my own account that's mine that no one can lock me out of and whatever that means.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's why I have my own blog. And then that cross posts to the social and things.

[Paul Thurat]

This was Richard. I don't know if you listen to Scott Hanselman's podcast, but this is literally his latest episode is about this exact topic. Why you don't go to a medium or substack or whatever, because you don't really. You're promoting their business. You don't own your stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the. Of course, now both X and several others are becoming financial institutions.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, no, that makes total sense to me.

[Leo Laporte]

So now your money, they'll also have that.

[Paul Thurat]

I can't even trust you with my ideas. You want. You want to put my money in your thing?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's the Everything app.

[Paul Thurat]

It's the Everything is Terrible app.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Is what it is. I really got to figure this out. This is going to be a thing for me this year. I got to. I really. This was eye opening. We've all heard stories about people who are like, oh, I just lost all my family's photos because Google or whoever arbitrarily decided not to let me into my account. And sometimes, look, the person did something. I don't know. But a lot of times it feels like it just kind of happens and you feel like, what are you going to do? Yeah, what are you going to do? I can tell you it doesn't matter what you do because you never get in the shot.

[Leo Laporte]

If it's a human on the other side, at least you have a shot. But if it's a machine on the other side.

[Paul Thurat]

See, I really. I tried to condense this down because really, who cares about the whole thing? If you do care, it's on my site. It's a brutally long story, but the thing I went through in the hotel room before you guys got back from breakfast was me getting on a chat line with some idiot from Google or whatever. And she said, can you send me a screenshot? I'm like, yeah, I can, but it's exactly what I just said was happening. She's like, well, if you don't mind. I'm like, okay, now could you sign into the browser with an incognito window And I'm like, I mean, I can.

[Leo Laporte]

But she has a notebook that she's working her way through that has absolutely nothing.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, the next one was I need you to record screen recording of you signing into this account. And I literally. My response was, no. And the reason is that will not show you anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

And she's like, well, I'm sorry, we can't really go any further. We have support that they need this. And I'm like, I'm at this page.

[Leo Laporte]

If you don't get me past this page.

[Paul Thurat]

So I did. I made a screen recording like a jerk. And then. And then I'm like, how do I get this to you? She's like, just put it in Google Drive. And I'm like, what does that mean? Do you. Is there a URL. You want me to put this in my. In my Google Drive where it's going to take up space and cost me money? Yeah. I can't just send this to you anyway. I did, because, you know, I'm stuck and wait, please wait, and blah, blah, blah. And then I think you guys had already come back by this time, but it took about an hour, and they were like, yeah, we're gonna have to get back to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you notice when you saw him again that he was a little frazzled? Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

I was losing my. I felt so bad about the way we left on Friday because I was out of my mind. Mind.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, y.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Is this in the premium section or is this in the regular section? I think it's gonna log in. I want to read the whole.

[Paul Thurat]

It's not the longest thing that I've ever written, but it's. It is one of the longer posts of recent memory, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Worthy of a Sanovsky post.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yep. It is a. It's a long story. And it's more to. Like I said, the more we talk about the. I'm reminded of other parts of it, but. But, yeah, I had a. I was so. Yeah. Traumatized the entire weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an important lesson that every. I mean, I'm glad you wrote it up, because it's not. I mean, there's one thing to say it happened to you, but this is something that could happen to everybody.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. And look, I kind of know what I'm doing. I mean, compared to maybe the average person. So. Richard will appreciate that the image that's at the top of this article is from Puerto Vallarta.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great sculpture. This is how I felt for three days straight, says Paul.

[Paul Thurat]

That was not Great.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, it's not done, right? It's still no.

[Paul Thurat]

So it is done now. Oh, good. But it wouldn't have been done if Brad luckily did not somehow, and I don't know why, he does have this old account still in his Google authenticator app.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank God.

[Paul Thurat]

We would have. I would have been locked out of my entire channel forever. That would have been the end of it. They literally threatened me. I published most of what they wrote to me in the chat thing in that article, so you can see it for yourself. But it's like you just, like, talking to me like, I'm an idiot. Like, I didn't do anything. You. Something changed on your end, you know, it's your fault. It could result in losing full access to your channel. We don't want that to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, whoa, whoa, could be gone.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And by the way, I should point out, probably people think, oh, well, Paul's got connections. Paul could work this. You know, this isn't. We could. We, you know, he could figure this out. Nope.

[Paul Thurat]

I. I just. Speaking logically, the way I look at it is, like, I'm a paying customer. I am a business.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Yeah, you're not even a free customer. That's the.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm not. I'm not freeloading on anything. I mean, I. I just. No, nothing. Okay, interesting. Because I had to prove to you that I was the owner of this business two years ago, and I did, and I don't understand. I don't know. Whatever. Whatever. It's just so frustrating.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Rid of that Brad's authenticator thing, that's gone.

[Paul Thurat]

So that account. Now I am in control of that again. But. But the thing is, I was cj.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think CJ is an AI?

[Paul Thurat]

I like this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is CJ stepping in.

[Paul Thurat]

So I made fun of that. I was like, first, CJ stepping in is meaningless to me. Who's cj? Like, I. Should I be impressed by this? Are you someone I should know?

[Leo Laporte]

This was the cj.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, I'm like, oh, cj, finally. I've been waiting for you to slip. And the whole, CJ's here now stuff's gonna happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I. I could sense how important it is for you to have your channel back. This is. Because clearly, Paul, I just want you to know, okay, this has all the earmarks of an AI written email.

[Paul Thurat]

The one thing I didn't save was the chat transcript from the original chat, which I sort of assumed I'd be able to get to. In fact, they Told me I would get it via email, but it never arrived. Because the way this chat started. Now, that you meant to say again, I keep remembering things. The person whoever got on said, hey, exclamation point. How are you doing today? I said it. No, we are not doing that. Solve my problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Stop it.

[Paul Thurat]

No, I'm not even going to pretend to be nice to stop. You shut me out of my account.

[Leo Laporte]

I like C.J. hi there.

[Paul Thurat]

I hope all is well. Not well. And the reason you can tell that is because I'm chatting with you right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody chats with you when they're happy, cj.

[Paul Thurat]

Cj. Yeah, exactly. I don't just come to you when everything's going, idiot, idiot, idiot. It was the. It was a miserable, miserable.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Paul Thurat]

That was not good.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's just a mortality reminder, right? It's like.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You don't own any of this crap.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. We can end you anytime.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't own it right now. Not even notice that we have.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. Yep. You talk to me wrong a little bit, and I'm going to flip a switch, not tell anybody. We'll see how it goes. You know.

[Richard Campbell]

How's your account now?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, truthfully, I don't know. You can get screwed so many ways.

[Paul Thurat]

I know. So I guess. I think. I think this is a good reason to start looking at this stuff and to lower the exposure.

[Leo Laporte]

Lower your.

[Paul Thurat]

What's the phrase? Microsoft? The. Lower your attack. Surface. And I think I have. As much as I talk about this stuff, I'm not perfect. You know, I'm not an expert really, in security, but I have. I'm. I am perhaps relying a little too. I mean, I can't do anything with YouTube. Right. That's going to be a Google account. Of course. But I got a. I got a lesson. You know, someday I'm not going to be able to get into the company that's hosting my website because it's tied to my Google. I'm not even sure if it is, but let's say it is. And now what? You know what I mean? Like, if everything goes south, everything's really gonna go south. Yeah. You know, anyway. Sorry, it's just.

[Leo Laporte]

God.

[Paul Thurat]

So I'm gonna live in a cabin in the woods by myself.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the only solution.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Ted Kaczynski, obviously.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, that went great.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you know why he wrote that manifesto.

[Paul Thurat]

He got a lot of writing done. I mean, he used paper and pen, but whatever. Or a typewriter, probably. I Don't know what he did, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Just those few trips to the mailbox. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, just remember Battlestar Galactica survived because it was not hooked in to the corporate network. Their phones still had wires.

[Paul Thurat]

That was. Yes, that delightfully old fashioned stuff inside the spaceship from the future. The actual phones.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm still trying to convince my wife to watch that by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

Says so much about Ronald Moore's mind. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's how he.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how he took him out.

[Paul Thurat]

If you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free.

[Richard Campbell]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurat]

Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom Be a virtual.

[Leo Laporte]

Prepaid MasterCard in 15 days.

[Paul Thurat]

Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a.

[Leo Laporte]

$10 device connection charge. Qualifying port and trade in service on Go5G next. And credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to.

[Paul Thurat]

Continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on required finance agreements. Due bill credits and if you pay off devices early. You're watching fabulous episode of Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is in. No, it is. It's a great episode. Paul's in. The more personal you are, the more I like it. Paul's in Mexico City suffering.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, actually, I mean, I. I rename.

[Richard Campbell]

The show the Torment of Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

The Torment of Paul.

[Paul Thurat]

It's better now, but like just thinking about. I'm getting worked up just thinking about it. Like how terrible it is, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Torments of St. Paul.

[Paul Thurat]

It's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

Someday people will remember you. There'll probably be a parade down Main street with your mutilated body as a.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, I'll go like Mussolini. Yeah, yeah, it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, Leo Laporte. We're glad you're here. And we will even be more glad when you become a member of Club Twit. You are a member of Club Twit, aren't you? If not, I'd love to invite you to join. There are a lot of benefits, one of which is I had free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't hear this, you wouldn't hear any of the other ads, including the inserted ads for things you don't really care about. Just get rid of them all. And that's both for audio and video. You also get video for shows like Hands on Windows. Paul's Great show that we only put out in public and audio. You also get special events that we do in the club. We've got some coming up. Chris Marquardt's photo show is coming up in just a couple of weeks. We have Stacy's book club. Still haven't set a date for that. But the photo time is February 6th. Micah's crafting corner the next episode is February 19th. Yeah, we're in February already. You get a lot of benefits but the biggest benefit is the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting this network and the shows we do and the programming we do. We do have advertising but the ads do not cover the costs. And that's despite the fact that we, you know, shut down the studio. I just got some good news. We, we won't have to pay the lease after into well in 2026. That's good news. It's better than nothing news.

[Richard Campbell]

The alternative.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so we have paid for 2025 but we don't have to pay for 2026. So there you go. So shutting the studio saved us money. I sad to say we did have to cancel some shows, lay off some staff but I don't want to do that anymore. I would like to add shows and you know, I would like to, you know, do shows that really fit your interests. So join the club. That's the best way to support what we do and it's not expensive. Seven bucks a month. Please visit Twitter TV Club Twit for all the benefits and thank you in advance. We really, we really appreciate our club members. The Discord's a great, great hang to. You'll have a social network of really smart interesting people and that is not nothing. That is not nothing. Also if you're. Even if you're not a member of the club, we would love to get you to take our survey Twit TV survey. It is I think last day today or tomorrow. It is the one thing we do once a year to find out more about you so that we can a target our programming towards you and b let advertisers know what a great bunch you are. Nothing individual just as a. As aggregate. That is one of the ways we best way frankly that we have to sell advertising on the network is just be able to say things like 75% are it decision makers and things like that. So if you would last chance Twitter TV survey if you haven't done it yet, shouldn't take more than a few minutes. And it's also a great way to help us out so there's two things you can do to help us out, and thank you very much for your support. Huh?

[Paul Thurat]

Is that Patrick Norton? Is that what that. What Is that a picture of who in the discord?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know. Let me go look.

[Paul Thurat]

It looks like you're sneaking up behind somebody, but it was like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably Patrick. Yeah, that's Patrick Norton blowing something up.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, In a while. That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's an old screensavers promo, is what that. What that there is.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, there's a whole little thing there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the screensavers blowing.

[Paul Thurat]

It's like you blow. You. Like you're putting the trigger right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty much the way it was, to be honest, on the show.

[Paul Thurat]

Like, hey, go open the door.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite moment. Patrick had a sledgehammer. He was famous for his sledgehammer and his kilts, which, really, if you think about it, they don't. That's probably two things that shouldn't go together anyway.

[Paul Thurat]

They should never go together.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurat]

Get squeamish just thinking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

We were doing a segment showing you how this is 25 years ago, how to destroy your hard drive so that the data is not recoverable by, you know, federal agencies or whatever. And so he opened up a hard drive, and he said one thing you could do is hit it with a hammer. He did. What he didn't know is that some hard drives are not metal. They're glass. And in this case. Oh, boy. Glass shards. I don't. I'm very lucky to have both my eyes at this point. That was very crazy moment. On live tv, no less. But we learned something there. Sometimes they make them out of glass.

[Richard Campbell]

You hit with a hammer.

[Paul Thurat]

Like a home renovation show where they just attack the wall. It's like, you want to see if there's electricity in there or plumbing. I mean, like, you know, that in a.

[Leo Laporte]

In a nutshell, was. Was. Was Patrick. He was great. That's why we love Patrick. He's just like. Like, I don't know. Let's see what happens. It is a hard time.

[Paul Thurat]

Still alive, huh? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The time Kevin Rose decided that the best way to destroy an old hard drive was to blow it up with thermite.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a good one. I like that one.

[Leo Laporte]

So he put it in his backyard and. And the whole PC and. And put thermite. Can you even buy thermite nowadays?

[Richard Campbell]

You just have to make it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, you just. You just.

[Richard Campbell]

I got the recipe.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it? Is it rust and it's aluminum oxide.

[Richard Campbell]

And iron oxide and a little bit of magnesium and you're good.

[Paul Thurat]

It's in there with like the blueberry muffin recipe and the apple pie recipe.

[Leo Laporte]

Just ask Deep Seek, it'll tell you. What we didn't tell you is don't do it in your backyard. He practically set the whole place on fire.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you can't put it out. Ask me how I know. But it does make lovely glassy jewelry. Artifacts out of hard glass.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Lord. Those were the days. There's nothing like live TV. It really isn't funny. So let's talk Xbox, Mr. T. Real quick though.

[Paul Thurat]

There is some breaking news. Not earnings related, but Microsoft has added Deepseek. Have a hard time saying that word, by the way. Deepseek R1 is now available in the model catalog on Azure, AI foundry and GitHub.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So hugging face did that a couple of days ago as well. That's hysterical. Now, is that the local version?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I believe. Let me see. Yes. Yes. Yep. Oh, well, actually, no, not necessarily. So coming soon, customers will be able to use distilled flavors of deep seek R1 locally on copilot plus PCs.

[Leo Laporte]

Distilled flavors actually are the name of the segment, the whiskey segment.

[Paul Thurat]

So distilled flavors.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought it was something weird from my closet.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, how is this thing not here yet? I keep looking at the investor page. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course they're going to be late. They're waiting until you finish the show.

[Paul Thurat]

I know. Those bastards. Okay. It's okay. All right, so this is a rarity, but I have some good news this week for Xbox. And the first one is that Microsoft is now the biggest game publisher in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurat]

$465 million was spent on Microsoft games worldwide in December. Second biggest company is EA, which is I think was 3, 300 and something million. So it's not even close.

[Richard Campbell]

3, 366.

[Paul Thurat]

366. Yeah. So obviously Call of Duty was a big chunk of that. Some interesting. There's not. This is like a third hand report because it's like Amphir came up with the data but was reported by a video game publication and no one else has access to this report. So I'm just going off what they said, but 64% of spending on Microsoft games in December was for PlayStation.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Mostly Call of Duty, that complaint to FTC.

[Paul Thurat]

I know, but you said you did. I always knew that was nonsense. But anyway, that's beautiful. So that's good. And then semi tied to this, you know, obviously the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard controversial. And then the Microsoft strategy is still controversial in our little community here. People who believe that it should just be about the console and blah, blah, blah. So Phil Spencer's been pretty vocal lately. I mean, he's usually pretty vocal, but he's given a bunch of interviews where he said some interesting things. One is that with this generation of consoles, Microsoft made it a requirement for game makers to target the Xbox series S, but also target the unique capabilities of the Xbox series X. Whereas that's not the way they've ever done it in the past. They've never come up with two tiers at one time. Right. So what he said this week, one of the things he said was that be forcing, but requiring developers to target the lower end specs of the S series S machine will actually benefit the company when they come up with a portable gaming device of whatever kind. Because now you've got this thing that has to run with reduced resources and be respectful of battery life and so forth. So I thought that was kind of interesting, you know, like the scalability of the games is going to benefit a coming generation of portable video game machines because it will probably, maybe they add a tier or however they do it, but it will be like it's just part of the system.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's their Xbox everywhere, right? That's the.

[Paul Thurat]

I mean, it's part of it. Yeah, it's part of it. But I mean one of the arguments against this strategy is, well, you have this higher end device, I mean, don't you want them to take advantage of the unique capabilities there? But they actually do require that. But even Microsoft itself, some of their studios. I think this happened with Starlink, Starcraft. What was the game? Starcraft, where it didn't support 60 frames a second at whatever resolution when it first came out, but it did later, like they added it later on the Xbox series X. I don't know, whatever. He also was asked by a different interview, I think it was, but on a different interview, you know about hardware and it's like you guys are like cross platform and blah, blah, why would anyone buy an Xbox, yada yada yada. And his answer is exactly what you thought it was or what you might imagine, which is like, look, we still make hardware, it's critical for us. I made a crack about it on Twitter. Like critical condition, I think you mean. But, but people buy Xbox hardware for a very specific reason. But he's like, look, I don't want to lock out gamers. We publish games, we want to reach the biggest possible audience. And so again, promising. We're still going to make hardware, but really the platform is bigger than just that hardware. And then since I think it was late last week, whenever they did the Xbox developer direct event. The way I would describe this is no real surprises, but. But really well met. Like, this was an event that gamers. I was looking at some of the stuff on YouTube about this. I don't think I found anyone complaining about this. Really. Everyone's really excited about the games. It looks like a solid lineup. I'm mostly concerned with that Doom game, which is coming out in May, trying to make it more like the original Doom games, which I think is a big deal. Because my initial reaction to the modern games like Doom 2016, I think was just that it was like you were kind of sliding around like you were on ice, like it didn't feel the same. And they've added some verticality to the more recent game. So now they're going to kind of bring it back down to earth and go back to basics with this one. To me it looks great. So we'll see. So, yeah, just something to look forward to a bunch of. Looks like a solid year for games, especially if you're on PlayStation own Doom. Yes. Because Doom was id Software, which was bought by Bethesda.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Paul Thurat]

Bought by Microsoft back and Minimax.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you become the biggest game publisher in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

Get to the top of the rollout up.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yeah. So I don't know, like, I feel like the Activision Blizzard thing has been kind of a net. Not a net negative, but it hasn't had the. The boost I expected, you know, like last year I often. You probably don't remember, but I sometimes complain they don't bring the games on game pass. And I'm like, you know, what are they doing with this thing? But then you see something like this. You're like, oh, right. Your goal is to be one of the biggest game makers in the world and you are in fact the biggest game game maker in the world. So that's. That's why, that's. They. That's why they spent the almost, you know, the tens of billions of dollars, whatever the figure was, to buy that company.

[Leo Laporte]

So the old adage in investing is you buy on the rumor, you sell on the news. Right. And so you. Stock maybe went up before the results, but the results are out, they're good. And yet.

[Paul Thurat]

There'S no way we can do any analysis here, but. So Microsoft revenue was up 12% year over year net income. Here's 10% year over year.

[Leo Laporte]

They exceeded expectations by 4% on their earnings per share.

[Paul Thurat]

That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but that's when you expect the stock to go up. But yes.

[Paul Thurat]

So the gross stock. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, geez. So more personal computing. There was no growth in revenues. I haven't seen that in a long.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Surface?

[Paul Thurat]

What is that Windows? Well, Windows from PC makers.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurat]

Devices, which is Surface. Xbox. Xbox. All up. Xbox content and services. Revenue only increased by 2%. Interesting. I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's a year of the PC.

[Paul Thurat]

Is it?

[Leo Laporte]

This year. Oh, congratulations.

[Paul Thurat]

I know. I feel like we're due. I'm just trying to see if there's anything in here real quick.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little dead cat bounce. That's good.

[Paul Thurat]

Commercial. Microsoft 365. Commercial growth 16%. That's good. Server products and cloud. Sorry. Azure 31%. It's been there for a little while. Windows and PC maker revenues increase 4%. Like I said. Xbox, 2%. That's lower than I would have thought. Go back to this. What do they got? Gaming revenue declined 7% overall. Hardware declined 29%. How low can that go?

[Richard Campbell]

You're also taking a lot of hardware off the market, too.

[Paul Thurat]

That's a tough one, though. All right, well, I'll have. Next week, we'll go into.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, you wanna. We want a thoughtful earnings revenue.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, $70 billion in revenues. I think, you know, they're gonna mind you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna have to get over to the other side. There we go.

[Paul Thurat]

We're gonna weather. Weather the storm.

[Leo Laporte]

Weather the storm. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

If you love your phone but not.

[Paul Thurat]

Your carrier, just switch to T Mobile. You can keep your phone, keep your number, and we'll help pay it off up to 800 per line.

[Richard Campbell]

You can also use our savings calculator to compare our plans and streaming benefits against Verizon and AT&T.

[Leo Laporte]

So switch and keep your phone, keep.

[Paul Thurat]

Your number and keep more of your moolah. @t mobile.com up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card.

[Leo Laporte]

Allow 15 days qualifying only device credit service ported 90 plus days with device.

[Paul Thurat]

Into eligible carrier and timely redemption required.

[Leo Laporte]

Card has no cash access and expires in six months. Let's. I think we're ready for the back of the book. Yeah, I think we're ready for the back of the book. We got a little earnings learnings more to come next week.

[Paul Thurat]

Windows Weekly earnings fly by.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat's tip of the week.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So Tip and Epic are both very Microsoft centric, which I guess makes a certain amount of sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So in the sense that I do this with podcasts, like Richard's podcast, for example. I don't listen to every single episode, but I look at the. Well, I look at what the topic is, and some of them are like, oh, my God, I have to write. And so I do that with a lot of things.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why, by the way, people often tell us, my staff, mostly, you really ought to say what the show's about in the title of the show. And I say, no, that's exactly what you don't want to do.

[Paul Thurat]

I do not want.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody can go, I don't care about that, and not listen.

[Paul Thurat]

That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I like to be obscure.

[Paul Thurat]

Is a guy. Dave Plummer is a guy who was on the original.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love Dave's Garage.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, that is. He's, you know, he's. He's an OCD ADHD guy.

[Leo Laporte]

And you could tell.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I met him Deep Dive guy briefly, and he was not particularly nice to me, but I think it was like an ADHD thing, so I'm not going to hold it against him. But anyway. But he's very. But he's knowledgeable. A lot of his. He has stories from like. Like, you know, a million years ago, which are interesting. Absolutely. But increasingly, I find the stuff that he talks about now to be even more interesting. So he just did a video about Deep Seek and, like, the Steven Snofsky thing. I think you should listen to. Watch it or whatever. His take on this is, is very good and technical and knowledgeable. You know, I don't. Well, actually, I find myself watching more and more of his videos. He's a guy like, I would kind of cherry pick. And now I find myself, like, he comes with a video and I'm like, yeah, I'm probably gonna watch this. So if you haven't heard of him or you haven't watched it, he wasn't sure. Whatever, I recommend it. Just check it out. Dave's Garage on YouTube. And then the power choice thing is, I already referenced this, I guess, earlier today, I think. But Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman have a podcast now, which is. It's short and, you know, I like those guys a lot. So I listen to it. It's good. And in an episode a month or two ago, they were talking about Zoomit, which is a utility that Mark wrote 30 years ago. One of the many sysinternals utilities.

[Leo Laporte]

So Good.

[Paul Thurat]

So, so, and. And they were joking around about how at some show they. Mark gave Scott access to the source code. He was like, I thought this was going to be this awesome thing and it's like, you know, complete garbage or whatever. But zoomit is an amazing. So it made me go back and look at this. I haven't looked at this in a long time. And zoominit is an amazing utility, but they mentioned it allows you to zoom into the screen. Right. So in other words, you're doing a presentation, you want to zoom into this part of the screen, whatever, and zoom back out really quickly. It's nice. It does a bunch of stuff, but that's the primary thing. But they mentioned, or he mentioned, Mark did, that it was coming to PowerToys. So this week they released a new version of PowerToys which has this utility built into it. So I use PowerToys fairly extensively after, I have to say, I kind of ignored it for maybe longer than was healthy in my case, because I use a bunch of these things all the time now. I did. Let me think, when was this? I don't remember. I did an episode on Hands on Windows a while back, but then since then I picked up more of them. I actually like the double control key thing for the mouse I use like every day, literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Power run. I use the screen Timeout one to keep the screen awake all the time. And Zoom, it's part of it now too, so. So definitely check it out. Like, if you haven't. Powertoys is pretty amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a great tool.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Richard, you are up. It is time for Run as Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

See how this Internet holds together now that we're towards the end of this. So this last show of the month with Mark Maroski, I called it Querying for Breaches because it's actually about Cousteau Kusto, or KQL is this language for querying across the logs of telemetry and all of the data sources that you have inside your Azure tenant. And he's actually put together a book with a few associates called the Definitive Guide to kql. And it includes all kinds of working examples. So things like, show me everybody that's logged in in the order they've logged in and when. The last time they logged in was, you know, analyzing baseline behaviors, like what? You know, take this account and show me what resources they access on a weekly basis. It's really quite powerful stuff. And the point was you can run these queries and get to a place where you can see a breach in action. You can see that an account has been compromised and is exfiltrating data and so forth. Because it's all in the logs. It's just that you tend not to look for them. So having these smart query sets means you can run them on demand. You could set the schedule them and have the results emailed to you if they're interesting. So we've given away a few of the KQL books. If you go to the Run Ass site, you can get a discount code and got one for a buddy of mine that I gave to him for Christmas when we shot the show.

[Paul Thurat]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's. Mark's a great guy. He's actually moved over to the Ghost team now, which is the fighting the State actors.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how cool.

[Richard Campbell]

He can't talk about his new work, but I'm like, please, please someday. But now he's part of the. He was part of the Entra team when they were doing all of this. And it just was one of those things where Kusto like PowerShell, it's worth your time to learn. It'll make you a more effective administrator.

[Paul Thurat]

To have these tools in your pocket.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm going to do an experiment on this next bit, the whiskey bit. I am going to shut up and record with this Plaud note. Record your entire piece and see what the notes are that it comes up with.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I'm in London, so of course I went to World of Whiskey because this is one of the few places in the world that you can buy the Flora and Fauna Edition whiskies. And so this week I grabbed Blair Atoll and I had just, just unwrapped it. So I haven't even tasted it yet. So Blair Atoll is actually a. The distillery is outside of Blair Atoll in a little area called Pidlochy. This is all north of Edinburgh. So this is in the Highlands. In fact, it's at the very southern edge of the Grampian Mountains in a bit of a flatland moor area there with a good water source, water sort called Alt de Bern, which means the Burn of the Otter or the river of the Otter. This is one of the old, old distilleries. It was originally founded by John Stuart Robert Robertson in 1798, although at the time they called it Al d'or, which was the name of the waterway at the time, and didn't do well at all. Shut down shortly thereafter. But in 1825 it was enlarged and reopened and called Blair Atoll, likely because that was the name of the Duke that owned all the land in the area and the town. And so they did a little better in the early 1800s. It was acquired by Peter McKenzie, was one of the large whiskey barons of the time, in 1886. And then, of course, it got into trouble during Prohibition, all those sorts of things. So Blair and Sons acquired them. That's Arthur Bell and Sons bought Blair Atoll at the same time they acquired Dufftown and a few others, all in financial distress. Arthur Bell and Sons makes a whiskey, which they still do to this day, called Bell's Blend. So they were. They were making blended Whiskey in the 1850s, just like all the other big blenders that they. That we've been talking about recently. And so the Bell's Blend, which still made today, is made with a variety of these whiskeys, include Blair Atolls. The primary whiskey goes in that blend to this day, along with Dovetown and Inch Gower and Glen Kinshee and Cariolo and a few others. So shortly after those were all rolled up in 1933, with the war coming on, everything got shut down. And then after the war, they sort of recovered. And then you. We never really have talked about Arthur Bell and Sons before. It's because they were acquired by Guinness in 85. And then, of course, Guinness merges in with the Distillers Company, becoming United Distillers in 1987. And it was distillers company that came up with that idea in 88, called the Masters of Malt, which was Glen, Kinchy, Dalwini, Craig and Moore, Talisker, Lagavulin along all whiskies we've talked about before. And really was one of those moments that put whiskey on the map again, because people had moved away from it to highballs and things in the 70s, but Lagavulin being the big hit, it suddenly Pete Whiskey became cool. And so that way that happened in 88 and then in 91 was when United Distillers went past this Masters of Malt and created this Flora and fauna series. So these were all whiskeys that didn't have brands. We talked about this last year when I got the Dalia Wayne 16 and there was actually 26 of them. So these were all distilleries that tended to go into blends. Some go into Johnnie Walker, some go into Bells and a couple of others. And that includes things like Blair Atolla and a bunch of the others I mentioned Daly, Wayne, Martlock, Rosebank and so forth. But United Distillers, in trying to just make more their whiskey approachable would do specialty bottlings of this largely only for the local market. They this bottle does not have an export license on it. And it's one of the reasons I only tend to get them in the UK because they're just very hard to come by. And so Flores and flying, that was 91, that's a while ago. They've sort of come and gone. It's big with collectors. When they initially came out, they were like £20. Some when I first ran into them in early aughts, some of them were 40, 50 pounds. Today the very popular ones like the Mortlock 16 if you can find 1, 200, 300 pounds, really hard to come by. Now we don't. The United Soldiers just didn't exist anymore because by 1997 they are acquired by Grand Metropolitan. That all pulls together to become. Become what we know is Diageo. So this is now all Diageo for better or worse. And again I have less. The longer I get to know Diageo the less I dislike them. The distillery itself is a classic partially automated distillery in the highlands. So no peat. I did note that they use cream yeast because that seems to amuse you too. They do a short fermentation about two days for 50 hours or so. Their wort is cloudy. They use a mixed washback approach. So they have four wooden washbacks and two steel washbacks, which is unusual in their fermentation and preparation of the wort before they go into a pair of 13,000 liter wash stills and a pair of spirit stills. These stills are known to be pear shaped. You can see the pictures that you had of them there. Just to say they have no reflux bowls. Their lye arms are fairly straight. It makes for a very mild whiskey. Now normally this whiskey is only used for blending and so it typically is only aged in bourbon casks because they're the least expensive. But this Flora and Fauna bottling of Blair Atoll, which is a 12 year old, is entirely barreled in first fill sherry casks. So this has spent 12 years in a sherry cask and you can see it. Look at the color on that. For a 12 year old. It's unbelievable. So I am a very happy man. I haven't even tasted it yet because you know it's rare most of the time when you, if you have sherry cast finishes the last year or the blending point is the only time it's in sherry. So this smells of sherry like strongly. It's only 43, not a lot of alcohol smell. Nice glasses at the. At the curio yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding.

[Paul Thurat]

Mm.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, lordy. Yes, sir. Now, it's got a sharpness to it, like there's no peat in this, but it's definitely a smokiness. Like that's interesting to me and it warms really well. Like, well, hello. You just had a nice drink of whiskey, but yeah, a very potent cherry sherry flavor. And these, they just don't have a brand. Like look at this bottle. It's a very standardized bottle. This is literally we call the Flora and Fauna bottle. It looks, looks like there's so many bottles that look like this and all the labels are yellow. You have to read them. They don't distinctive on the shelf to understand what they are. Now I picked this up today for 65 pounds, so about $80 US at World World of Whiskey. Not particularly expensive. It is very hard to find in the us. It's not impossible, but it is difficult. But you'll probably pay twice that 150 and that's a bit much for a 12 year old. But if you're in the UK, go get one, bring it home.

[Paul Thurat]

A.

[Richard Campbell]

Your friends will never had a had it because they're very hard to find outside of the UK and they're fun. They're a nice, very drinkable whiskey from a brand you've never heard of because it's never marketed except in these rare occasions in the Flora Fauna bottlings.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Paul Thurat]

Man.

[Leo Laporte]

One of these days I might have to take up drinking.

[Richard Campbell]

I wouldn't recommend it impairs your judgment.

[Leo Laporte]

But it looks like you're having so much fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I am. Well. And you know, it's a whole thing about telling a story. Can you tell that photograph was taken with the bottle laying on its side because there's a big bubble there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at that. Yeah, that's a giveaway. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

This one though, that's that set up right now. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So anyway, the fun part is I picked this up earlier today and I've been, you know, working at the conference, doing all these things. They've been. And all my friends have been staring at the bottles like, what are we doing? It's like I' opening until Windows Weekly tomorrow.

[Paul Thurat]

I would have opened it but they turned off my Internet. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, no, and I'm not coming home with this. Right. This is going to be shared amongst my friends this week before I head off to Stockholm for next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Very, very nice.

[Richard Campbell]

So I, I mean every time we've done this in London, I have gone to World of Whiskey and picked up a A flor and fauna. It's just like add this to your list of things to do when you're in London or anywhere in the uk. Find a good whiskey shop, go get a floral bottle bottling, take their recommendation. I don't think any of them are bad, but some of them are really special. And a 12 year Sherry aged whiskey is pretty rare.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Yeah, I like the idea that was in the barrel for 12 years. That's great.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then, and that also means that they very much intentionally made this Right. New make and barreled it differently than.

[Leo Laporte]

They knew what they were. Yeah, they were up to something.

[Richard Campbell]

They intended to make a flora and fauna from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, very interesting. I like the name too. Blair Atoll.

[Richard Campbell]

Blair Athol.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the less from the Gaelic according to Matt from Blair Athoda, which translates to the English the plain of the new Ireland. Well, we've all learned something today, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find his fabulous podcasts Runasradio and.net Rocks with Carl Franklin. And he joins us here to do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, as does Paul Thurat from thurrott.com join the Thurat Premium club. That way you can read his rant about Google and CJ and the gang.

[Richard Campbell]

In your world going through an existential threat.

[Paul Thurat]

As I wrote in that article, I assume CJ is a woman. I, I, I don't actually know. Could be the guitarist from Poison for all I know. It doesn't matter.

[Richard Campbell]

I think West Wing took over the name.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, CJ became a woman's name in West Wing. That's right. CJ was the press secretary.

[Paul Thurat]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

I worked with a DJ named cj. CJ Bronson.

[Paul Thurat]

DJ named cj. Pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

A DJ named cj? Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, if you want Paul's books, you're gonna have to go to leanpub.com but boy, it's worth it. Windows Everywhere and the Field guide to Windows 11 both there. Set your own price. If you like this show, you can come listen to us. Do it live if you want. We have a live broadcast of the production of this program beginning at 11am Pacific every Wednesday. That's 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. The live streams are everywhere. Should be pretty easy to find us if you're a club member. Of course you can listen in the Discord. But we're also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik and did I mention TikTok? I didn't and there's one more I'm missing. There's eight of them.

[Paul Thurat]

Anyway, Leo, I was thinking, if you want to get something for your wife. Wife. For her birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little late for that. Today's the day.

[Paul Thurat]

Eagles jersey would be the right thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Not an Eagles fan. Not fly.

[Paul Thurat]

Eagles fly.

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking about sport ball.

[Paul Thurat]

It's an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you. Are you an Eagles fan? I guess you would be. Is McCungy closer to Philly than Pittsburgh?

[Paul Thurat]

So we were in a bar and I was talking, blah, blah, and someone came in and said, hey, what happened? The Eagles game was on tv. And I was like, oh, we did the blah, blah, blah. And my wife leaned in, she goes, did you just say we? Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's.

[Paul Thurat]

And I was like, I am talking to the locals. Shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

We're the 49ers. We are. And you are the Phillies and the. And the Eagles.

[Paul Thurat]

We're something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, you are. And Richard, you're the Canucks.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

And the lion and the Lions. Yeah. You know, you gotta really identify with your team if you're gonna watch. Our son is so disgusted. Michael has a big Green Bay packers fan so disgusted by the playoffs, he says, I'm giving up football. The refs are in the bag for the. For the kc. I'm gonna take up baseball.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, good. You'll love that sport. Nothing will disappoint you there. I hope you like the log of.

[Richard Campbell]

Manipulating baseball at all.

[Paul Thurat]

It's like a nine month, 162 games. Yeah, it's going to be great. It's just because he wants to be.

[Leo Laporte]

A Milwaukee brewers fan. I don't understand that at all.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

At least be a Cubbies fan. I mean, if you really want pain, suffering.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So watch the show live. But you don't have to because we do make it available on demand. It's easy enough enough. Go to the website TWiT TV WW. You could download audio or video files there. You can also go to the YouTube channel. There's a link on the webpage and watch there or share clips. That's what we like you to do. And of course, best way to get the show, subscribe and your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Minute Kevin King puts the final polish on it, sprinkles it with Kevin King dust. And that's appealing, isn't it? And then wraps it up with a bow and puts it out on the Internet. We'll be back next week with your analysis of the Microsoft earnings, which are just coming out now. And of course, all the usual fun and merriment and the rants. The rants. Where are you off to next, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

I am off to Stockholm on the, on the weekend. So I will be streaming from Stockholm and I literally delayed my return so I could do that before I fly back on.

[Paul Thurat]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Well, a little extra time in Stockholm ain't the worst.

[Paul Thurat]

Or February.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're right, actually.

[Paul Thurat]

Enjoy the 15 seconds of sunlight or whatever it is now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I got, I got the heavy coat and I'll probably pick up a bottle of MacMurin while I'm there.

[Leo Laporte]

There. All right. We could do Aqua Vita if you wish.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think so.

[Paul Thurat]

Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you everybody for being here. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. We really appreciate you and we will see you all next week on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurat]

Bye. Bye. If you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurat]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurat]

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[Paul Thurat]

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[Leo Laporte]

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