Windows Weekly 922: There's Never a 'Not OK' Button

Summary

Windows Weekly 922: "There's Never a 'Not OK' Button" Released on March 5, 2025

Hosts:

• Leo Laporte
• Paul Thurrott
• Richard Campbell

---

1. Farewell to Skype

The episode kicks off with the hosts bidding farewell to Skype, reflecting on its legacy and decline. Paul Thurrott shares anecdotes about using Skype, particularly during the pandemic when Microsoft’s focus shifted to Teams. Leo Laporte reminisces about early uses of Skype for personal connections, highlighting its once pivotal role in bridging communication gaps.

Paul Thurrott [72:12]: "Microsoft announced this week that they're going to kill Skype in May pretty quickly, actually."

2. Microsoft Copilot Updates and Privacy Concerns

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Microsoft's ongoing updates to the Copilot app in Windows 11. Paul Thurrott expresses frustration over the frequent updates and the lack of transparency regarding Microsoft’s changes.

Paul Thurrott [07:28]: "Microsoft is updating the Copilot app in Windows 11 for what I'm going to call the 127th time. I just don't understand. I don't even understand what's happening anymore."

The hosts delve into the privacy implications of these updates, particularly the default setting that enables model training on user text inputs. Richard Campbell and Leo Laporte raise concerns about data privacy and Microsoft's handling of user information.

Leo Laporte [09:43]: "Now, this is the same thing that caused so much concern, isn't it, that Microsoft was going to send this information to the home office. But that's not what's happening still, right?"

3. Phone Connection Integration

Paul Thurrott introduces the revamped Phone Connection feature, formerly known as Phone Plugin, which allows Copilot to interact with Android devices. The integration raises alarms about data harvesting from personal devices, as it enables Copilot to access messages, contacts, and more.

Paul Thurrott [15:03]: "It was like the aliens tendrils coming down and, like, you know, suctioning in your body."

The discussion highlights the potential risks of increased data access and the lack of clear communication from Microsoft about forthcoming features.

4. Recall Feature and User Experience Issues

Paul Thurrott shares his experience with the Recall feature, emphasizing its cumbersome update process. The necessity to manually install multiple updates for simple functionalities frustrates users, leading to a degraded user experience.

Paul Thurrott [18:52]: "Recall is interesting because like other copilot plus PCs, it relies on local AI models. Right. What I would call small language models, but we're just mixing up language. People call them large language models."

Richard Campbell and Leo Laporte echo the sentiment, criticizing the inefficient update mechanism and its impact on usability.

5. Windows Update Strategy and Frustrations

The hosts critique Microsoft's Windows Update strategy, drawing parallels to the overly complicated processes that hinder user convenience. Paul Thurrott cynically refers to it as the "Call of Duty experience," where updates intrude during user activities like gaming.

Paul Thurrott [23:45]: "There is no day you couldn't check for updates and not find them somewhere in Windows."

6. Adoption of Rust Language at Microsoft

A noteworthy segment discusses Microsoft's adoption of the Rust programming language to enhance security and reliability. Mark Russinovich, CTO of Azure, advocates for eliminating new C and C++ code from the Windows kernel, citing Rust's memory safety benefits.

Paul Thurrott [41:10]: "Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He is famous. You've probably heard of him."

The conversation touches on the challenges of integrating Rust with existing codebases and the broader implications for software development within Microsoft.

7. Widget Customization on Lock Screen

Paul Thurrott expresses satisfaction with the upcoming customization options for lock screen widgets in Windows Insider builds. This feature allows users to select which widgets appear on their lock screens, addressing previous limitations.

Paul Thurrott [28:04]: "They are adding that feature now in the Insider program. So that suggests to me that we'll see it in Windows by mid-year maybe."

8. Intel's Production Delays and Market Impact

The hosts briefly discuss Intel's announcement to delay the opening of Ohio fabs until after 2030, reflecting on its potential impact on the semiconductor industry and market competitiveness.

Paul Thurrott [56:55]: "Intel today at Mobile Congress announced the V Pro SL, meaning commercial versions of their latest Core Ultra Series 2 processors."

9. Outlook Mobile and AI Integration

Updates to Outlook Mobile are highlighted, including the addition of delivery and read receipts. Paul Thurrott notes increased activity on the app, indicating a push towards integrating more AI-driven features to enhance user experience.

Paul Thurrott [97:05]: "There has been a lot of activity on Outlook Mobile this year."

10. Sponsor Highlights

US Cloud:

• Leo Laporte introduces US Cloud as a top-tier third-party Microsoft support provider, emphasizing cost savings and enhanced performance compared to Microsoft's own support services.

Leo Laporte [40:18]: "So seven bucks a month, it's not expensive to get rid of all the ads."

Zscaler:

• Leo Laporte also mentions Zscaler, a leader in cloud security, focusing on their Zero Trust plus AI solutions to protect organizations against evolving cyber threats.

Leo Laporte [69:00]: "Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI."

11. Gaming Segment and Updates

The episode includes a brief gaming segment where the hosts touch upon new releases in Xbox Game Pass, including re-releases of classic titles like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4. They also discuss the challenges faced by PlayStation VR 2, including production delays and high costs.

Paul Thurrott [116:05]: "Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4 are both coming to all platforms, whatever that means."

12. AI Developments and Local Models

Paul Thurrott explores the advancements in local AI models, particularly Microsoft's expansion of their AI toolkit for Visual Studio Code. The discussion covers the performance differences between cloud-based and local AI models, highlighting the potential and limitations of running AI locally on PCs.

Paul Thurrott [100:04]: "And I was like, well, what does this look like? And what it looks like is using a chatbot, except it's in slow motion."

13. Closing Remarks and Call to Action

The episode concludes with the hosts encouraging listeners to leave positive reviews on platforms like iTunes to support the show. They also tease upcoming segments, including an interview with AI skeptic Gary Marcus, and promote various community features like Club Twit.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [09:43]: "Now, this is the same thing that caused so much concern, isn't it, that Microsoft was going to send this information to the home office. But that's not what's happening still, right?"

• Paul Thurrott [41:10]: "Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He is famous. You've probably heard of him."

• Richard Campbell [130:30]: "This is the way they update themselves as if it were an online service is ludicrous..."

• Leo Laporte [120:27]: "Could they be triple LMs? Could they be triple lms?"

---

Conclusion

Episode 922 of Windows Weekly delves deep into Microsoft's evolving strategies with AI integration in Windows, highlighting both advancements and user concerns. The hosts navigate through complex topics like privacy, programming languages, and system updates with their characteristic blend of expertise and humor. Additionally, discussions extend to broader industry movements, including Intel's production strategies and the ongoing shift towards more secure programming practices with Rust. The episode serves as a comprehensive overview for tech enthusiasts keen on understanding the latest developments in the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. Coming up, we say farewell. We pour one out for dear old Skype. Then there's never enough rust. And Google now has a way for you to remove yourself from search results. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is tw.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 922, recorded Wednesday, March 5, 2025. There's never a not okay button. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. This is the show. We cover the latest from Microsoft with these fine kitty cats right here. Mr. Paul Thurat from thurrott.com. t H U R R O double T. Hello, Paulie.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I see in Mexico City still. That's nice. I'm jealous.

[Paul Thurrott]

A little distracted today. A little birdie told me about something, and now I'm just, you know, all.

[Richard Campbell]

He wants to talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now he's laughing like a Bond villain over there.

[Leo Laporte]

You have distracted me with different browsers over the years. I have switched. I was a Firefox guy. I switched to Brave. Then you got me to use Ark. Now I'm hooked on Ark. But the browser companies abandoned Ark.

[Paul Thurrott]

Leo. Nobody likes comeuppance and nobody likes to get advice. They just want to give it.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Richard Campbell's also here from runnersradio.com. he's in his beautiful home in Mad Park, British Columbia.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want.

[Richard Campbell]

It's sunny. You want the view?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's see the view.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that is. That is a beautiful day. Wow. How many sunny days do you get up there in bc?

[Richard Campbell]

Both of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

As opposed to Mexico City, where there were more sunny days than there are days.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that true? Is it always sunny? It's always sunny.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, no, no, it's not true, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Cmx, CD or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is pretty damn sunny.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Well, you're at altitude, aren't you?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you notice that you. You huff and puff when you go upstairs?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah. We talk about this all the time. We went up to 10,000 or 10,005 the other day, and that's hot. Not running up any stairs. There's not gonna be any rocky moments there. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're figuring if you spend a couple of months there, you'll start to adapt. Which means when you come down, you feel a little supercharged.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like when I was in high school, you'd throw like a medicine ball around. They'd pick up a basketball and throw through the wall, you know? Yep. It'd be like that.

[Richard Campbell]

When we hiked Everest base camp, we met our altitude on the way down, and it's transformative. Like, all of a sudden, you're Superman. You just never get winded.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, isn't that cool?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It was really an experience, but it ha.

[Leo Laporte]

But that doesn't last.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope.

[Richard Campbell]

How long it goes away? A couple days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Your body quickly figures out you have way too many red blood cells. I know what to do about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It seems like there'd be a way to, like, kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, train. There's trainers that do that, that restrict your oxygen flow so your body makes more red blood cells.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I used to.

[Leo Laporte]

U.S. olympic team trains up at altitude in Colorado.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of marathoners will train in places like Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is like, you know, 6,000ft. Or they'll run up and down. The sand probably goes up to, I don't know, 10 or so, because they come back to sea level and they're like, you know, super athletes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're glad you joined us for this edition of superhuman.com.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. The least athletic people you've ever met. Talking about athletics, I, I, I rode a bike yesterday. My butt is killing me.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not a. I did want to mention.

[Richard Campbell]

Thought that was a horse. I thought you were.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa showed me a picture of you as a cowboy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. A caballero, as we say.

[Leo Laporte]

Caballero. And I thought, what the. That is?

[Richard Campbell]

Did he lose a bet? Like, what is that about?

[Leo Laporte]

What's going on?

[Paul Thurrott]

So you know how, like, look, we've all seen that you're on social media, you see some photo of something, and they'll say, only in. And it's whatever the place is. Like, only in Boston, you know, Only in. You know what? These things happen everywhere. Let me tell you something. Riding a horse through a city. Wow. That is kind of an only in Mexico moment. I have to say. It was bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

So you were in town. You didn't go like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You started in the city and rode out into the woods, I guess we'll call it. Yeah. So it started in a crowded urban area, and it was just the weirdest. Yeah, it's very strange. It was like the US in the 1800s or something. It was very strange.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to just quickly pull up the. If I can find it here.

[Paul Thurrott]

My Morrissey photo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you kind of. That's a good. That's a good one. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I knew as soon as I Was like, I have to put this there, and I know I'm going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you put it there. Thought maybe it was a trick played upon you by your. By Stephanie, your wife.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I was trying to take a concern, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because I'm holding. So I'm on a horse holding a phone. I mean, you know, that's the concern. I'm trying to take a.

[Leo Laporte]

You look like you're in Handmaid's Tale. I don't know what's going on exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm trying to take a picture of whoever that is behind me. My son, probably. I can't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's your wife. I think it's my wife. Or maybe it's your daughter. No, no, it's your daughter.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We were in a procession of the whole family.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to go. I like the black ponchos, too. You look.

[Paul Thurrott]

But we needed them because actually up there, it did rain.

[Leo Laporte]

You look like Clint Eastwood. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at this walking. Here you are walking through town. The dogs are going, what the hell?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the biggest dog I ever saw. Dogs love the horses. And then. Or some of them hate them. But, yeah, you get to go over the topaze, which are those speed bump things.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they don't really. You don't really have to slow down, though, right. On a horse, you're kind of. You're already kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

Suspension is excellent.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we did this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there you are. You got out of town.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we got into the woods, but. So we're coming back, and my apple watch makes a little blurpy sound. And I look down at it. It says, it looks like you're. It. Thought I was on a walk, I think. And so I, you know, as you do, you put your arm up so you can see it, and then you're going to hit it. And that arm was holding the reins of the horse. Oh, no. Galloped forward, and I was like, all right.

[Leo Laporte]

I need said, it looks like you've taken a fall.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's like you get a right. Except my feet are humongous, so they would have held in the stirrup thing, and I would have, like, been hanging off the side of the horse like a jerk, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how pretty this is, this waterfall.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was neat. It was a neat place.

[Leo Laporte]

It's nice your. Your kids are visiting, huh?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, usually my wife and I stay in the apartment and walk around the neighborhood, and then people visit. We actually go do stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Makes sense. It's a. It's an amusing place. But I do, I have to say this picture of you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we make this the thumbnail for the show?

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Okay. I knew I was. I knew I was open myself to mocking. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I messaged him. Just a horse.

[Leo Laporte]

A horse. A man. Panama. All right, let's talk about the subject of the hour. Windows, Microsoft. Anything to report, gentlemen?

[Paul Thurrott]

So let's move on. Yeah. So a bunch of stuff, actually. Actually, this is a fairly momentous week in some ways, depending on how you measure these things. The first one is that I've lost track, and honestly, I kind of lost interest as well. But Microsoft is updating the Copilot app in Windows 11 for what I'm going to call the 127th time. I just don't understand. I don't even understand what's happening anymore. The thing that's. But this is actually kind of interesting. Not because they're updating the app again. Seriously, what are you doing? But more because of the things they're not saying about what they're doing. Right. So a couple of months ago, they updated the app. They said it was native. It's not. It's a native shell around the old web app. Sometime before that, several months earlier, they had gotten rid of that Windows integration where you could ask it about changing dark mode or whatever. Remember, that was one of the core features back in the beginning that had disappeared, and now that's back, and so it's kind of hard keeping track. The old UI was tan. This one's blue. The old UI had some kind of a daily update thing where it would redo the news for five minutes. That's gone. But by the way, it's probably coming back. It's written in xaml, Right. So it's actually a native UI instead of being the old web app, which I think would have been easier to update, frankly. But I think it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I don't know why they went this way, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, neither do I because they're not explaining it. But my guess is it's related to that Windows functionality because they brought that back. And so I think the old web app wasn't capable of interacting with the Windows commands. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So now we're living in the sandbox. So got.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think that's why the previous version for some reason, dropped the side panel. That's that collapsible conversation history that you always see in chatbots. And it always had it, but then it didn't, and now it does again. Okay. So here's a couple of things, though, that they don't really talk about. If you go into these settings, there is a privacy section and it has one. Well, a couple of options, but one is checked by default. It's called model training on text. They're actually training their model now on whatever you type in there, unless you find this UI and change it back.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, this is the same thing that caused so much concern, isn't it, that Microsoft was going to send this information to the home office. But that's not what's happening still, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they're training their models and what you type, so, yeah, it is, actually. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So now all that moral panic is real.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, that's what Microsoft does. You know, they lull you into a sense of who cares anymore? And then they just, you know, turn it up a notch. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're training now on the content, on what you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

By default.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they don't explain what.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't explain it, but. Well, they do. Actually. There's a page, there's a fact that explains this on Microsoft.com that's linked to in my article. But by default they are training on what you type, they're not training on what you say. So if you use your voice, but you can turn those both on or off, you can turn it off. There's also this kind of language, says there's an option called personalization. I believe it is off, actually, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's on or off by default, but it says it will let you use Copilot, or you'll allow Copilot to use your chats, Bing comma and MSN Activity, and any inferred interest for personalized experiences. Inferred interests. So there's a lot of things I don't like about the sentence, but if you've been in the Microsoft space for a while now, you understand that personalized experiences means tracking and inferred interest is inferred. Infer is an AI term, Right. It's a good choice because nobody knows what it means. You like mainstream users, right? So what they're really saying here is that if you use chats with Copilot, if you chat with Copilot, if you interact with Bing, and if you use msn, which I would argue are three things no one should ever do, then it will infer your interest from your activity, right? Meaning what you type and what you do. And then it will use the combination of those things as it's been doing all along. It's just that now we're adding AI to the bucket to personalize experiences view.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a circumlocution basically to say, hey, good news, we're gonna, we're gonna.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're tracking you. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

It's more. We've always been tracking you. Would you like us to use this tracking data to mess with what we say in Copilot?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, it's kind of strange.

[Richard Campbell]

So my instinct now is to turn all of this on, go to Bing, which you never do, search on something weird like radial arm saws and then see what copilot says about radio alarms.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not what you want, is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that might be. Actually that's not a horrible idea just to kind of see what happens. Right. It's almost a, that's almost a pain free thing to do because the reality is once you've done it, you're never going to use those things again anyway. Who cares? So you could just, you know, just screw with it. I mean, might as well go take a look. Right. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And as long as this data is used to benefit you in the sense of you're obviously interested in this information. Let me provide more information in that context. It's the question is where does it go from there?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Yep. So look, this is a problem with Microsoft's web based services, you know, msn, Bing, et cetera, because this is their, you know, it's advertising based. Right. And they're adding Copilot to which you know, arguably is a web based service. Right. I mean it's. The problem is it's AI and AI is beginning, we keep talking about this, it's becoming really powerful. So Microsoft might have had a pretty stilted idea of your interest before and probably didn't do much with it to any effect. It was probably pretty stupid compared to say Google. But now they're using AI for it. So actually they're probably going to get pretty good at it. So it's a weird kind of an issue. Tomorrow I'm going to be recording a couple of or two or three episodes of Hands on Windows and one of them almost certainly will be about some of the new features that are coming in. Phone link. Right, the phone integration app on Windows, which is much better if you have an Android phone and even better still.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that great when you have an Android phone either. Ask me how I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, well that's. Yeah, yeah. Well it's pretty terrible if you have an iPhone. So this is really kind of hard to explain, but there is a. I just love the way they explain this. There's a feature that is being exposed through this new Copilot app, now called Phone Connection. And this is the thing I love about this. There's a webpage about this on Microsoft support. It says, we're excited to announce that the Phone Connection, formerly known as Phone Plugin, has been restored with enhanced performance and refreshed visual designs. Microsoft, I have never heard of Phone Plugin in my life. I don't know what you think of me, but please know that I actually follow Microsoft pretty closely and have for a really long time. And I'm particularly concerned about Windows and also I would say with AI. And I have never heard of this thing, and it warranted an exclamation point. So the point of this thing, regardless of its name, is that if you're using Copilot on your PC, it can now connect to your mobile device, well, your Android device, in addition to Windows, and it will use that to personalize its responses based on data stored in the phone, which includes such things as your messages and your contacts and. Yikes. Is there a way to take my phone off the Internet forever? What are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, so it's like this product we made to connect your phone to your PC so you could move pictures around easier is now being used to harvest as much information from you from your.

[Paul Thurrott]

Phone, which, as you said, that is a very matrix, the movie type term harvest, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we're harvesting your data.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like the aliens tendrils coming down and, like, you know, suctioning in your body.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a battery.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but that's what's happening.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's what I've done with this. And when I say I've done this, I mean I've done it poorly because it's terrible. I've used it to set an alarm. No, I'm sorry. A timer. So in other words, I tell Copilot I need a timer for two minutes, and it says, okay. And the first three times it fails, but the fourth time, it actually sets a timer. I don't have my phone here. I'm sorry, it's the wrong phone. It set a timer on my pixel, and then the UI didn't do anything, and I was like, okay. So I set it for two minutes, and then I went back to whatever I was doing, and all of a sudden my phone was like. And it was like the timer had gone off, and I was like, oh, I see. So according to Microsoft, it will Allow you to perform common actions on your phone. Well, through your PC, on your phone. Right. Sending text messages, setting alarms and timers, locating places, using the map app on your device, etc. So yes, to Richard's point, it's using that phone link connection between Windows and your PC to interact with functionality on your phone. Just as now it is once again doing so with Windows with features like turning settings on or off or whatever. So I gotta. Look, I'm not a conspiracy theory. We're gonna talk about Recall, for example, in a few minutes.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not a conspiracy if they're actually after you. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm a little, I don't know, this one's a little weird to me.

[Richard Campbell]

The good news is it's a reminder that the software always. The rights you have to give the software to do the thing you want also lets them do all sorts of things that are beneficial for them rather than you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Harvesting is such a good word because it does feel like the tendrils violating you in a way. Right. And I am a little, I don't know. So we'll see how this evolves. And the reason I say that is because the description that Microsoft provided for this update was very vague. It was only through diving into it. And I also talked to Rafael who uncovered some stuff that's going to be bait or is going to be coming soon. It's baked into the app, it's just not available yet. So there's more coming, but it's, I don't know, it's a little weird. So anyway, there's that. In less controversial news, I just wrote this up this morning for no particular reason, but I've been using Recall on my Surface laptop for three months. Surf or Recall, you may recall, was a fairly controversial feature at launch. No, it was delayed in preview for, I don't know, 6ish months. It became available on Snapdragon, I think in late November, and then on AMD and intel based copilot PCs in December. In preview, it's been updated a few times. Obviously Microsoft made a big show of all the supposed changes they made from Feedback, but I argued, I think objectively that's not. Most of it is not true. The big change they made, the only really substantive change was to make it opt in. Right. Instead of opt out. That's huge. I mean that is big. I can say in using this thing that there are still some controversies to it. And I'll just kind of boil it down to two things. Well, and I should say the third point Though is I've never actually used it. Right. So this thing's been running the searching.

[Richard Campbell]

Part like go look.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, other than just to test it. Right. In other words, the point of this is I did something on my PC but I can't remember. I can't remember like exactly where it was or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then that will help you recall that thing, whatever it is. Right. I use the green pants. I was searching for green pants and I, I found a pair I sort of liked. I forgot where it was. And you can search recall for green pants. It will bring up that thing. Right. So I made the case last May, I made the case last fall, I'll make the case now. I think Recall is something that mainstream non technical users could actually find value in. It's essentially a semantic search type of solution where.

[Richard Campbell]

Except if you look for your green pants on your phone, that's not going.

[Paul Thurrott]

To show up anywhere in Recall. Not yet. But yes, you're right. But that phone connection thing, you have to wonder, right? So I don't know. But there are two controversies to Recall that have been pretty persistent since I first started using it that I do experience regularly over the past three months. The first one is updating it. So Recall is interesting because like other copilot plus PCs, it relies on, on dis. Local AI models. Right. What I would call small language models, but we're just mixing up language. People call them large language models. Sometimes Microsoft, I don't know how much.

[Richard Campbell]

Of its language model for Recall, this is really taking screenshots, right? And then the graphic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, once you hear the names of the models, you understand why, what, what that is in a way.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

But the, but yes, you're, you're correct. It is taking screenshots, but it's, it requires four models. Those four models are not installed on the PC by default, so you have to install them. And when I say you have to install them, I mean you have to install them. Like when you run Recall, it's like, yeah, we'd love to run this thing, but you actually have to install some updates. So why don't you go to Windows Update and install those updates to come back and then we can play with Recall. Okay. So you go there and you do this and you check Windows Update and sure enough, there's, there is, there is an update waiting there. And I'm going to see if I can come up with the exact name. Maybe it doesn't really matter, but the name is something to the tune of. It's like image Search. You're like, okay, right. Image search. I might have these out of order. It doesn't matter. It takes a long time to download. Takes a long time to install. You do it. You're like, nice. All right, go back to Recall. All right, here we go. Nope, it says, no, no, sorry, there's still more updates. Could you go to Windows Update again? Check. You're like, okay. Then you go back, and then there's another one, and this one's called Image Extraction. You're like, oh, okay. Stalls really slowly. Installs really slowly. Finally, you finally, you're done. Several minutes later, like, all right, here we go. Recall. Nope, nope, sorry. There's more like, okay, fine. You go back. Oh, yeah. Sure enough, there's a third one. It's called Semantic analysis. Install this thing. It must be humongous. Takes a long time to install, takes a long time to download, etc. You're done. You're like, all right, surely this is it. No, no, not done. There's a new one, a fourth one. This one you probably have heard of. It's Faisilica, right? This is the on device AI models Microsoft's had for a while. Okay, fine. So you download this thing. Same thing, slow, slow install, slow download, etc. You finally go in. All right, Yep, now it works. You're like, okay, cool. Now I can use Recall. So you turn it on, and if you're me, it's on the whole time. You never use it for a single thing. You don't even know why you're using it. December comes, January comes, February comes. Every one of those months. Not on Patch Tuesday, by the way, but on some other day, randomly. You wake up in the morning, you look down, the recall icon has like a slash through it. You're like, what's this? Recall is paused because it needs some updates. You should go to Windows Update and see what's there. And you're like, I think I played this game before. And you have. And you do it one at a time, manually.

[Richard Campbell]

Times four.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And this thing, you know, look, in the context of life, maybe 30 minutes or whatever it takes isn't that long.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but this is a totally automatable, in fact, otherwise automated process for everything else in Windows. What the What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? So 10 years ago this year in January, Microsoft announced something called Windows as a service, which we all mocked because the notion of updating a legacy desktop operating system and all the convoluted layers of code that are in this thing as if it were an online service is ludicrous. It's never going to work. Ironically, actually, they did a pretty good job with it, right? Not at first. It took a while, but they actually got there. Right. So there's all these different ways Windows can update itself. It's really amazing. In fact, it got so good at it, they're screwing with it in Windows 11. They update Windows all the time. It's terrible. You could. There is no day you couldn't check for updates and not find them somewhere in Windows. Either in the Store or Windows, whatever, there's always updates. Somehow in this world where Microsoft can update Windows at the drop of a hat, you, the peon, have to click and click and click and click and wait and click and click and click to update the stupid thing so you can use it. A thing that runs, really.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not going to be running when it's going to save something that you might need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, here's an idea. Why don't you do it overnight when I'm not using the fricking computer and automate it? Because it runs in the background. Okay? So that's one problem.

[Richard Campbell]

What's going to happen is you're finally going to need it for something and you're going to find out what has been running for the past four days because you didn't check it in update.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, you know what? I'm going to call this the Call of Duty experience. Because I play Call of Duty now again, on a computer and not on an Xbox. Well, I think it's going to be the same on the Xbox and I don't play every day, but three, four days goes by. Whatever it is, I'm like, you know what? I got a couple hours to kill. I think I'm going to play Call of Duty. This will be good. I could. Yeah. First turn it on.

[Richard Campbell]

An hour to update everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

180 gig download, please stand by. Oh, my God. I mean, I'm not saying it happens.

[Richard Campbell]

To plan to play for tomorrow, right? I think I play Call of Duty tomorrow. I'll start the update process.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is not. It's not an impromptu experience. It doesn't happen every single time it happens.

[Richard Campbell]

But this used to be how Xbox was that. Every single time you went to go use Xbox, it just stops. But you can actually set Xbox to update overnight.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can. If you do that, you literally just killed the Brazilian rainforest. So your options as an Xbox owner are do not do what you just described and update as they come. Which means you will turn that thing on, not be able to play the game you Want to play? Because it literally won't play anything until you update the system to update everything. And then you update. Go to your update. You go to the app or the game and. Yep, you got to update that, too. And Hilarious. Now it's time for dinner. Sorry, I hope you didn't want to play today. Or you can let it go into this power management mode, which is a mockery of the term power management, because it's bringing down the nuclear reactor streak. It's using so much power. But, yes, you can play when you wake up in the morning. So it's your choice. You can be selfish and kill the well.

[Richard Campbell]

And I set up the machine that the Xbox was plugged into, had an arc port and things, so it turned itself on when you turned the Xbox on, which I always knew when the Xbox started, did its update because the machine lit up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so there's that. Okay. The other problem with recall, which is also I would say user experience related, is Windows hello, ess. Right? So when all those people complained back in May or June or whenever that was, that, oh, this is not safe, I put it on this PC, blah, blah, whatever. You know, I'm like, yeah, but you're not using Windows hello, ess. You can't be. You aren't. So you're not. You're bypassing the security that protects the thing. You have no idea how secure this is. Well, I've been using this thing for about three months, and I know exactly how secure it is. And when you talk about security, there's always that trade off between convenience and security. Windows hello, ess, is on the security end of that spectrum, and it is a pain in the ass. It's terrible. It's actually a pain. It's horrible to use. And the reason it's horrible to use is if you think about if you have an iPhone or an Android phone and you're using, like, facial recognition or, you know, like a fingerprint recognition, it's pretty seamless. Like, you get a prompt, you put the phone up. It works, you know, and that's how Windows hello works, too, by the way, On a PC, it's actually pretty seamless, except when you have ess, then it becomes less than seamless because the dialog comes up. It does a little eyeball animation, right? Oh, there you are. We found you. And then it doesn't go away. You have to click the OK button.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Guys, work with me. Here's your seam right here. Agree to the seam, please.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I mean, so here's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

You ever notice there's never a not OK button?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Like registry is corrupt. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's also not a checkbox that says.

[Richard Campbell]

Just never do this again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just make it happen. Yeah, so I'm not saying this happens every single time you use Recall. Like I said, I don't use that much. But every time I use it, I have to update the models first and then I go to get into it and I have to wait to get in and then I'm wondering why it's not in. It's because this stupid dialog hasn't gone away and I'm just kind of a terrible ui. So. Yeah. Anyway, all you people that complained about this last summer, you're silly and you're wrong, but there are huge problems with this thing and I wish, you know, look, the good news is it's still in preview, so maybe they'll fix it.

[Richard Campbell]

Presumably these are the things you fix coming out of preview.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but this, remember this was going to go into preview last June. Like here we are, it's not that far away.

[Richard Campbell]

Man, it's March.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's crazy. Like this is nine months, ten, whatever that is. Nine, ten months later. Yeah, it's. It's weird to me that this isn't better, you know, than it is, but. Okay, here we are. Okay. Only one major set of Windows Insider builds over the past week. This is that beta dev thing where if you're on 24H2, you get the same build in both channels. There is something here that I'm super happy about, which is lock screen widget customization. So since they added widgets to the lock screen, remember originally there was just the one. I think it was weather to start. Then they added the other three. They take up the whole bottom of the lock screen. They're fine, you know, people seem to like them. Although if you use Windows hello to sign into your computer, you don't even get to look at them.

[Richard Campbell]

You never get to see them come and go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? But okay, fine. You know, my ADD logical brain looks at that and says okay, this is fine. Is there a way to determine which of those appear? No, there is not. They're either wrong.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't be silly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so they are adding that feature now in the Insider program. So that suggests to me that we'll see it in Windows by mid year maybe. And you'll be able to check which ones you want like a normal UI would have. So that's good. But that's how features get developed in Windows now, right? They Add it, they change it and then people give feedback and they're like, oh yeah, we should probably let people determine in this case which ones to show. Which to me is just obvious like we should have been there 1.0. And then they add it. And by the time we're done talking about this, when this actually appears, I think about 18 months will have gone by. You know, that's how long these things take. It's stupid.

[Richard Campbell]

It is in the insider. So they leaving low hanging fruit for the insiders to pay. I don't know the answer to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't see how you rush out widgets to a lock screen without this. To me, this is part of the package.

[Richard Campbell]

Some PM thought somewhere, you know, people may not care. Let's just try it without and see what happens.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what happens when you do that? You find out about every single person that cares, which we're going to talk about later when we talk about Skype.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's kind of useful to do it that way. Like he's collecting empirical data. I'm a big believer in PMs collecting external data whenever they can.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So every time Microsoft updates any product, you'll find someone complaining not necessarily about the update, but because they have a pet peeve about some other feature in that product. And they say, yeah, but what about whatever this thing is, right? And this is common, you know, in our roles, all of us, we've, we deal with this kind of feedback all the time. We don't have the answer. We're not the ones making these decisions. But yeah, you know, we, It's a fair question, you know, how come you've added something no one asked for? But how about fixing this thing? A lot of people have been asking for and you know, we don't know, we don't know the internal machination. So one of the things that to me falls in this category is something that actually I use all the time and really like, but I'm not really sure anyone else uses, which is Windows Share, right? That thing that debuted back in Windows 8 and my God, they keep changing it and adding to it and whatever. And so in this fundamentally it feels.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it should be a good idea. Why is it going so poorly?

[Paul Thurrott]

It is. Look, I can't speak for the world, right? But I know for me, when I'm on mobile, if I read an article and I want to read it later, I share and then I use Instapaper. But it could be Pocket, whatever you have to use. Very common, right? Or you could Share like a webpage to your messages app and text messages. Like I think we, I think people do do that all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I do it on my Android device. Like I go to Google Maps to look the location I want to go and I can share it to the Rivian. And then the Rivian suddenly bunk uses the big screen. Da da da da. I don't have to bother with Android Auto. I'm happy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So Microsoft has applied, I mean look, it goes back, like I said, to Windows 8. So back in 2012 they probably started working on it. In 2010 iPhone had come out, iPad had come out. We're going to adapt Windows for this new mobile world. Look, we all bitched and moaned about it, but whatever. But okay, we get it. And I would say for mainstream users it's nice to have UIs that you know are familiar. Windows 11 as a kind of a mobile UX, UI, whatever you want to call it. Okay, cool. I don't know, like, I don't know. I don't think anyone's using this thing but they keep screwing with it. Like I said, I think a week or two ago I was talking about how they consolidated the UI and they.

[Richard Campbell]

The other thing is it's still in the insiders. Anybody who's in the insiders perfectly happily emailing stuff to themselves.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think everyone on earth is perfectly happy. That's the thing. I think. No, I think that's the mind shift. I think that the trick for Microsoft, and maybe this is just a psychological barrier they can't get by, is that when you sit down, not you, I mean, but when, you know, like maybe a mainstream normal user, they're like, all right, I'm doing this as a PC. This is old, it's old fashioned. I have this way of working on this thing and I can't wait to get off it because all the fun stuff on my phone or whatever and I don't know that we're making this transition along with Microsoft. I am. I mean I actually do use share on Windows like I said, all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

But you also use new browsers so we know you're not normal.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. I'm not change averse necessarily. So I don't actually see this on my computer even though I'm in the wrong computer. That's why I have real trouble with this. So in the dev and beta channels now, if you right click a file or group of files to share and there's a share option, obviously the share option in the menu will Have a submenu of apps so you can go directly from that right click to the app. So if you have a compatible app on your computer, you want to share whatever it is, a document image, whatever you want to share it with, whatever app might be in that list, you could do it directly. And if you don't see the app you want, I want to do something else. You can just click Share again and it will go to the old ui. So that's fun. And this is one I hope to hear from someone in the chat on because I thought this was the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but they made a big deal of it. They're changing the way that Task Manager calculates CPU utilization in the processes, performance and user pages in Task Manager.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apparently there are standard metrics for this. Microsoft was not using those. This probably dates back. This is probably written in basic, quick basic 3.0 or something. I have no idea.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no. If it's not compliant with standards, has been compliant standards for decades, forever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like literally from the beginning. I'm sure this is an NT 1.0, 3.1, whatever thing, but there it is. If you want it to still do the old way, you can add an optional column called CPU utility and it will show you the old value. So I don't know who's looking at this thing, but I don't know. There you go. So anyway, yeah, this is what we're testing that stuff. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know how anybody would know if they changed the calculation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yep. That's my. I use Windows every day, all day long. I don't. I would never. It could be an octal. I wouldn't.

[Richard Campbell]

One guy who's like, hey, these calculations have changed. I've been monitoring, monitoring this for years. Here's my spreadsheet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, you know, there's going to be. Yeah. Some developer, some technical person. Excuse me. This is off by 1.7. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the. This, this is the kind of person who detected that exploit that changed the timing on the ssl.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need those people. Right. We just need everyone not to be like that. That's most people not to.

[Richard Campbell]

We need that guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

We do need that person. But we don't need two. Yeah, we don't need two of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's forgotten his name and he's back in his corner office.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Somewhere his name is like.

[Richard Campbell]

And ready to help us again when the time.

[Leo Laporte]

If it ever happens again. Andrei's point. You know who remembers his name? Kevin.

[Richard Campbell]

Kevin.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of adhd, buddy. Jeez.

[Richard Campbell]

Kevin's also a one.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ask co pilot. Come on, tell the truth. All right, let's.

[Paul Thurrott]

He says it's in his pure memory.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's pause for a moment before you go on. We have some rusty news. But first.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a word from our sponsor. How about that US Cloud? You guys know US Cloud, I hope you do. I've been talking about them now for a while. I'm going to confess something. I had never heard of them and the name didn't really tell me what they did. So I called them, they filled me in and now I think you should call them because this is great. US Cloud is the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. That's right, third party Microsoft support. They are the global leader, frankly in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500 and they can say there's three reasons people switch to US Cloud, but number one, they save you money. In fact, 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. But it wouldn't be any good if it only saved you money. They're also faster and they're better, so faster. They're twice as fast on the average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And when your hair is on fire and the network's down and you're going crazy, twice as fast is good. They also though they're going to live up to their name now because they have something new that I think will save you money and it's pretty cool. It's a new offering. They call it their Azure cost optimization service. So I think I don't have to tell you it's easy to forget you've got you know as what your Azure usage is, right? I mean when's the last time you really looked at all of it? If it's been a while, you probably have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. But good news, saving on Azure is easier than you'd ever think with US Cloud they have. And by the way, I don't think Microsoft would offer this. They like it that you've got all that extra Azure going, right? Keep the spigot on. But US Cloud has now an eight week Azure engagements powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you're going to get expert guides. You're not just like here you go, try. You're going to get access to US Cloud senior engineers. I told you These guys are better. They have an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. These are the pros right now. At the end of the eight week engagement, you're interactive. You'll get an interactive dashboard and you will see very clearly rebuild and downscale opportunities. You'll see resources you're just not using. You get to choose. But you can reallocate your precious IT dollars now towards needed resources. And I know you know that budget is tight right now. You might want to do what a lot of people do, which is take the savings and put it into US Cloud's Microsoft support and save even more. That's actually a very popular option and I'm sure US Cloud would like it if you do that. But you don't have to be nice though, wouldn't it, to completely eliminate your unified spend and shrink your Azure engagement. Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming, he gave US Cloud five stars. He said, we quote, we found some things that have been running for three years that no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, that really adds up. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance. And you can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Just one more reason you gotta call US Cloud right now. Visit uscloud.com, book a call, find out how much you can save and find out more about this Azure engagement. This is a really good idea. Uscloud.com, book a call right now and get faster, better Microsoft support or less. We thank USCloud for supporting our show. We appreciate it and I hope you will support us by telling them if they ask you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, I heard about you on Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Leo was talking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

That helps us too. All right, Paulie, back we go. Let's talk about Rust. Yeah, we were actually talking about that yesterday with Steve and how important it was to use memory safe languages. Replace C and C with something that's much more reliable. No more buffer overflows, just a whole.

[Richard Campbell]

Class of errors that you don't have now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you know what's consistent about this is the Google. Google, I think was the first of the major platform users to make the shift with Android, go figure. And then Linux, famously a couple years ago, and then Microsoft, right, with Windows and Azure. And at least two of those three have used the same figure. Which is this immediately eliminates 70% of a class of errors, which are all memory related.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what Steve was talking about yesterday.

[Paul Thurrott]

Incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Just gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now, there's a lot of pushback about this, right? And this is tied to, you know, familiarity and people with expertise and languages and the history of things and so forth.

[Richard Campbell]

And so this is all old people complaints.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you, hey, believe me, if you learn C, you put all that time into C, you want everyone else.

[Richard Campbell]

To suffer as much as you have.

[Paul Thurrott]

I watched a thing, you know, Mark Russinovich, actually, it's another thing we're going to talk about in the video, but he recently said something to the effect of C is a great language. I can read C code, I understand it. I look at C and I'm like, what is that? What the hell's going on? It's purposefully obfuscated. It's ridiculous. And that's fair.

[Leo Laporte]

It was all, I'm sure, an attempt to make it safer, better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course, just like McDonald's was an attempt to make food better, but it made us fat. I mean, the unintended consequences, right?

[Leo Laporte]

So are you saying C is the Twinkies of programming?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. I was going to say Big Mac, but yeah, the Big Mac of programming language.

[Leo Laporte]

So delicious, but really just so delicious.

[Paul Thurrott]

So much extra bread that we don't need. So look, the C guys are coming out in force now. They're like, well, we could improve our languages to make them memory safe. Like, why don't we just do that? Wouldn't that be better?

[Leo Laporte]

Rust is very C like, though. I mean, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I don't. Listen, I don't actually buy the big. Well, let me just get into this story first. So. And because he addresses all this. So Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He is famous. You've probably heard of him. He reverse engineered the NT kernel back in the 90s. Wrote articles about how you could flip one Registry switch and make NT workstation into NT server, et cetera, et cetera. He wrote all the sys, internals, win internals, tools, et cetera. He knows what he's talking about, right? So a couple of years ago, he said, look, I'm not going to. I don't think we should have any new C or C code in the kernel. And he meant Windows and Azure and in Linux. This has been very controversial. You know, we talked about this like last week or a couple of weeks ago or both in Windows, based on his. What he's Communicated publicly because we don't see that development publicly. Not so controversial actually at all. Like they've really embraced it inside of Microsoft and not just in the kernel groups, but across Microsoft. Right. Office and other parts of Microsoft as well. So he gave a talk at a Rust conference about a week and a half, two weeks ago maybe now, which is worth watching if you care about this topic. And it's funny in a way because he says, he says, I put out that tweet and then he got a call from Satya Nadella and he was like, really? And he goes, yeah, really. He's like, all right, I trust you. You know what you're talking about, right? So that was kind of interesting. But he also said like, I don't, I wasn't even clear in my role as Azure CTO at the time, if I even had this power to just kind of say this. And he's like, actually I said it and it just happened. Like everyone was on board 100%. And so there's all this stuff that everybody knows why Rust is great. Right. But the thing that's interesting about this talk is he discusses the things that are issues, right? He talks about the feedback they got within Microsoft over a period of years. And of course the big one is that thing that we saw in the Linux flare up recently, which is interoperability with C and C. And this is, that's going to be an ongoing issue because the reality is until some future thing, and this is actually, it's the future thing that I'm most interested in here, we are going to be dealing with both code bases, you know, pretty much forever. Right? I mean, the reality is this is these things have to exist together. We're not just going to wholesale replace everything there is, you know, testing and new bugs that get introduced and all kinds of things that happen when you re not just refactor code, but rewrite it. Right. In a different language. I mean, serious. He said that pretty universally people would adopt it or try to adopt it and be confused for about two months. Right. Because it's so, you know, because of the memory stuff that's just in your face and then the spit flips and they're like, I, I love this, I will never do anything. But this, like, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Wonder how it impacts hiring.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it's a certain class of developer that's going to be more excited to work in Rust than in C.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a real, I mean it's not universal because like I said, they're using it across Microsoft in interesting ways. Like the Office adoption of Rust is actually replacing C Sharp. That was kind of fascinating to me. Not, not just to replace C Sharp, but rather that there was this underlying code that because of the time it was written, was written in C. It's used across Office on all the different places Office appears. Right. Desktop.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very unusual. Crossing between garbage collected and non. Garbage collected is not a trivial thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The idea that this thing didn't need to be garbage collected means it probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. It either needs that or it doesn't. C is a garbage collected language.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, the managed language. And so you get that kind of overhead of the runtime and all that stuff. So there's an instant.

[Richard Campbell]

It also means you're okay with non deterministic memory behavior. And in, in low level environments that's just not acceptable. Right. You don't write drivers, you don't write microcode. Like that's not how this works.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So no, it's completely different. Yeah. And I, I, this is kind of fascinating to me. I just. So the, the UEFI, the firmware that's in Surface is written 100% in Rust and it is also the firmware they use in Azure and in their data centers. So it has been open sourced. In fact, most of the stuff that he discusses has been open sourced by Microsoft. It's called Project Mu, you can find it on GitHub. So they're encouraging PC Maker partners to use this as well. He didn't discuss whether any have or will. They're. They've been a pretty resistant group to anything, frankly forever. So I don't know that that's ever going to happen. But kind of interesting. In every case there's been a performance benefit. In every case, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive for those people involved and they will never go back. Like it's that, that's been one truism of this, so. Or a set of truisms, I guess. And then I'm trying to think what the other. Well, tooling is an issue, obviously. I mean, Microsoft has a rich body of programming tools, utilities, frameworks, languages, etc. So, you know, getting everything up to speed to work with Rust is going to take some time. And of course Rust itself is also still evolving, even though it's, I don't know, 10 years old or so. There's some bits of it that aren't yet stable that could change and we still have to deal with that. And Windows, of course, thanks to the architecture Dating back to literally, I think, the first version 85 dynamic linking, right from when we didn't have enough RAM to run something as big and heavy as Windows. Dynamic linking, which is common in Windows today, still is a problem with Rust, apparently. So it's not, you know, it's not all perfect, but the way he says it is, look, it's not all rosy, but it's rosy enough and we're all in is the way he said it so well.

[Richard Campbell]

And it does like it looks like. So do these. When you can define the API barrier, one side can be rust and one side can be something else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus there's excellent books on rust. It has a crab. And they call themselves Rustations.

[Paul Thurrott]

Rustations.

[Leo Laporte]

So what, you know, I mean, really.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know why they call it that? Because they took the C out of the word.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I get it now.

[Paul Thurrott]

See this crustacean, take away the sea, which is what they're doing with the language, becomes a rustation.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't actually get that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just made that up, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's true. But it's a rest station.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's my honor.

[Leo Laporte]

Because otherwise it'd be crust.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, we're crusty. Yeah, you sure are. We're waiting for you to retire.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not exactly SEA like, but I mean, all languages nowadays, all important comparative language.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, it's just like. But it is C like, right? I mean, it's C like I. Most. Most languages are C like, I guess I. Modern languages.

[Leo Laporte]

I think people resist. You know, you spend a lot of time learning a language.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is all I. All I deal with now is people resisting everything.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, nobody wants.

[Paul Thurrott]

You couldn't. I know I couldn't explain anything enough for someone not to be like, yeah, but. And then they say, so I'm like, I addressed that like two hours ago. You know, like, they just don't. They can't get past it.

[Richard Campbell]

We did a whole thing on Net Rocks about the C services being migrating to Rust. It's like, is Microsoft abandoning C? I'm like, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft makes the something like F the functional version.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. So functional languages like F are never going to replace mainstream language. They're just very special use cases, like their global variables. I mean, G sharp. Maybe.

[Richard Campbell]

There'S a group of folks who can think functionally. It's a different way of thinking, and it's very, very hard to hold both in your head. And so the F believers are a small group of very enthusiastic people. They're great at what they do. Their code Is not obvious, indecipherable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, if you're used to imperative languages, it's not, but you can get used to function. And once you, once you grok it, I think it's certainly safer. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got some advantages.

[Leo Laporte]

You're eliminating these science.

[Paul Thurrott]

What I'm about to say is going to sound super insufficient, sophisticated, but they're literally working on this. So when I first heard about Rust a couple years ago, when this first came in the Microsoft space, right. I heard that Microsoft was working on rust. They're putting rust into the kernel. You know, they've since shipped rust in the kernel. You can go to the command line and see the components that are written in rust, et cetera. Very exciting. And then AI happens, Right? These two things were kind of coincidental at Microsoft in a way, time wise and AI. We just talked about this briefly, but AI is especially good with programming. And of course, in my dumb CRO Magnon brain, I think to myself that one of the first things I blurt out without really thinking it through is, I mean, couldn't you just take the Windows kernel and say, hey copilot, no, you can't rewrite this in Rust.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just going to say, no, no.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, no, I know, I know right there. But hold on a second. They are actually working on what I just.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, so this is not happening tomorrow, it's not happening in this year, whatever. There's a whole bunch of stuff that has to happen. But at the end of his talk, Mark Russinovich discusses that aspect of this, which is it's not going to be like flip a switch and pub, you know, compile, you know, it's also a.

[Richard Campbell]

Very normal practice when you migrate. When you're switching languages like this, you migrate smaller pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You build up a repertoire of skills.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. And then it gets better and better and then it accelerates and soon you're like, oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that worries me is if you, if you use it depends how you use it. But if you use AI to code often that means you don't really know what's going on. It's a little brittle, it's hard to debug.

[Richard Campbell]

It's about fine until it doesn't work.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, like I said, what I said is patently vague and super high level. It doesn't make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

And I trust Mark Russinovich. My God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the way he said it is, look, we want to automate the translation of C and C. I think they can do that. We're using LLMs for this, they've created something called Graph Rag that uses rag NLMs to extract knowledge from raw text and structured form forums, which is not how it's like what he calls, I think a hierarchical rag, if you will. It's supposed to be much more precise for certain things, but especially for translating software.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a really interesting use of AI if it can do that. I think that is really a proof of concept that's very powerful, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

So his demo of it is as dumb and basic as it could be, which I think highlights maybe how far away it is. But it's a text mode game written in Python which is like a little side scroller thing. And you know, you flip a switch and it's in rust and it's 100% identical. And it's one of those things where, you know, you have to prove that the, you know everything, the output or the, I guess, yeah, the output you receive on whatever input is exactly what you. It has to be exact, right? It has to be exactly the same. It can't be like sort of the same. It has to be exactly the same. And so, yes, that's a silly example, but you know, that's like I said.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, we're going to interview right after the show actually on Intelligent Machines, Gary Marcus, who has been kind of very outspoken in fact about saying don't use AI to code. So I think it'll be interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got bad news for this guy. I'm sorry, but that ship has sailed. I mean, this is Brad, we're Talking.

[Richard Campbell]

About what, 50 million lines of code.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, yeah, no, of course it has to scale. Look, it is being used to write code right now. It's not being used probably to write 50 million lines of code.

[Richard Campbell]

If you're talking about Window going to take on all Windows, the other side of this is the performance side, right? Like they went after C services because they measured how much it cost them to operate it in Azure and anything that reduces the cost of operating in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Azure is what matters in Netwin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and Rust is pretty performant, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean they have never seen anything but performance gains. And someone, you know, one of the bits of obvious feedback he addresses actually in his talk is, you know, he says, I'm just going to get, get in the way of this right now. I know what you're thinking, but Mark, if you refactored this code in C or C, you would probably get some kind of performance benefit as well. And he says, right, but if we did that we would be doing it for that reason. We were not doing it for this reason. We have still to this day never done it for this reason. But we still see 10, 20, 30%, whatever the number is, depending on the code performance. You just get it for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, we haven't even optimized for performance. That's just what we got.

[Richard Campbell]

This is like doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So sorry, you know, but that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is, you know, it's not the reason to use Rust, but it is. It's a nice side benefit, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So far, at least.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, that was why people use C, because it was as close to assembler as you could get. And so it was very performant.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why, you know, it was the.

[Richard Campbell]

Easy language compared to assembler. Like that was the fun part.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then it became, became the assembler for the next generation of people who thought that that was too.

[Leo Laporte]

It was really just, I think in the earliest days just an assembly language pre processor really.

[Richard Campbell]

But more or less, yeah, it was pretty close. And then when, when we went object oriented because it was memory efficient in the 80s, that's C. Right. There's a very. You need some ontological humility. They were making the best decisions they could make at the time with the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Reason I think a lot of really smart people lost their mind on oop, you know, a lot. And Microsoft definitely went too far. And if you look at the Ms. And they were going to do this object oriented file system in Cairo and. Oh yeah, object. Object oriented ui. Right. And so one of the big compromises they made when they went when Windows 95 came out was like, we can't do this Cairo thing. It's just too resource intensive. This has to run on a 4 megabyte PC or whatever it was at the time. And what they came up with was, you know, the object base, which is like when a kid. When you put a kid's drawing on the refrigerator and you tell them it's great. It's like, I don't even know what it is. But that was Windows 95. But then they used it in NT. Right. And then we still use it today. Right. So that it was good enough for that purpose, I guess. Okay, so there's that. The way I wrote this next thing in the notes is the way I was. I decided I'm going to turn into the onion of the tech world. And this is how. Right. Headlines, intel delays, Ohio Fabs until after the Earth Greens into the sun.

[Richard Campbell]

So by the way, the sun will be coming to us, not the other way around.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, thank you for correcting me on that joke. So. So that's good. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

We have billions of years to prove him wrong.

[Richard Campbell]

The earth is absorbed by the sun.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I love it. You are my people rich. It then scared. So yeah, I'm completely off track because I know I'm thinking about that.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, so only 20, 30 men, that's five years from now.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they were supposed to open this year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

So look the funny. Well, that's not funny. But oddly enough these fabs is two of them have. They've already started construction on both. You can, you know, it looks, looks like Chernobyl, but you know, they're partway there.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess there's not a lot of difference between a fab and a nuclear power plant, to be honest. Yeah, they take too long and well over budget. Like it's very similar.

[Paul Thurrott]

So right now these things are big construction projects. They're slowing, not stopping. So the claim here is like, look, if market demand increases and we need them more quickly, we're not starting from scratch. We're not stopping starting, I guess restarting from scratch. We're still going to, we're doing it, but we're going to do it slow. I don't know that intel as we know it today will exist by the time 2030 or even 2032. Right. Because that's as long as it really could take according to this new schedule. You know, by the time that comes around, you know, we'll see. So I don't know, I don't know. I guess I want to, I'm trying to remain positive, but I. It's hard to get out of the death spiral, you know, idea for intel and then Dell and HP as I predicted shortly after the last week's show issued their earnings not as positive as Lenovo's in either case. One interesting point though, Dell overall was up 7% revenue wise to 20, we'll call it 24 billion. Dell, like Lenovo, but not like HP also has these other big product lines like in server space especially. Right. And so they've never stopped being that unified enterprise company that does everything. HP is PCs and printers from a revenue perspective, they're PCs really. Right. So I mean they're mostly PCs.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like there's no margin on printers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and it's. Well actually, actually the margin's not bad on the other because of the ink and everything. But the. Just the amount of. Is. Yeah, much smaller. But oddly enough, if you look just at the PC businesses of both companies, Dell's revenues are actually significantly higher than HP's. And I can't explain that 100%. I will say both companies are overwhelmingly serving the commercial PC market. HP has a higher percentage of PC sales revenues, whatever units that are for consumers, than Dell does. Dell is. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I mean, the question is. Well, this is what it'd be. Infrastructure Group solutions is different from client solutions. Right. Whether it's desktop PCs versus rack mount servers for cloud.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but I mean, looking just at PCs, Dell's.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're meeting desktop PCs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Is bigger than HP's right now. And that's weird because HP, if you look at market share, et cetera, is actually a much bigger company in the PC space than Dell. Dell, HP was until a couple years ago the biggest PC maker in the world. They're number two now. Dell is a distant number three. But if this trend continues, they'll be number two pretty quickly, actually. Yeah. I don't know what's going on there. So.

[Richard Campbell]

And did they break out laptops versus desktops? I presume it's all laptops.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they don't do it. That. No, I'm sorry. Actually, they kind of do. So, yeah, it is almost. It's 80 to 90% laptop. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have those numbers off the top of my head or in front of me, but I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I think Dell makes nicer laptops and I think Lenovo makes nicer than any of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. But Dell's brands are terrible. You know, like right now, Dell used to.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they detonated their brands.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Reflected in this.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

In this annual report that'll show up next year when everybody knows how to buy their product.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. So I don't know, maybe Dell is just benefiting more from that refresh cycle. We keep pretending it's happening, but I. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

So Dell, you know, what you've now talked about? Three PC companies are all making more money. Something's going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fair enough. Yep, fair enough. And then I probably should have added this, the intel story before, but intel today at Mobile Congress announced the V Pro SL, meaning commercial versions of their latest Core Ultra Series 2 processors. All of these are Arrow Lake designs, not Lunar Lake, meaning they don't have that 40.

[Richard Campbell]

The NPU sucks, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a 13 tops MPU like a little bit better than the one in Meteor Lake. So yeah, I mean so it's just the nature of their. The way they updated so most of them are for the lunar lake thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Really went well for him, didn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

The funny thing is from the perspective of someone who buys one of those computers, it ended up fine if you were to buy one of those today it's actually. It's fine. It's not as good as the AMD stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

No. I'm still in the market for buying a new machine. I don't know how many tariffs I'm gonna have to pay to buy it at the moment so I might want to wait a little while.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So I would say having always built intel machines I feel like I'd need to build an AMD machine. That was my advice at the beginning of the year for acquirer, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

For Admins Definitely go AMD. Although of the whatever it was 4 or 5 lines of updated V Pro chips they announced the last of those the 200s is a desktop chip. Right. So they have desktop class AI PC great. But they don't have desktop class copilot plus PC because seriously intel whatever. So if you were holding out on.

[Richard Campbell]

Than that that was either change co pilot spec or make me a better chip.

[Leo Laporte]

I ordered that frame that cute little framework. Yeah you got an AMD and oh no I won't get it till Q3.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh the framework. Right. No you got your.

[Leo Laporte]

I got my meerkat system 76 that's gonna be a.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a. Probably need that but does it come with dedicated graphics or did you just get it with the.

[Leo Laporte]

Both. Yeah, yeah yeah but it's AMD and they say it's like this is a.

[Paul Thurrott]

New system on a chip telling you the AMD is going to be awesome and it's got.

[Leo Laporte]

They say 50 tops. So I got 128 gig one with all the you know as many GPUs.

[Paul Thurrott]

As I could and not even so I, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I want that to be my AI, my AI server.

[Paul Thurrott]

I should be getting the latest gen that they announced at CS a laptop with that chip in it soon. But using what was the top line for laptops as of last September I can turn Call of Duty up basically all the way graphically and it does 110 frames a second at whatever 2800 by something like stupid resolution. Like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I was like integrated make this a gaming machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

No but I'm saying integrated graphics. Yeah like that's that's incredible. And then the AI stuff between that integrated gpu, whatever the name of it is, and the npu, which is incredible. I mean, some good stuff out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a 8060s Radeon graphics. So it is an exact integrated, but it's a system on a chip.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And this is, this is the one they say. They claim 50 tops, which is decent for a home. And I got enough RAM.

[Paul Thurrott]

Enough. Well, by the way, that's 50 tops. That's probably just the MPU.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it definitely. It is. That's what. Yeah. So when.

[Leo Laporte]

This is cute.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, but when, when intel talks about tops now, they, they try to. It's like, yeah, the MP is only 13 tops. But if you add in the CPU and the GPU, which are also both integrated, obviously it's. I don't remember the number, but still not 40 or 50. It's like 20 or something.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the reasons framework is soldering this on, which is kind of counter to their original proposition, which was all upgradable and modular, is because they said they worked with AMD and there was no way to get the throughput unless they used unified memory. So this is 128 gigs of RAM. That is most, I think 96 gigs of which are available to the NPU or to the. The ipu.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So that's good for.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good thing for AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is common to, well, Lunar Lake, the latest stuff, all the Snapdragon stuff does the same thing. So the. The RAM is integrated somehow, either on die or, you know, with the die or whatever. And yeah, it's for that reason. And that's why you buy a lot. Most laptops, not all laptops. Most laptops today, they don't have a ram. They don't even have a dim slop you can add to it. Like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

What you get at purchase time is what you get.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. This is all soldered in. You could change the motherboard. That's all you can do. So this is the AMD AI 300 AI max 300.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So that is, if I'm not mistaken, is the latest one that they announced to cs. So that's a step above the stuff I've used.

[Leo Laporte]

Very interesting. I mean, does everybody need a home AI server? No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, wait till July. I mean. Yes. The answer will be yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's about when I'm going to get it. July or August.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a. Any. You know, this, that's. That Whole. Do. Do I really want to be calling out to open AI with everything I say in my house?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we're going to talk about this soon because let's. We're going to talk about this. This is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's save it for the AI segment, which is still to come.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not calling to open AI. You know, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

You're listening to Windows Week. This. Do you want to take a break now? I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I got lost track.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, we hit the end of that section. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We're at place to take a break. And then we come back. Microsoft 365, AI, Xbox. And we got a little tease. We've got some. A castle of whiskey coming up.

[Paul Thurrott]

A castle.

[Leo Laporte]

A castle. It's from a castle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Castle.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how good it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it like a hectare of.

[Leo Laporte]

They make it in a castle.

[Paul Thurrott]

I see.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. It's actually Irish, right? I like Irish.

[Paul Thurrott]

Somebody. Somebody gave me the size of something in hectares yesterday. And I was like, you know, I don't know what that means, right? You just talk.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that in hands?

[Richard Campbell]

Farthings, perhaps?

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like, what is that in, you know, acres?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm like, what do you.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody else in the world uses, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

We use acres, they use hectares.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I got a hectare up here like everywhere else in the civilized world. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Trying to pick it up. Just.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just you and the North Koreans, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

Little hectare.

[Leo Laporte]

I blame Jimmy Carter. He wanted to go metric, but he backed down at the last moment. He was a nuclear submarine guy. He knew. He knew that everything had to be metric. Instead, we've got two by fours that aren't two by four. We've got socket sets that don't work with metric. It's. It's a. It's insane.

[Paul Thurrott]

I strongly recommend the Nate Bargassi SNL skits as George Washington for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, isn't that funny?

[Paul Thurrott]

They are bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that hysterical?

[Richard Campbell]

There's here.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, so. So in the United States. Then you. You say that your kids go to school for a dozen years. And he's like, what. What is wrong with you? Get off the boat. It's like, nobody says that.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. We will come back more of Windows Weekly still to come with Paul Thurat, of course, and Richard Campbell. Mr. Hector. Richard Campbell. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. This. This is how. This is how you protect yourself. You See, the problem is enterprises over the years have spent unlimited funds on, on, on perimeter defenses, right? Firewalls, hoping that if, you know, if you keep people out, you'll be all right inside the network. Right. They also of course have VPN so you can burrow through the firewall into the network. How's that working out? Not so good. Breaches are, are skyrocketing 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks. I predict because of the, we're backing off on investigating Russian ransomware groups, that it's going to be worse this year. Right. Last year, a $75 million record payout to ransomware gangs. Double that easy this year. Maybe that's a little scary. These traditional security tools, they expand your attack surface because the VPNs have public facing IPs. It's like, here guys, here's how you get in. And of course the bad guys are using AI tools now, so they're working faster and better than ever. It's amazing really, some of the exploits they've got out there. And then of course, what happens is the bad guy penetrates your perimeter defenses and you're just the assuming. Well, anybody's inside, it's gotta be a good guy. So we'll let them have access to anything they want. Lateral movement, no problem. So they get in there, they can look at everything. They start exfiltrating your data through, through encrypted traffic through the firewall. The firewalls are struggling. They can't inspect that in traffic. Encrypted traffic at scale. So you've got, you know, you've got data leakage. It's actually not just ransom anymore. Now it's, it's like blackmail. Hey, we've got all your customer data. You wouldn't want us to put that on the darknet, would you? They blackmail you and then they say, oh, and by the way, boom, you're encrypted. The bottom line is hackers are exploiting this inadequate security structure, traditional security structure, and they're doing it with AI. They're outpacing your defenses. We got to rethink security. You can't let bad actors win. You need zscaler. Zero Trust plus AI. So first of all, Zscaler hides your attack surface apps and IPs are not visible. A hacker can't attack what they can't see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, it eliminates lateral movement. Even if a hacker is in your network, users are only connected to the specific apps they're authorized to connect to, not the whole network. And zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. Plus it simplifies your job by automating with AI. So security management's easier than ever. And by the way, Zscaler is keeping an eye out. They detect they over half a trillion daily transactions and they use AI to filter out the good stuff. Most of it. Right. And find those, those attacks, those needles in that haystack. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Just remember that. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. You can find out [e-mail] Security Protect against all kinds of attacks, even attacks no one's ever heard of. All those zero days because zero trust works. Zscaler.com Security we thank you so much for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us when you go to that address so they know you saw it here. Zscaler.com Security Microsoft3.65 I'm ready for the wake. Is it over? Is it over? Oh, Skype.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft announced this week that they're going to, you know, kill Skype in May pretty quickly, actually. But then again, they were talking about this for about three years, so this shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody, but.

[Leo Laporte]

And they've been neglecting Skype for as.

[Paul Thurrott]

Long as they have. There was, there was a bit of bad timing when the pandemic happened for all of us, but for Skype in particular because Microsoft was all hot and heavy on teams and it was exploding in usage. And teams, of course, is part of Microsoft 365 commercial. It's a moneymaker. It's a big reason for customers either to stay with or adopt Microsoft 365 classic Microsoft bundling strategy, et cetera. They only made a couple of passing moves with regards to, you know, free usage during the pandemic. And Zoom, you know, ran away with that. Right. Obviously that. I mean, the pandemic was the best thing that ever happened to Zoom, if you think about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, for sure. I mean, they ran out of ideas. Now they've made it horrible. Tried to desperate to be a platform, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because that's what we want.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It was the height of Skype, truly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And. But it was good for this network.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn'T exist without Skype. Paul, you and I, we know for years that's what we use.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, we did on Dynamics.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was a lot of back and forth with Skype over the years because, you know, my little tie in with it is the original version of this app was written in telephone. Right. Was it really the client front end. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that. Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, it used a kind of a peer to peer network because.

[Leo Laporte]

Zendstrom and Frisk, the guys who wrote it, had written. Was it Kaza? They wrote a peer to peer.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know if they wrote it or if they were like inspired by it or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I think they actually, that was their first product. Yeah. And so they use the same peer to peer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, that's what Microsoft killed when they bought it. And that started to go downhill.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. So Microsoft, I don't probably heard the term client server. They're kind of big in this. I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the other part of this was phones. Right. You can't peer to peer to a phone. Not when people.

[Leo Laporte]

You lost that. And that was one of the greatest things about Skype. I remember my daughter did her junior year of high school in France. For a whole year I got, for 90 bucks, I got her a Skype phone number and we could Skype together for free.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't peer to peer to phone. So. So, I mean, first they did the Kazaa supernodes. They put those everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

When Skype, you have to remember Skype is 25 years old or whatever. The. It's 20 something years old. And the world of 20 whatever years ago is quite different from today. Right. We didn't have pervasive broadband Internet. We didn't have mobile phones or smartphones like we know them today, I should say. And the feature you just mentioned, the ability to buy credits and then call landlines or cellular phones or whatever we would have called them back in the day, was very useful.

[Richard Campbell]

Skype out. Which they did right away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Especially for international or long distance calls that were still very expensive in that timeframe. You know, today everyone has a smartphone, so there's much less of a need for that type of feature. If someone were inventing Skype today, that wouldn't even come up.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the pressure on the entire telco industry to go voip anyway.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Skype was part of that. They weren't the only ones. There was a bunch of services out there that did.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So, you know, I, you know, I've been, I've been around long enough. I've been writing about Skype since the beginning. And I kind of went back and kind of reacquainted myself with the history there and wrote up a very long thing about that, if you want to read it. But to me, the interesting bit is that. Well, there's a couple of things. So when Microsoft acquired Skype for, I think it was 8.5 billion in cash, by the way, it was by far their biggest acquisition at that time. Super controversial. An argument that would repeat itself later with teams when Microsoft, I think they.

[Richard Campbell]

Way overpaid for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. They were trying to buy Yahoo. Slack 20 years later.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm thinking in context of the reason that Ballmer paid 8 1/2 billion for Skype when it wasn't worth that is he just failed at the Yahoo acquisition.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right. And that was kind of wanted a.

[Richard Campbell]

Mark to show he could buy something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. But it was okay. Right, so. Right. It was, you know, horribly overvalued, et cetera. But. And was their biggest acquisition. But if you look at it, the thing that's kind of curious about that to me today is it's still their fourth biggest acquisition of all time, even today. More than they spent on GitHub, more than they spent on Nokia, which is the one I think a lot of us would kind of remember as kind of a big deal. Right. That was a huge deal. And that was many years later. No, it wasn't. It was several years later.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it 8 billion? They spent what?

[Paul Thurrott]

It was 3.5. Yeah, yeah. LinkedIn though, 26.2 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the thing the numbers have really.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're hard. So like Nuance, 19.7. That's crazy money. So. So, you know, LinkedIn, Nuance, Skype and smaller things that don't make the big list, like Yammer, et cetera are things that have been integrated into the kind of Microsoft stack. Right. That was the first thing that they did after they acquired Skype. Skype started appearing all over Microsoft's product. But the controversy to me at the time was more just the same controversy that Bill Gates brought up about buying Slack, which is we already have this stuff. I don't understand like what. You know, we had whatever MSN messenger by that time was Windows Live messenger, whatever. They had Link by that point, which used to be Office Communications in the commercial space. There was. I don't know if they called it Federation, but there was the ability to communicate back and forth across that divide. What are we getting here? And yeah, I don't know. They got a really good brand, like you discussed earlier, had to change the infrastructure, which I think they did twice, actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the immediate fix, which is we can't be caught using other people's machines. Yeah, we have to build out the super nodes and just direct. You continue to use a variation on the CASA protocol to direct through the super nodes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, teams.

[Richard Campbell]

But then ultimately it's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they did.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

The backend is still.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that to messaging at Microsoft or communications, whatever you want to call this. Skype is essentially what NT is to Windows. Right. When Windows 2000 came out, remember the horrible tagline built on NT technology? I think I made this crack when teams came out of it. I'm like, is there going to be a little thing in the dialogue this is built on Skype technology? Because.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

The answer is pretty much guarantee not.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the codec that Skype built is the one that teams uses.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's by the way, why we use Skype. It was the best codec.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's fantastic. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And even today. We were talking about this yesterday with Alex Lindsay. He says because that codec would use as much bandwidth as you had, unlike Zoom, which tops out at a few megabits a second, it would use 20 megabits if it could. And so you could get really amazing quality.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. And they offer that professional version, remember, for broadcasters. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Skype tx. Yeah. Or vx.

[Paul Thurrott]

We tried very briefly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It didn't work out.

[Leo Laporte]

But remember, Colin, you have, by the way, Kudos, a great history of Skype as part of your.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You'd wrote a great piece there, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

I just loved it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I didn't even. You can't really hit on every. It would be a book, you know, it was. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you left us out, but that's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at you, young Paulie. Was that your first Skype? My first Skype?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Well, this was. That was probably Windows Live messenger or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, we. We remember. I don't know if you remember, but in order to have multiple people on our shows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Colleen built what she called Skypasaurus. This is back. We were in the cottage, which was a bunch of Mac Minis. Each caller had one Mac Mini and each. There were. So there were a bunch of Skype calls, then conference together.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I did it with old laptops. I literally just had a laptop sitting side by side. Separate Skype accounts for each one.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

You just hook up each person you.

[Leo Laporte]

Call into that one. And then we put them all together in a mixer and we did that for a long time. And then we tried the Skype TX.

[Richard Campbell]

When it came along.

[Leo Laporte]

BIZRT offered that and we tried it and we weren't crazy. Thank Goodness. Zoom came along because we actually get great results doing it soon. Yeah, yeah, we're not on Zoom now, by the way. We're on Restream.

[Richard Campbell]

And we went over to Riverside. We tried Zencaster.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are so. Those are WebRTC. This is a WebRTC solution. So is Riverside.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all basically the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And Alex said, you're going to regret it. He does not like WebRTC. That's what.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's got his problems. There's no two ways about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Zoom is the best. Best. And so, yeah, we do still use Zoom with ecamm on some of our shows like Twit, but I like to switch the shows. So we use Restream for the shows that I. That I'm sitting here switching.

[Richard Campbell]

But I, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Skype comes from. From desktop land. It never really was meant for mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably the problem this was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Remember that we had those USB mics on a stick? You know, they would sit on stand. We would, you know, it's a different error. This is the, you know, and this like Windows Phone, you can't point at a thing and say, that's why it, you know, that's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but I would say what, you know, WhatsApp occurs.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it was phone centric, actually before that even, there were things like Apple did like Ichat first on the Mac. Right. Google did. Whatever. Google, you know, it wasn't me. Google Chat, whatever, G Chat, you know, back in the day. And yeah, they were very much desktop based in the beginning because it was that era. But also these were companies that got into mobile and thus had to make that work. So they just did the. I think they just did a better job of. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Where WhatsApp was mobile first and that. And it just had the biggest thing that WhatsApp did. Right. That everybody else struggled with was because they made it phone number centric, then your phone book was immediately available and anybody who had a phone number, boom, like you, your graph built itself.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So you can, if you look at the timeline for this stuff, you know, so Ichat is early days of Mac OS X. Right. 2001, 2002. Microsoft had MSN messenger in the beginning that actually dates back to the 90s and it evolved through the whole Windows Live phase, et cetera. Macs or Ichat comes to iPhones, as does FaceTime. Eventually, right. In 2010, Skype comes up in whatever that time frame was, 2005. So. But mobile messaging to me was like the divide, right. So it's like BlackBerry obviously was huge Phone, not phone, Centric phone only but BlackBerry only. Right, but then iPhone happens, Android happens a year, a year later. But that's when we started like you said, WhatsApp is 2009 WeChat 2011. Like you start seeing these WhatsApp to this day calling it mobile focused or phone focused is a gross understatement. If you've ever tried to use WhatsApp on your PC on your Mac. Right. It's kind of a nightmare. Targets.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's totally mobile.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's phone linked for one app.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, even today it's audio and video stuff is not great. It's a group chat tool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, but, but I think the final. Well I don't think it's pretty obvious. The final nail in the coffin is Slack. And Slack has its own kind of funny history because that company started, they were trying to make a game and failed. And he was like well maybe I'll do this completely different thing. And they came up with what was eventually called Slack and they changed the name of the company to Slack and this notion of a chat based interface for real time collaboration. Right. And this is probably trying to think, I guess 2013. So same year Microsoft bought Nokia if I'm not mistaken or. Right. Within a year that Slack occurs and is popular with the same kind of companies that would do Google Docs like or today notion or you know, smaller companies like startups and all this kind of stuff. And I having used Slack like to reuse your drone before Richard, I can assure you it's frigging terrible and I hate it so much. But the thing that Microsoft did that I thought was really innovative with teams I think was smart and is as much of a reason for its success as say bundling it with Microsoft 365. Also smart by the way, unless you care about antitrust is they understood like Slack was, this is how we do it. Microsoft was like hold on a second, we have this installed base billion probably people using what are now yes old fashioned tools like Office or I'm sorry like Outlook where this is, we're communicating and collaborating over email or you know, something heavy like SharePoint or whatever. So Microsoft reuses SharePoint right there. It's what's on the back end of teams but they put it next to Outlook and they allow these things to interoperate. So if you're one of the old school guys, gray beard, whatever, you're like nope, I'm never chatting, I'm not a child. There's no emoticons happening Here you can do all your stuff through Outlook. The young guys, the forward leaning people, whatever, adapt to this very quickly or love it, whatever, they're familiar with it and you're all communicating and collaborating together. Sharepoints on the back end, the Great Satan. But you have these two different front ends and that was smart and that's what I think would allow this thing to kind of come forward. I had forgotten about this by the way. The original name of Teams was Skype Teams.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, of course. Well, because they literally were using the same codec but they had that tie to SharePoint.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean Skype for Business took over for Lank at some point. I don't remember the history there exactly, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it started as Office or Live Communications Server. Right. Going back into the Vista era and then that as it got to R2 they renamed it to Link.

[Paul Thurrott]

To Link and then they rename that.

[Richard Campbell]

To Skype for Business. Yeah, we could throw a response point into the equation if you wanted. Like the number of TELFO efforts that Microsoft had that ran into each other response points.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was interesting because that was a solution initially for small businesses.

[Richard Campbell]

I actually had three, I have one in the house.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had three sets at one point, different versions. You know, it was, it was a good idea for that era. Right. You know, it was a different time. But the other thing, I think I didn't, this is not in my article, but the other thing teams did over time. So the, the, you know, the pandemic happened, that was the focus. They very rapidly upgraded it but they, they turned it into a platform which is always going to be controversial but they, they made it extensible with, you know, you can call them apps, whatever, extensions, doesn't matter. But you can run apps inside of Teams. Right. Which was, you know, is a common model. I mean Slack does the same thing, but it's fascinating to me. I bet Teams as a platform is certainly more active than Windows as a platform as far as new app development goes. But it's got to be in the terms of just number of users and whatever as a platform is got to be in the top five in Microsoft, probably top three. Right. It's big. Like it's, it was smart. And plus you get all the stuff you get with Microsoft 365 commercial around compliance and, and policy and regulation, et cetera. So it's good. That's where the, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The other piece that they got by buying Microsoft, getting Skype out, those became endpoints that actually turned Microsoft into a telco, which they still are. Like you could buy phone numbers from Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So that springs this.

[Leo Laporte]

Use Twilio like everybody else.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the other day, you know, when.

[Richard Campbell]

This was announced, but I do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Through teams, we headed out to lunch and I mentioned to my wife, I said, you know, Microsoft has killed Skype. She's like, they still make Skype, you know, which honestly is kind of a very normal response.

[Leo Laporte]

The same thing, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we watched this terrible TV show that's on Netflix called Somebody Feed Phil. You might have seen this. It's like a food travel show.

[Leo Laporte]

I know Phil.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, goofy guy. Yeah, he's a goofy.

[Leo Laporte]

But everybody loves Ring.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. And everyone would know that for some reason. I guess I don't. Anyway, he's whatever. He's a guy, whatever. But at the end of every show, he makes a Skype call with his parents for some reason. It's terrible. It's the worst part of the show. But the Skype logo is prominently displayed in the corner. And they're talking on Skype.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's replacement.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know what they're going to do next time. Right. And so I mentioned that to her. I said, you know, you watch a show that uses Skype every episode. She's like, yeah, I don't see that stuff. And I'm like, okay. Which is kind of. It's a Mary Jo thing to say. Right? Like, I don't notice that. Like, it's like, oh, yeah, why would they?

[Richard Campbell]

But there's a whole episode now to be made about migrating to teams.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I hope they do that. Exactly. They'll do. The teams. They'll probably just move to FaceTime, frankly. But.

[Leo Laporte]

So Microsoft paid for that placement?

[Paul Thurrott]

I would assume so, of course. But, I mean, it's the only example I can think of is something like that beyond the. I think. Was it. No, I wasn't sure. Like, there was some show that used, like, Windows Phones, like, years after they stopped making them. Remember? And, like, I'm sure when Windows Phone was a going concern, they were trying to get Windows Phones and movies and TV shows and, you know, every company that makes things like this has that effort, but you don't really see a lot of Microsoft product placement in the world. And that was a weird example of it to me. But the other extreme response to Skype being killed is like, people have just woken up out of a funk or something, and they're like, wait, what's going on? I rely on this product. I use it to call phone numbers, like landlines. I need it I need it. And it's like, wait, dude, where are you from? Are you from the Wild West?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I think I've heard from every single person that does this.

[Richard Campbell]

They're freaking out 2010 now.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've been talking about this for years. Yes, it's happening suddenly all of a sudden. But two years ago, Jeff Teper was saying, look, we're not going to do it suddenly, but we are transitioning to teams. This is the time you got to start thinking about this stuff. And of course, the problem in this particular use case is that there is no thing in.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no replacement. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm struggling to come up with a solution for these people. The obvious one would be Google Voice. Right. I spent 20 minutes the other day typing in zip codes. No area codes, and then names of cities in the United States to try to find a number, and there were no numbers. So I don't understand why they don't have a ui. That's like, I'm feeling lucky and just give me a number in Des Moines or something. I don't know. But I tried every area code I could think of in Pennsylvania, in Boston area, a bunch of city names, and I never come up with a single number. But if you could get a number, if you already have a number, I assume that would be a solution, that you could use Google Voice to call those phone numbers. Right. Like, I don't know. But, yeah, that's a tough one if you're still using that. Just like it's a tough one if you're still using, like, a chariot or a horse and buggy. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S not fair.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not fair.

[Leo Laporte]

You can use Google Voice, though, right? You could.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you could get a number.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying. You can't. I tried to. I can.

[Richard Campbell]

It's always the question of, can you get a phone number?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Google's been kind of indicating that they didn't really want to do this anymore either. Well, you got to listen.

[Richard Campbell]

We sold the place to go, quit Loma. I took the phone numbers that were, you know, dedicated to landlines there, and I migrated them into teams.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Just part of them into teams. And now they go.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you're talking about teams commercial. So this is a slightly different.

[Richard Campbell]

But it goes through an automated attendance, so you actually have to. You know, that's good. So that blocks a lot of the spammers. And then it's up to Microsoft to.

[Leo Laporte]

Convince people that this is a viable thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and I don't think that it is. Try and set up a teams account. There's no better example. Start from scratch on a bare machine that doesn't have any Microsoft accounts on at all. Set up a teams account from scratch.

[Paul Thurrott]

I, I would, I will never do that.

[Richard Campbell]

What you just described such a bad. I mean there's famous stories of guys like, like Scott Guthrie took the whole Azure leadership team, gave me each like a hundred dollar credit card and said, go build a website on Azure with none of your existing accounts. Go from scratch in a weekend. None of them could do it because the barrier to setting up accounts and things is just so fricking high.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

They make it impossible to get started. If you're already in teams, it's fine. If you're not, you ain't getting there. It's just too hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if you just. But if you're just an individual person, human being, whatever. Listen, you signing up for Google Voice today will assure you that they will kill that service tomorrow. Yeah, like Google. Yeah, Google will kill that immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

Normal people are using now WhatsApp or Facebook messenger or Signal or. Almost all of these will do form.

[Paul Thurrott]

Every person, every business, every. Everything in the country that I'm in Now is on WhatsApp. Everything. People.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Mexican.

[Paul Thurrott]

They text their doctors in the middle of the night and get responses like, this is the way people communicate.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it in the US that we don't have any consensus on?

[Paul Thurrott]

We have blue bubbles and we have green bubbles, Leo. And never the twain shall meet. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, if everybody were on an iPhone, iPhone would mess up.

[Paul Thurrott]

The messaging would be it.

[Richard Campbell]

No, and genuinely, I have friends who are so iPhone centric, the fact that I have an Android means I can't chat with them.

[Paul Thurrott]

The stupid thing is you can, but they're just being dicks.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't disagree. But the bottom line is you have to go where people are and I'm not buying an iPhone for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Apple's support for RCS now at least gives it a decent connection to Android devices.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this is the most artificial restriction in the history of artificial restrictions.

[Leo Laporte]

It's slightly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's an exact. It's a beautiful example of how terrible that kind of really is. But. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But I do wish everybody would just give up, give in, and start using iPhones.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I do too. I do too, you know. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Submit to Tim Cook once and for all.

[Leo Laporte]

My daughter refuses. She's like you, she says. She's like, you're rich. She says, I'm not I've never used.

[Richard Campbell]

Him and why would I go into it?

[Leo Laporte]

But her birthday's coming up and I don't tell her, but I bought her an iPad.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh God, that's so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Wedge.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that will do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wedge.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. You know, if you were using the iPhone, you could text and call through that iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she insists on like doing meat or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some people insist on carving things into their arm with a knife. I'm not saying it's healthy. I'm just, you know. Yeah, we all have our little ideas. I don't know. Apple has an evil company from the Discord. Yeah, but Google. Yeah, but Google isn't evil. But Google's great, right? Like Google's fine. Yeah, Google's good. Google's better. Somehow.

[Richard Campbell]

There are no kinder, gentler textures.

[Paul Thurrott]

If evil is the bar, we. We just move to a farm and you use the little.

[Leo Laporte]

Google and Apple both move to the same motivations. It's just that Google's so bad at it. It's like. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Microsoft is just as evil as Google or Apple. It was terrible at everything. They just like. It's a combination of evil and inept, you know, I guess. Is that better or worse? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

At least if you're going to work with an evil company, work with an inept evil company because.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, unless you want stuff to work.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, telling you the iPhone.

[Richard Campbell]

So do we have a consensus on our Skype replacement? Because we know it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, we do not. That's. Well, no, no, no. I should say actually. So if you're an individual. Right. So for a lot of people listening to the show, this advice is going to be complete nonsense. But if you're just a person, like a non technical person who would not listen to the show, actually the consumer version of Teams, as I'll call it, it's actually a consolidated client that comes in Windows 11. It's pretty damn good, which I say.

[Richard Campbell]

Having hated it, Skype out.

[Paul Thurrott]

What does it do?

[Richard Campbell]

I know. Does it still have Skype out? Like I can still phone a landline.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, it does not. No, it's a matter.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a modern cell number.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, it doesn't do that. It does modern things. But it's. But it, but it, it works well and it does support. If you. The thing I. One of the things I've been using it for just in passing, is with the switch to the consolidated client, I can use it for Skype. I'm sorry, for Teams Calls that are work related. It will work for that too. Right. So if I get a teams link, it just. That works fine. I can do teams meetings. It's great. I don't use teams at work anymore, but if I did, it would work for that too. They don't have it as of the last time I checked, but any day soon they're going to have some import to get your Skype stuff into there and it will be there. So your history, your chats, whatever. But as far as like an app, it's actually pretty good. This is an interesting comparison. Maybe because I know this is controversial too. It's further along than the new Outlook. It is. I think it's pretty good. Anyway, there we go. All right, just one more quick thing. Speaking of incompetent Outlook Outlook Mobile a week or two ago we talked about a slew of updates is another one. They're getting support for delivery and read receipts which somebody on social media told me that fax machines had back in whatever year. Fair enough, but. Okay, so there you go. Anyway, for some reason there has been a lot of activity on Outlook Mobile this year. Right. We're only two and a half, not newer interns. I don't know. Yeah, but there's a lot of stuff going on there. So this is one of them, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. There's many things going on and this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is one is one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, we're going to get to AI Gaming. Still lots to come. I just want to pause briefly to ask a favor. Could you leave us a review on. Not you, Paul or Rich, I already have. Our dear listeners, could you leave us a review on. Particularly on itunes? Turns out people have been review bombing us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Review.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't. Personally, I think you either listen to the show and like it or you don't. That's fine. But advertisers pay attention to the reviews, weirdly. So if you could help us by leaving a good review for Windows Weekly or any of the shows you listen to, listen to and like, you know, an honest review, you don't have to lie.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I think this show is.

[Leo Laporte]

Great, but don't, don't lie. But if you feel like the show's a good show and you want to support it, it's just another way you can do it is leave us a nice review, particularly on itunes. People pay attention to that. I'm just, I'm just mentioning that at a, you know, whatever. Hey, thank you for doing that though, if you do. Now we do talk A lot about AI on the next show. Intelligent machines is coming up. Gary Marcus, as I mentioned, our guest, he's a naysayer. He's a skeptic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He took Kevin Roos to task, who wrote in the New York Times about AI coding. Now it's easy to take.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kevin Roost, I was gonna say that's a soft target. I. You know, you got to go after someone who knows what they're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but. But let's talk about AI for a little.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Some of this.

[Leo Laporte]

You guys know what you're talking about now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I actually, I'm not even sure I would say that. But let's not get.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's not get crazy now.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. You can't. You can almost not.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard knows what he's talking about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Okay. You know how fast this stuff is evolving?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it is incredible.

[Paul Thurrott]

This past week just. I'm only gonna hit on some of the things. I mean, there's been so many developments. There was a. Just as we started the show, Google announced they're adding an AI mode in experiment at first to Google Search, for example. So I have to go figure that out. You know, Microsoft, Kev Brewer put this up in the discord earlier, but I just said, you know, my kids are here. I haven't had time today yet. But the UK CMA approved Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI after investigating it, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff going on. Microsoft. Brad Smith put up a public letter aimed at the Trump administration saying, look, we have these AI export rules. They're hurting US companies. They're classifying a lot of our allies and partner countries as basically nemesis. Nemesis. What's the word? Nemesis.

[Richard Campbell]

Nemesi.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nemesis. I know, it's a weird one, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question. Nemesis.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Nemesis is probably by definition one entity, right? You have a Nemesis. You don't have Nemesi.

[Leo Laporte]

But if we did, it would be Nemesis.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nemesis. Okay, there you go. And so that one seems like a pretty straight up. That's pretty obvious. You know, Nvidia is making the same complaints. Like they're going to start hurting US companies with these things. So they're asking for some changes.

[Leo Laporte]

Just get in line, buddy, because I know the car manufacturers are ahead of you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's weird. There's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of complaints. Just policy things. I don't know. It's politics. OpenAI announced their latest model, which is not ChatGPT5, but rather 4.5 or I'm sorry, GPT 4.5, which they're describing as their last non reasoning model. So suddenly we have traditional models like this. This type of AI is about 2 seconds old and we're already moving on to the next gen. They will never make a model of this type ever again. Which is kind of interesting. So yeah, I mean, feel free to use it. Sounds wonderful. One thing I have been wondering about a lot and playing with a little and did so again this week is local AI. Right. This notion that you can download some of these distilled smaller models as I think of them as small language models, SLMs, by the way, Microsoft refers to these things as different things, which I hate. LLMs is one. One of their. One of my favorite names they have is they call them local machine local language models. LLMs.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like another LLM.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it's not large.

[Leo Laporte]

Could they be triple lms?

[Paul Thurrott]

Local Large. It's LM squared. I don't know. So look, I think the general term we're just going to use here is AI models.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, Deep seq as we know came out a month and a half ago. Whenever that was kind of exploded onto the world stage. It was a big deal. Everyone's freaking out. Microsoft, you know, to their credit, you could imagine they would see this as a problem and they embraced it immediately. They put Deep Seat up in Azure. They put it.

[Richard Campbell]

They made it available. AI Studio.

[Paul Thurrott]

AI Studio. It's there. Right. And so this past week they expanded on the single distilled model they had previously offered on copilot PCs by adding two more that have more parameters. Right. So the first one was 1.5 billion parameters. Now they have 7 and 14 billion parameter versions of this model. For the time being they're Snapdragon only, but they will be going to obviously to any copilot plus PC. So the X86 stuff as well. And all right, you know, like I do, I'm like, I have to try this out. And so you can use something called the AI toolkit for Visual Studio code, which is an extension. And then from there you can browse their little marketplace of all the available models. You can filter that list by. I only want models that are local and only specifically work on the mpu, which nicely filters the list down. And these new models are there. And so I was like, well, what does this look like? And what it looks like is using a chatbot, except it's in slow motion. Right. So a reasoning model like this is Will spit out. Okay, so you're Asking me this and like, you know, the way I would think about this is this and this. And so the way I think I would solve this problem, it kind of talks through it. But when you do that on an LLM in the cloud, this happens very quickly. Right. In fact, you have to kind of scroll back to kind of catch up with it. It's a little hard to stay up with it when you do it locally against cmpu. At least the things I've done which were all programming related. It happens slowly like it. I used this comparison earlier today, but the first time I ran Windows was on a 286 black and white, well, grayscale with two megabytes of RAM, maybe, maybe one, I don't remember. It was stupid low end system and you could watch it draw the menu, draw the lines between the menu items, draw the menu items and then it would do something and then it would slowly go do that thing that, that's the effect. I think it's kind of that effect. But for the stuff that I need, it's actually pretty damn good. It's interesting. Yeah. So if you want to experiment with LLMs that could be in the cloud or SLMs as I would call them, but local models, it's not a horrible way to do it. Visual Studio code is obviously a developer environment, but, but we're talking about something kind of technically everything. And once you get that thing in, you can run it in this little. They call it a playground because that's, you know, it's fun and you could just interact with this thing. There's a switch. You can use web results as well if you want. I've left that off. I'm just, I'm trying to see what this looks like locally, but it's kind of interesting. So that to me is interesting and, and something I want to keep going with. It's similar to the work I did with the, what's it called, the Windows Copilot runtime where you can do the local AI stuff in an app, like a Windows app SDK app is another one of those areas where I'm kind of just trying to figure this out. Like, you know, right now I would say a lot of the advantages of a Copilot plus PC aren't necessarily AI related. It's more about the battery life, efficiency, reliability, et cetera. But this was the promise. And so I'm kind of curious to see. And then, you know, builds coming and maybe. Well, no, not maybe right now. You could, you know, Richard, one of the complaints that he Raises all the time, which is very real is you have this really powerful system with a GPU 470 tops or whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Thousand tops. 1500 tops.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, yeah. So one of the things you could do with this tool is down is look for those models that work off the gpu. Right. And I suspect you will see considerably better performance than what I'm seeing off the MPU with this one thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And it would put some pressure on, you know, if you want to make a serious mpu, go ahead like, but make it. You've got to make it better than an RTX video card for granite.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Or make a system that intelligently will just flip between them and don't worry about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Nvidia had this PC sized machine at CES this year. It was 3,000 bucks. Could run GPT3. Right. People already dropped 2,000 bucks on a GPU. You can build a $2,000 NPU that'll fit into a PCIe, you know, X16 slot for two grand.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it should run full bore.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was a potential preview of an Nvidia, possibly Nvidia mediatech coming line of processors and PCs for no.

[Richard Campbell]

And Nvidia should be making that card. Right. It's a line of cards that would make a lot of sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it's going to happen. Yeah, I think that's going to be a thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It seems apparent. And then by the same way you can get a video card running in a chassis that plugs in through a DPI port or any other particular interface. Same thing for that NPU in that scenario.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right. So I didn't include this in the notes, but this week is Mobile World Congress or whatever we're calling it now. It's in Barcelona like it is. And you know, HP and Lenovo, at least PC makers are there as well. It's not just mobile companies. But one of the things that. Well, two of the things that HP showed off were essentially external npus that run off of whatever USB C connection you have. So Thunderbolt obviously is the best. But one of them is a monitor that has it built into the back of the monitor so goes through the, you know, the USB C plug. And the other one's just like a little, you know, like a little, just a little doodad that sits between your PC and the monitor or actually, no, it just. The monitor doesn't have to be part of it at all. It just plugs in the side. Sort of like an external gpu. Right. But it's like an enpu. This is not a product they're shipping this year necessarily. They haven't announced it as a thing. It's more of a prototype. You can tell it's kind of a prototype because the little standalone stick piece was a 30 or 33 tops MPU for some reason. So it's not a copilot plus PC. But until we've made this shift to these PCs that have the stuff built in, this is an interesting way. Potentially I think they're trying to gauge interest to add NPU capabilities to an existing computer. Right. So a bad idea.

[Richard Campbell]

And again via PCIe slot would be a fine way to do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean one could argue. Do you ever play with a Google Coral? They're a few years old now. No, they were a USB based neural net model that was something like five tops. Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which at the time was probably a few years ago.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they were great. And they were, we were implementing them in, in video, in NVR. NVMs, the, the network video machines that were monitoring security cams so they could do person recognition and vehicle recognition. These days most of the cameras can do that. But back then, you know, this was a solution and it was a hundred dollar solution. Like the bus speed on a USB3.2 port is high enough that you could build a. The same way you can stick an NVME in there, you could stick a neural processing unit that could be pretty darn quick. You should ought to be able to get 100 tops in a USB C slot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there you go. And so this is probably a temporary solution. As MPUs become integrated with CPUs it will become the way. Right. But even then you could make the argument maybe your built in CPU with integrated NPU is only 11 or 13. What are the numbers? Top and then you could go to a 40, 50, 100 like you said, whatever. That's an upgrade. Right. And so if you're a developer or whatever, you need this kind of thing without you don't want to buy a new computer. It's an interesting idea. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We are in a weird interim phase right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And just again next week it will all be completely different. It's just crazy. Microsoft announced a new Copilot this week. If with luck this will be the last time I ever mention it. It's called Dragon Copilot.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know why.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know why either. I like the logo though by the way. It's kind of a. Kind of a fun take on the standard Copilot rainbow colored logo. It's for the health care market. Right. And so Microsoft has something called Microsoft Cloud for healthcare. It's an AI assistant for that industry. So we're probably not going to talk about it again, but.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I've done some work with some of the clinical businesses there. And I mean, there's a lot of transcription and. And such going on in healthcare across the board. And more detailed record keeping is better. Most. Most modern trauma centers now have multiple cameras, instrumentation on all medical equipment so that they have full telemetry of everything that happened during a trauma event.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a bad time to have a hallucination, but yeah, it's, you know, look, whatever. I mean, it's. This is going to.

[Richard Campbell]

It's mostly transcription. Right. Is what they want is. Right now there are a lot of skilled people that spend a lot of time transcribing what doctors say. And more of that being will help.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interestingly, I don't remember how much detail I provided about this. I must have told the story about how my wife used AI recently for her writing, and she writes about health and wellness and all this stuff. And so it says this new AI assistant will search for medical information from trusted sources, make the information easily digestible for clinicians, and automate certain tasks, such as conversational orders and clinical evidence summaries. That's almost exactly how my wife is talking about here. Yeah. I mean, so it's really interesting. Right. But grounded in trusted medical sources for that organization, it seems smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Stability.

[Richard Campbell]

Dragon Word comes from the fact that Dragon naturally speak. Nuance was there first, and Dragon naturally.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you think that's what it is? Oh, that's.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's a partnership thing. Yeah. With them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right, good. Look at them. Reusing this brand finally. Okay. I always imagined one day this is how I'd write articles. I would speak, you know, and it would just do it for me. And it would be Dragon naturally speaking or something.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can do it now. Do you think you could?

[Paul Thurrott]

But I just. I thought I'd have to because of, you know, like. Oh, because of my wrists and things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It just never happened. Thank God. But I. I was just always prepared for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I've known people who did that years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to remember who it was. Head carpal tunnel. And David Pogue always used Dragon actually to do his indexes. He wouldn't do it to write the book. He wanted an easy way to kind of scan through the book and say, okay, page 122.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it apparently worked well. That's how he did his indexes for years. That was 20 years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Back in the 80s, we combined a Dragon Naturally Speaking board, an X10 controller for light switches and drapes, and an African grey parrot named Timmy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, Timmy wants to open the curtains.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry, he did open the curtains.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was paying attention. But slow down for a second, Timmy.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but would you give the commands to the parrot?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that we did the commands ourselves. Within a day, the bird knew the commands.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's hilarious. I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you found out the bird like to go to bed early, would turn off all the lights and close the drapes at like 6.

[Leo Laporte]

Turn off everything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good night.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we gave him control over a radio animals. So we left him by himself. He only listened to Rush Limbaugh. He was a right wing parent.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's really interesting, actually. Not the Rush Limbaugh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Our dog was a racist. Actually, you know, I, I don't, I don't know. I don't. I can't explain the animal kingdom. I could just watch the videos, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Timmy wants to go to bed.

[Paul Thurrott]

I saw a video of a guy trying to train a dog, like a golden retriever to be able to hit a thing and then the treat would jump through the air and he could catch it in his mouth. And the dog was oblivious to this. So we got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember we have a hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

A cat walked over, moved the machine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hit the button and it hit the dog who was asleep. The cat figured it out while the dog. He was. The cat was watching the whole time and the cat figured it out. The dog had no idea what was going on anyhow. Okay, this. I'm just saying. Not, not AI, I guess it's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

But so quick to continue the gaming segment. Yes, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just real quick. So Stability AI has partnered with Arm holding to begin with on generative AI audio, but they're going to work on other things. 3D and other. So the ARM is finally getting into this. And I'm not going to go through this in great detail, but at Mobile World Congress this week, there's a ton of AI stuff being added across.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I bet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Android, Pixel. Well, I guess Android and Pixel because Apple's not there. One of the best reasons to own a Pixel phone is the scam detection stuff on the phone. They're adding it to messages. This is the greatest addition possibly to a mobile phone this year because of all the crap we all now get.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

This stuff's huge. And it's. They're bringing it to Android proper as well. It's not just pixel. So if you have Google messages on whatever Android phone, like a Samsung, whatever, you're going to be able to get that ton of Gemini things, including live features. Gemini live features. You know, the kind of AR stuff where you point the camera at the world and it tells you stuff about everything. Incredible. So this is all happening and then Apple, of course, continues to struggle. And the joke there is, if you don't believe it, just ask Siri. I'm just kidding. Yeah. So now Mark Gurman is reporting that they might not have the stuff they promised at WWDC last June for maybe two more years. Like it's. This is going poorly.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because they were afraid of missing a year, so they announced before they were the normal level of Apple ready. They're going to miss a year anyway. I would just say I'm doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

The other day on the horse. That, the horse thing. We were up in the middle of nowhere. We were like 10,000ft up in the mountains and no one had a signal. And I triggered Siri by mistake, which is the only way I trigger Siri. And if you thought Siri was useless when connected to the Internet, I challenge you to try it offline. It is hilarious. If this phone could drool, it would be drooling like it's unbelievably stupid. Okay, just a couple of things in the gaming space this week which is good, bad and different depending on your perspective, I guess. It is a new month, so we have some new Xbox game pass games. I'm not going to make the joke about Activision Blizzard because even I'm finding that to be tired. But it's like it's done. Yeah, yeah. Not much. Nothing. Nothing there. And I have never heard of any of these games, but.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Why? Why not? Why would I know any of these games? This is apparently a big deal. I don't quite understand why, but Tony hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4 are both coming to all platforms, whatever that means.

[Richard Campbell]

They were very popular games at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

They were way back in the day.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you have a Nintendo Switch, if you have an Xbox One, if you have a PlayStation 4, I'll give you an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Tony Hawk is now Hawking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Please cures Tony Hawk who walks around with one of those Walker things now, right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's reverse mortgages next. We know that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know. It's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you look at the 900.

[Paul Thurrott]

Man, you'll be able to get it game pass, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

And a nice guy too.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then the PlayStation VR 2 headset, which launched a couple years back. Remember this thing used to be more expensive than the console itself, which was kind of crazy. Like, they did a pretty good job with the first gen on PS4. This one hasn't gone very well. So there were rumors or news maybe of them pausing production for a while. They just dramatically lowered the cost. Still expensive, but in the US it went from 550 to 400, which by the way, you could buy an Xbox Series S and maybe two or three games. So that I'm on money. It's crazy. It's a. It's still expensive. But you can play Steam VR games on a PC using this with an adapter. But the 60 bucks for the adapter. So there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I have a few more animal videos I'd like to discuss.

[Leo Laporte]

The short dog being abused by a cat in history I actually got up to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sorry, but a lot of AI. You should have taken a walk during the eye. I think it was.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Yeah, I made a mistake. Hey, we will take a quick break because the back of the book is just around the corner. And I always like to do a little harangue before that to get people to join Club Twit. If you like the programming here on our fine network, if you enjoy what you're hearing, I would like to invite you to support it. Now you might say, well, Leah, you've got ads. Well, okay, so here's the deal. The ads do cover, you know, 90, 95% of our costs, but that still leaves a gap and the club covers the rest. Thanks to the club, we don't have to scale down anymore. We've done a little bit of that, but we don't have to do any more of it. In fact, more people join the club, there's more things we can do. The other thing, and I always hate this when you pay for something and then you still get ads if you join the club, ad free versions of all the shows available to you. So now, although I have to say, some club members actually listen to the ads still. In fact, there was a demand that we put the ads in the Club Twit Discord so that people could hear what we were talking about, but you don't have to. And that's a very nice part of this. So seven bucks a month, it's not expensive to get rid of all the ads. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a really great hang for anybody who's into the kind of stuff we talk about on our shows. Smart people doing interesting things. Here's the club and a picture of Tony Hawk. This is the live chat. But that's not all that goes on in the club. We have all sorts. You know, you could. Software development, you can talk about any kind of geeky subject you want. It's all. It's all in here. The other thing I like that we do in the club is we do events. So Thursday, tomorrow, 1pm Pacific, we'll be doing our photo time with Chris Marquardt. We do that every month. Club members pay for that. Stacy's book club, Micah's crafting corner. Lots of stuff goes on in the discord behind the scenes, so you're invited to join that as well. And you also get the satisfaction of knowing you're supporting a great podcast and the podcast community here. And maybe if you. If you all join, I can get that jacket, everything you always wanted in a podcast network and more. TWiT TV Club. TWiT. Thank you in advance for joining the club. We appreciate your support. And now back you're ready to the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

There were a couple of idiots in the chat. I just want to address real quick. I can't be ageist if I'm old.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're not old enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get older. Sorry. But, you know, I'm not. I'm not making fun of age. I'm making fun of a guy that was a skateboarder who was old when they started making these games. He's old.

[Leo Laporte]

Still cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's just old.

[Leo Laporte]

It is an old game.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a joke. It's not. We're not doing the overly sensitive about nothing thing anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

He's 56. How old are you?

[Paul Thurrott]

58.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sorry. I get to make that joke. And it's like. It's like a Paul. So, you know, if you make jokes about like Polish people or Italian people, some religion, it's like, you know, if you're that thing, that's what makes it okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it okay really, though?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it is okay. It's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's not be so sensitive.

[Leo Laporte]

Xbox. No, we did that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, we did that.

[Leo Laporte]

Your tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So Google this week added the ability to remove yourself from search results, which is one of those kind of fun things that they only got in the EU before. So to do this, you have to go to myactivity.google.com and then you can point them to search results and say, look, this should be. If it's personal information especially great news. Yeah. So I haven't tried it yet, but it just, just happened. And it's one of the only Google search related stories I've seen this year that's been like, oh, here we go. Good, good.

[Richard Campbell]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Bravo actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's cool. So you could do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then. Yeah. So Leo really threw a wrench in my plans before the show started by telling me about a new web browser called Zen which is basically Firefox based but with the ARC browser ui.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's like the best of both worlds.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to add that to the top of my list of browser changes from this week because that's actually super interesting to me. So I didn't know about that. You might want to check that one out. I think it's. I don't remember. Do you remember what the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, just Google ZenBrowser app.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Zen app.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does look very interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

It was Andy Inacco by the way who recommended it and I immediately started using it and it is, you know, it's Firefox. So ARC is a Chromium version. So this is Arc, the Ark UI including Spaces and a lot of the things we really like about ARC on a Firefox engine.

[Richard Campbell]

On Gecko.

[Leo Laporte]

On Gecko. And one of the reasons I think you might want to move from Chromium based apps is that Google is now starting to push manifest V3. So your, your browser, your and software.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is not going to work anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well. Yeah. Okay. Well you block rh, especially the most popular one. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But the. They have a light version that will. That supports manifest V3. But I don't know, I just, I, I feel like that's an anti user move on Google's part which they're blaming on security. And, and I want to support, more importantly, I want to support a browser ecosystem that is just not one company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean if you want to stick with Chromium, Brave solves this problem out of the box. You don't have to worry about Manifest anything.

[Leo Laporte]

But and as, as people are pointing out the. And they say when you install it it doesn't support wide vine so the DRM video will not play in it. But that's fine. Who cares?

[Richard Campbell]

Let's not support that for now anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. There'll be a plug in or no.

[Paul Thurrott]

This definitely plugins that is an immediately solvable problem. So yeah, the other two this week Opera is previewing their AI agent right in the browser. So they were very early I think they were the first or one of the first to have any kind of an AI capability, like in the browser. And when you think about agents, AI agents, the point of it is you. You give it a task or some number of tasks, and it goes off and performs that on your behalf. And then it will come back and prompt you if it needs you to do something or it needs whatever help with something. So, so what would, like, what would be the point of an AI agent built into the browser? It would be to control the browser. Right. And. And they interestingly differentiate this from things that take screenshots like recall or like, I don't remember the name of the feature, but Gemini has a feature like that as well, right. That it's based on screenshots because it doesn't have to see the browser. It is the browser. It knows how the browser works, it knows how the DOM works in a website, et cetera, et cetera. So you can say something like, I want to buy a pair of socks or 10 pairs of socks or whatever it is they need to be, whatever color they need to be, whatever size I want, the best price, etcetera, Et cetera. We'll go search for that stuff and it will come back and prompt you when it needs you to do something like approve a purchase, perhaps fill out a forum, you know, whatever it might be. Something sensitive, perhaps. Right. So this thing is still not broadly available. I don't think it's even in their developer channel or their. What do they have, they have like an AI. They have some kind of an AI program for adding AI features to their browser that you can preview that stuff early. So that will be coming soon. Kind of interesting. So that's kind of interesting. And then Firefox, they have a new version of that browser every four weeks on a really rapid schedule. Little wrench in the whole Firefox thing, I think. I don't know if this was before the show, but we were briefly. Or someone was talking about the updated Terms of Use, the privacy thing. They have a horrible way of just stepping on rakes all the time and hitting themselves in the face. And this is a good example of that. So they came up with the new Terms of Use also, I think an updated privacy policy where they removed some language which seemed to protect users against their data being used for whatever purposes. They tried to explain it poorly, I would say. And then they kind of went back and changed everything. I don't know if they changed it back, but they changed those documents again.

[Leo Laporte]

And Steve Gibson said he's Fine with what they said, but this is another reason why I picked up.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was bad communication. I feel like when you. If you read their explanation, okay, you know, it's like maybe, but I don't know. Come on, guys. Anyway, Firefox 136, I think is the latest version is actually a major update. It's the biggest update to the browser in a long time. So they've been working on an updated version of the sidebar for a while that's available now in preview. And this is. Oh no, sorry, in stable. And this is the one that has that AI chatbot, which can be any AI model you want, etc. And then all the normal stuff you get in a sidebar, including vertical tabs. Right. So not the first time. I don't think Firefox has had vertical tabs, but I don't know the full story there. But now vertical tabs are officially, informally back in the browser part of the sidebar. There's a control now where you can clear your browsing data and cookies independently of each other. Previously, that was one thing. HTTPs first, which is a fairly obvious browser feature. But. But if the site you're loading supports HTTPs, you'll get that automatically and if it doesn't, it will fall back and just a bunch of other stuff related to whatever platform you might be on or whatever region you might be in, including support for Linux on ARM64 based systems. Right. So if you're running Linux on a. I don't know what system that would be, but it's like, I guess, yeah, if you have an ARM based PC and you put Linux on it somehow, good luck with that. But if you did it, congratulations, you can now run Linux on there natively. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, nice. Well, I guess this means, like it or not, we've got to go to Richard Campbell now.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Find out what's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wake up.

[Leo Laporte]

What's coming up on Runners Radio published.

[Richard Campbell]

Today, my conversation with Karim Bissette about Secure by Design. So this was a reference to the US Government. Government Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, or cisa, which I believe is still in operation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but much restricted.

[Richard Campbell]

Just as far as the Russians are concerned, apparently. Yeah, well, but they focus on.

[Leo Laporte]

They're harmless security products.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, everything will be fine, I'm sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it'll be fine. So this is as much a conversation about sysadmins, you know, folks wearing tinfoil hats talking to developers and trying to get into more of helping developers to not use super user privileges, which Is hard because often the products they depend on don't have good security features. Security configuration anyway. And they can't make their tools even run without super user privileges. And it's just sort of leads to this cascade where it's very hard to retrofit restricted security into place after the fact. So how do you get to it sooner and build them environments where they're working in normal security constraints? Was a fun conversation, but it's never easy to sort of set limits on folks. But the consequences of not having the significance. So there's plenty of stories of the various exploits and problems. I'm pretty sure we said crowdstrike at some point in this conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that secure by design or insecure by design? That's the question.

[Richard Campbell]

Writing code into Ring zero is not exactly secure. He seems to want to do anything about it.

[Leo Laporte]

You brought along. Now I'm confused because it looks like. Well, what is that? It's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a container for a bottle of whiskey called Napo.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any whiskey left?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, there's a whole bottle of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay, good. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought I just took the cork out of that. I just wanted to handle it carefully because it's full.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this looks like it comes from Middleton. Is it an Irish whiskey?

[Richard Campbell]

It is an Irish whiskey. Napo castle is actually a cow castle. An old castle too. It's in Clare county, which is the southwestern part of Scotland. It's about 50 kilometers north of the Shannon Airport. That's 10 miles in the measures of the oppressors. The castle first built in 1467 by Sean McOnamara, which is now we would shorten to McNamara. The name means the castle in the place abounding with little hills. So. And stays in the McNamara family right through until Oliver Cromwell invades Ireland and it's confiscated and given to a roundhead named Arthur Smith. But a few years later, when the monarchy is re established in Ireland, McNamara gets their castle back. They. So they basically have it for what, 300 or so years. And they in the 1700s, they sell it to the Scott family who then operated maintained it as well. And in 1855, it goes to the Baron Dunbo was actually one of the leadership sites where their meetings for the war of independence in the early 1900s. And finally in 1927, it ends up in the Quinn family and becomes unoccupied for many years and in disrepair. And then it's bought by an American in 1966, a guy named Mark Edwin Andrews, who was the assistant secretary to the U.S. navy. He's originally from Houston, but was doing some work, apparently fell in love with Ireland and been working with what was then the earth, the brand new airport in Shannon. They call this the Shannon Free Airport Development Company and ultimately they do a restoration on the. On the castle. The family lives in it. And you got to think in the late 1960s, the Irish whiskey industry was in a terrible state. Like literally in 1966 there were only two distilleries still operating in Ireland. There was the Bushmills Distillery up in Northern Ireland and there was Jameson Cork Distillers. And that was about it. And that is when they sort of conglomerated work together to build the new Middleton distillery in the 70s and bought up a lot of the brands that were were bankrupt, the Red Breast and the like. So in that time, Mark Andrew and Andrews was buying barrels of whiskey from effectively broke distilleries. And very famously, he bought a few good barrels from the old Tullamore Distillery in 19 barrels that have been laid up in 1951. And we're just sitting there and he bottled it in 87. So it had been in Sherry casks for 36 years. And it's called Napa Castle 1951. You can still find one of these bottles once in a while in auction. The last One sold for 2,500 US and apparently there is a 1949 edition also Tullamore du 33 years in Sherry. That's even rarer to find it. I couldn't find any pricing on that whatsoever. So that entity, the. The Shannon Free Airport Development Company becomes just Shannon Development. And they have this group they call Shannon Heritage Group and they've restored the castle and they operated from medieval banquets and events and so forth. It becomes a famous place to stay. Charles de Gaulle stayed there, Richard Nixon stayed there. And ultimately in the 90s and 96, Shannon Development buys the castle outright from the family. But in the meantime. So that brings us to this edition of the whiskey, which is the son, Mark Edwin Andrews III launches a company called Great Spirit llc and he actually takes the remaining bottles of Napa Castle 1951 and makes available to the public and then starts to collaborating with the Middleton Distilleries to make their own whiskies. So these are still in Telemardu. All these whiskies come from the Middleton Distillery. The Middleton Distillery was built in the 70s specifically to have one set of stills and equipment that could make multiple kinds of whiskey. And so it's not hard to calibrate to make your own versions. And so the original Napa Castle from this new Generation was a 12 that came out in 2010 and then they came out with this 16 as well. And I should wrap this up with a. In 2021, Irish Distillers acquires them that's actually owned wholly by Pernod Ricard. So they're now part of the big conglomerates. So yeah. New Middleton. The Middleton distillery is Jameson Red breast, Red spot, Green spot, Blue spot, Yellow spot, Tullamore Dew. The whiskey itself is strictly malted barley. We know that's not a requirement for Irish whiskey. They do all kinds of crazy things with it. It does a triple distillation instead of a double. That's the way they like it. So they raise the alcohol level a bit higher and then the age. And the 12 year old is aged strictly in bourbon. The 14 year old is bourbon and sherry. And this 16 is 14 years in used bourbon casks and then 21 months in Olorocho sherry. So my first taste, big strong alcohol note up front which is always a surprise like don't expect it to be, but not too sweet. Very gentle in the mouth though. Boy oh boy, that's too easy to drink. But for a 16 year old you would expect as much. This is a very drinkable first whiskey. Sort of warms you up. You don't want to, you know, for it's a hundred dollars US if you can find it. About 43, $43 ABV. So it goes down real nice. But yeah, that's a fruity happy. This is Irish whiskey and it's March, right. Like St. Patty's Day's upon us. So let's drink Irish for a while here. Yeah, and this is a nice one to have around. I'd have though I'd have a nice, you know, three fingers of this off the bat and then you can switch to Jameson and not feel bad about up.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is, if I'm understanding you better than Jameson, this is a first drink whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a very nice. This is your Honda Ra bottle of whiskey. Pure, you know, mostly, you know, aged in bourbon and sherry. So you have this off the bat, have a nice toast, right? You know, toast, Skype, thanks for all the calls. And then we, we switch pour one.

[Leo Laporte]

Out for poor old Skype.

[Richard Campbell]

Then, then you drink the $20 bottle, not the $100 bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, I need more bottles to buy for my brother in law who's an Irish whiskey fan.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And then Apple Castle. It's a great name. It's just that those guys, they don't own a distillery. Right. They just make their stuff in New Middleton. But it's the same as Writer's Tears and a whole lot of other whiskey makers or whiskey brands just use the Middleton Distillery. It used to be called the new Middleton Distillery 60, 50 years ago, but now it's just the Middleton Distillery.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not new anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's been like Tony Hawk.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's, you know, it's 58, no longer new. How good can you be at 58? My goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But this sounds really good. I love Irish whiskey because it's not smoky. It's always a little sweet.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they can get too sweet. Like, they can get a little weird. Right. This is very much a classic barley whiskey ski.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, made the. Made a classic way with a triple distillation. So it's a little smoother and a little less oily and stuff. It's. It's light and you. You can't go wrong. And so. Yeah, well, great to show up with as a gift. You know, you like someone enough to spend 100 bucks on them. Here's exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why. And you can get it in the US Pretty easily.

[Richard Campbell]

You can. I found it a total wine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a Wonderful Show. Paul thurot.com, his book, books, leanpub.com you can get the Windows Everywhere book and of course, a field Guide to Windows 11. Richard Campbell's @ Run his radio. That's where he hosts Run is Radio and dot net Rocks. And we always love getting together on Wednesday and talking about the latest news.

[Paul Thurrott]

And cat videos and mostly cats tormenting.

[Leo Laporte]

Dogs, always fun and gray parrots who are out of control.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, Timmy.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was the showstopper for that sentence for me. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you give him away or did he actually pass?

[Richard Campbell]

He was my. My roommate's parent, but.

[Leo Laporte]

So he left with the roommate.

[Richard Campbell]

He did pass.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he did.

[Richard Campbell]

But he lived a long life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they lived to like a hundred or something.

[Richard Campbell]

They live long. Well, it's one of those things where they're one of the animals that lives longer in the. In captivity they do in the wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's no threat except a little extra, you know, the home automation threat.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, now he was very happy to be automated, and I think that's so cool. The reality that we could give him control over his space so he could eventually set up curtains around his cage and definitely give him control what he was doing.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, to be clear, he was parroting. But there is straight. Sorry, did I say that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you were serious.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But was a stimulus response. Without a doubt. It was sure.

[Leo Laporte]

He knew something would happen when he went.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

He didn't understand the word. It's like AI. He doesn't understand what he's saying.

[Richard Campbell]

He would go to the microphone. Right. Like he would. He would. He would go to the SM58 we had set up for him. He would speak into the microphone.

[Leo Laporte]

He was trained. That's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

And by not trained, he literally watched us do it. And then he learned. Yeah. And then we learned to turn stuff off that we didn't want him to control. Like he can't turn off the television because he didn't like the television. He'd always turn off the television and I'm glad cats the living room and he can't close the drapes anymore. Like we gave him control of his space. Not our space.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But the funny thing is you could tell what he wanted to go to bed because he would still give the command to close the living room drapes even though it didn't work anymore, which is his way of saying, I want to go to bed when people are annoying me.

[Leo Laporte]

That's dark room.

[Paul Thurrott]

That sounds pretty smart to me.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's really cool he had it going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Richard. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Paul. We do Windows Weekly on a Wednesday morning for me anyway, 11am Pacific, that's 2pm Eastern Time. And next week we're gonna go to summertime now you aren't, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Mexico no longer does.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So we'll be saving time. Yeah. One hour off from the rest of the planet. Again, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But Richard and I will be springing.

[Richard Campbell]

We're doing our shift this this weekend and then for better or worse.

[Leo Laporte]

So that means it will be at 1800 UTC. Not because UTC changes, but we do. So I know it's very confusing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a law in the books in British Columbia that says the moment that all of the Pacific time zone you have to follow agree, everybody will stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We've Washington and Oregon is signed on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in a referendum to not go to standard time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. To stay on.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can't do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was going to say what you have to.

[Leo Laporte]

You could say we don't want to do saving time daylight saving anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want to only be on daylight savings.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what The Californians voted for. And of course it takes federal approval because you're basically changing your time zone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Huh. Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

How'd that work out?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, nothing happened.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

We voted for it. But I think it was a strong indicator that we would like to stop the madness. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, and it sounds like both Washington and Oregon agree. Whatever. When California settles on something they can actually do. Well, I'll do it.

[Leo Laporte]

We just got to be in the, you know, GMT -8 and live with it. No more -7.

[Richard Campbell]

The sad part now is like, mornings are great here because the sun's coming up reasonably early and now it's about to get dark.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the argument, by the way, for this, because you in the Great White north have very long.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Dark mornings.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And I realized deeply programmed in my. Into my brain is if it's dark and it's hot, it's very late at night. Which became a problem when I started working in the tropics where the sun sets at 6 o'clock and it's always fricking hot like it's dinner time. I haven't eaten dinner yet and I can't keep my eyes open because programmed into my brain is it's dark and it's hot, it's late.

[Leo Laporte]

So when does it. When does the sun come up after this time change?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it'll be up around 7:30, 8:00.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's not bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? Right now it's coming up at 6:30.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's very nice. Yeah. Well, I. Frankly, if you wanted to. If the sun wanted to stay in bed till 8, I'd be happy with that. They worry about kids going to school in the dark. Nobody wants that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Except that's exactly what happens all winter long.

[Richard Campbell]

They do anyway. Yeah. You know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that you can't make the day longer. This is just.

[Richard Campbell]

The kids are more in danger because the. Because the bus driver's tired. Because you change the time zone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There are more heart attacks in the dark. The next Monday there will be a uptick in heart attacks, auto accidents.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because people have lost an hour sleep. Well, we're going to do it anyway, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Logic be damned.

[Leo Laporte]

The truth is you don't have to watch live, obviously. We're a podcast. You can watch it whenever you want, but that's only if you want to watch the live streams. There are live streams for our club in the Discord. There's YouTube, Twitch, TikTok X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. So there are plenty of places you can watch live. Now the real advantage of watching live besides getting the freshest version of the show is you can chat with us and we watch the chat as you probably figured out for all of the different channels. So that's the advantage if if you really want to schedule it and ignore what time it is, just download a copy of the show at TWiT TV WW for Windows weekly there's a YouTube channel dedicated. You'll see a link at the TWIT page and that way that's actually good to know because if you wanted to share like the whiskey segment or whatever with a friend it's easy to clip it on YouTube. And then of course after the fact you can get a podcast client and subscribe and you'll never miss an episode, audio or video. No charge. Just download the show. We would love that. Thank you Paul. Thank you Richard. Thanks to our club members. We'll see you next time, you winners and you dozers on Windows Weekly. Bye bye SA.