Windows Weekly 923: The Bouche is Amused

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 923: The Bouche is Amused

Release Date: March 12, 2025

Hosted by Leo Laporte, with co-hosts Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell

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Introduction

In Episode 923 of Windows Weekly, hosted by Leo Laporte alongside Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, the team delves into a myriad of topics spanning Windows updates, the legacy of a beloved Windows columnist, advancements in AI integration within Windows, browser innovations, and upcoming Microsoft events. This episode, titled "The Bouche is Amused," offers a comprehensive overview of the latest in technology, blending nostalgia with forward-looking discussions.

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Farewell to Woody Leonard

The episode opens on a somber note as the hosts bid farewell to Woody Leonard, a legendary Windows columnist whose influence spanned decades.

• Paul Thurat (03:01): “Woody Leonard passed away last week at the age of 73. He was one of my primary writing influences...”

Woody Leonard, known for his engaging columns in Computer World and the "Ask Woody" newsletter, significantly impacted many in the tech community. His approachable writing style made complex Windows topics accessible to a broad audience.

• Leo Laporte (05:42): “He was like, you know, they'll say the same about me. All right, well, it's not. I'm glad we could talk about Woody and the good old days.”

The discussion highlights Woody’s contributions, including his co-authorship of Windows Secrets and his pioneering role akin to early bloggers.

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Windows Updates and Patch Tuesday

Transitioning from nostalgia, the hosts examine recent updates to Windows 11 and reflect on the evolving nature of Windows releases.

• Paul Thurat (20:20): “Yesterday was Patch Tuesday...”

Key Updates Discussed:

1. Taskbar Enhancements:

   • Jump Lists: Improved access and sharing capabilities.

2. Windows Spotlight:

   • Enhanced image details for lock screens and desktops.

3. OneDrive Folder Backup:

   • Ability to pause backup alerts instead of completely disabling them.

4. Multiple Camera Support:

   • Facilitates simultaneous streaming from multiple cameras, benefiting applications that utilize camera feeds.

Upcoming Features:

• Canary Builds: Increased frequency of updates suggests a possible acceleration toward a new major Windows version, potentially Windows 12, focused heavily on AI integrations.

• AI Enhancements:

  • Copilot Features: Introduction of audio-based interactions, Daily Briefings, and Windows Context for more intuitive user experiences.

• Windows App SDK:

  • Decoupling developer features from Windows versions to allow more flexibility and innovation without being tethered to specific OS releases.

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AI Integration in Windows and the Future of Copilot

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Microsoft's integration of AI, particularly through Copilot, into the Windows ecosystem.

• Leo Laporte (40:05): “Ray Kurzweil will be our guest. This is one of the most interesting people I know...”

Highlights:

• Copilot Evolution:

  • Transition from text-based to voice-activated interactions.
  • Introduction of features like "Press to Talk" for seamless voice commands.

• AI's Impact on Development:

  • Paul Thurat (130:22): “This has helped my project immensely. The code explanations are invaluable.”

  The hosts discuss how AI tools like GitHub Copilot enhance productivity by providing code suggestions and automating routine programming tasks, thereby transforming the developer workflow.

• AI in Everyday Use:

  • Predictive features and personalized assistance are becoming integral, with potential applications ranging from automated note-taking to proactive task management.

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Browser Innovations: Zen and Beyond

The conversation shifts to the realm of web browsers, spotlighting emerging alternatives and their unique features.

• Paul Thurat (60:29): “Zen browser... Sidekick might not be supported anymore.”

Key Points:

• Zen Browser:

  • Open Source: Based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, promoting diversity in browser options.
  • Feature Set: Includes agentic browsing capabilities where the browser can perform tasks autonomously based on user prompts.

• Browser Dominance:

  • Despite the influx of new browsers like Arc, Sidekick, and Zen, traditional browsers like Chrome and Edge maintain significant market dominance, primarily due to their integration with broader ecosystems.

• Future of Browsers:

  • Potential integration of AI to transform browsing experiences, making them more interactive and intuitive. Examples include automated content summarization and intelligent tab management.

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Upcoming Microsoft Events and 50th Anniversary

The hosts preview forthcoming Microsoft events, emphasizing the company's ongoing evolution and its 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Microsoft Build 2025:

  • Scheduled for May in Seattle, focusing on AI advancements and new Windows features.

• 50th Anniversary Celebration:

  • Location: Microsoft Campus
  • Significance: Marking half a century of Microsoft's influence in technology, highlighting milestones, and unveiling future initiatives.

• Longevity and Legacy:

  • Discussion on how Microsoft’s historical decisions, such as the integration of the Windows App SDK and continuous innovations in AI, shape its current trajectory.

---

Active Directory and Security Updates

An important segment covers security enhancements related to Active Directory, underscoring the necessity for robust security practices.

• Paul Thurat (141:00): “Active Directory is 25 years old and must be kept up to date to prevent exploits.”

Highlights:

• Strong Certificate Enforcement:

  • Recent updates mandate stronger certificates for Active Directory, mitigating risks associated with lateral movement in network exploits.

• Impact on Users:

  • Organizations must ensure their systems are updated to comply with new security standards to avoid vulnerabilities.

• Expert Insights:

  • Richard Campbell: Emphasizes the critical nature of maintaining updated Active Directory to prevent security breaches.

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AI's Rapid Evolution and Its Implications

The hosts reflect on the exponential advancements in AI, discussing both its potential and the challenges it presents.

• Leo Laporte (59:57): “Expert predictions are being surpassed rapidly, making AI integration both exciting and bewildering.”

• Paul Thurat (139:05): “AI's progress feels like intelligence development in real-time, outperforming previous expectations.”

Key Points:

• Continuous Improvement:

  • AI models are rapidly evolving, with new capabilities emerging that often exceed initial predictions.

• Human-AI Interaction:

  • Increasing reliance on AI for tasks ranging from coding assistance to personal productivity, reshaping how users interact with technology.

• Ethical and Practical Concerns:

  • The pace of AI development raises questions about regulation, ethical use, and the future of employment in various sectors.

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Conclusion

Episode 923 of Windows Weekly weaves together reflections on the legacy of tech pioneers, the relentless pace of Windows and AI advancements, and the evolving landscape of web browsers. As Microsoft approaches its 50th anniversary and continues to integrate sophisticated AI features into its products, the hosts provide listeners with insightful commentary on navigating this dynamic technological environment. The episode closes with anticipation for upcoming events and a recognition of the continuous interplay between legacy systems and cutting-edge innovations.

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Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurat (03:01): “Woody Leonard passed away last week at the age of 73...”
• Leo Laporte (05:42): “He was like, you know, they'll say the same about me. All right, well, it's not. I'm glad we could talk about Woody and the good old days.”
• Paul Thurat (20:20): “Yesterday was Patch Tuesday...”
• Leo Laporte (40:05): “Ray Kurzweil will be our guest. This is one of the most interesting people I know...”
• Paul Thurat (130:22): “This has helped my project immensely. The code explanations are invaluable.”
• Leo Laporte (59:57): “Expert predictions are being surpassed rapidly, making AI integration both exciting and bewildering.”

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For more insights and discussions, visit TWiT.tv and subscribe to Windows Weekly on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. There's news of Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Microsoft's 50th anniversary, and a farewell to a legendary Windows columnist. All of this and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurat]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 923, recorded Wednesday, March 12, 2025. The Boosh is amused. Hello, you winners and dozers. It's time for Windows Weekly. So glad to see you. Leo laporte on this side of the Atlantic.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not any side of the Atlanta.

[Paul Thurat]

Come.

[Leo Laporte]

Under the pond is Paul Thurat. He's in Mexico City.

[Paul Thurat]

Hello, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Good to see you.

[Paul Thurat]

Unfortunately, Mexico City is over a pond. It's part of the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a swamp. Right.

[Paul Thurat]

It's a hollow space below the city that's slowly crumbling in on itself.

[Leo Laporte]

They never filled that in. They just kind of.

[Paul Thurat]

It's supposed to be filled with water, and then they started using the water and now it's filled with air. And I don't know if you. Or fractured up materials. Yeah, it's not good. But we have wavy buildings that would spread.

[Leo Laporte]

If you suddenly disappear, we'll know why.

[Paul Thurat]

It will just sink a little bit. 13 centimeters a year, if I'm not mistaken.

[Leo Laporte]

I could do that with my chair. But also with us from British Columbia, also on this side of the pond. So really, the whole pond thing was completely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, we're pretty much all North America.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all here.

[Richard Campbell]

Mexico. What is this? 500 sinkholes have been registered in Mexico City between 2017 and 2020. So.

[Paul Thurat]

Wow. Yeah, those are just the ones they register.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a registered sinkhole.

[Paul Thurat]

I've seen sinkholes that don't get fixed by the street guys. So I don't know what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Here, but, well, it's still a great place to live. And we were talking. Your ears must have been burning because Paul on Twitter, Mike Elgin, was saying how lucky Paul is and living in the culinary capital of the world.

[Paul Thurat]

I jokingly said to you before the show, I mean, I. He was a major influence that kind of led us in this direction. So, Mike, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're going to start in a. On a sad note, weren't we talking about Woody Leonard just the other day? I feel like we were.

[Paul Thurat]

Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't remember, like, whatever happened to him? Right?

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, yeah. So we're still trying to piece this one together. But unfortunately Woody, whose real name I did not know, was Greg Gregory Forrest. Woody Leonard passed away last week at the age of 73.

[Leo Laporte]

So very young.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, he is one of my primary writing influences. Him and Jerry Purnell, I would say Charles Petzall to some degree. But he was the author of the first Windows programming book I ever got ahead of even owning a PC actually. And it was kind of light hearted and casual and fun to read and not like other technical books. And it was kind of interesting to me that you could write like that, you know, interesting at later. I wasn't intending to become a writer at that time, but when I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Later.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, that was, that was a big influence.

[Leo Laporte]

He wrote for Computer World, Woody's Window Watch, which started in 1998.

[Paul Thurat]

So I will, I will never be able to explain the whole entomology of this exactly, but you know about Windows Secrets, the newsletter and the books with Brian Livingston and I helped co author one of those books and actually wrote briefly for that newsletter. There's also Fred Lange who wrote the Lange list.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. And think of is Flanger.

[Paul Thurat]

Flanger, yeah, Flanger, yep. So at some point those things were rolled into Ask Woody. And somewhere around, I don't know, 2020ish. I found this out after I wrote about this. He actually retired from Computer World, at least I think just retired in general.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this. I'm pretty sure it was on his show that he had moved to Thailand.

[Paul Thurat]

That's true. Yes. So. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And my understanding, just a month ago we were saying what happened, whatever happened to him. Don't you remember that?

[Paul Thurat]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it was because I do other shows. It might have been on Twitter.

[Paul Thurat]

No, we definitely talked. You're right. The Thailand thing is correct. And I've only interacted with this guy sporadically over the years. I don't believe I've ever met him in person, which I feel bad about, but because, you know, I'd like to be able to say, hey, just so you know, you know, you were kind of a big deal for me.

[Leo Laporte]

But there he is, the last picture we saw of him.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In Thailand.

[Paul Thurat]

So the editor, the person who was in charge of this newsletter now reached out to me, as he did to many other people, to try to find someone, anyone who knew anything about his full life story. And nobody does. And he's trying. He's in touch with the family that they don't seem particularly interested in this, but there is some. There'll probably be more information at some point, but I heard most recently that he had actually come back from Thailand when the COVID restrictions eased up. And then I believe he was. Has been in Tennessee since.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, so ask Woody. The newsletter still around, but obviously others have taken it over.

[Paul Thurat]

Not.

[Leo Laporte]

Not even since his death, but much earlier.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh yeah, no, for years. Two years ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And a lot of consolidation with other newsletters. So I'm glad those guys are still keeping us going. And Yeah, I don't know, it's too bad.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, he was one of the early guys and you mentioned Jerry Pornell in your. In your show in your article about this and. Yeah, who really kind of started. And Dvorak, who were kind of renowned columnists, who made everybody kind of interested in this whole thing.

[Paul Thurat]

Every person you just mentioned influenced me to some degree. When I first started doing something I called win info shorts. Takes like a 25 years, whatever that was. I wanted to model it after the back of the magazine. I don't remember if it was PC Mag or PC World that Dvorak did where it'd be little paragraph inside track, it was called. Yeah, yeah. They would have little bolded bits where the, you know, so I remember I put.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Sometimes it seemed randomly bolded, but okay.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, so the first one I put together, I did it in that style. And whoever was the editor, Penton, whatever Penton was called that back then was like, no, no, no, no, you can't do it like this. This is. You should have little titles for each one of these things instead. And I was like, all right. But yeah, so I. Anyway, that went off in its own direction. But yeah, you know, Chaos Manor, obviously, Jerry Pornell. And then I, I was. I'm a little. I can't. Yeah. It's weird saying the word younger now because I'm not younger in any way now, but I was a little behind generation, I think in the late 80s, early 90s at the latest. I had started buying books that were compilations of the articles he wrote for Chaos Manor in Byte. And it was a fascinating kind of time machine thing at the time for me. And then I was a bite subscriber for many years too. But just. He used to describe himself as potentially the first blogger because he was essentially doing what bloggers did much later on in the 70s. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I just was doing some research. His first book was self published because of his bad experiences with word for Windows 1.0, which he became an expert in.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He wrote a 280 page electronic book with bugs and workarounds.

[Paul Thurat]

That's Great.

[Leo Laporte]

And that led him to be asked to write his first real book, Windows.

[Paul Thurat]

3.1 programming, which by the way, was that first book that I bought. And the thing that was amazing about this. Now it's weird because lately, because Bill Gates just came up with the first volume of his autobiography. He mentioned some stuff where I said I'm going to go back and reread some things. So I reread Gates by Stephen Manass. I've been rereading Car Drive By. I think Paul Anders is. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. And one of the two mentions how I'm going to get this wrong, but I think it was Windows 2 something and then 3.0. Both could. Had this kind of small runtime so you could put it on like a disk and include it with a book. And in this case, what he had was a fully running version of Windows 3.1 with Word. And it allowed you to run the Word basic examples that were in the book.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's cool.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. And this might have been. This might have been my first experience because my wife had like a 286 at the time. And I do remember trying to put Windows on it. It must have been this one. I don't remember. But it would dry it so slow. I've told the story where it. It would draw the line around the menu and then each line would fill in and then each word would fill in. It was super slow. But yeah, that was my.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Martin told us in an interview he did a few years back that the first time he used a word processor, he was writing the Three Amigos. And if he wanted to move a speech from one part of the page to another, he would move it. Then would get up, go have a cup of coffee, wander around the apartment, come back and there it would be.

[Paul Thurat]

People forget.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so. It's.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes, you forget.

[Leo Laporte]

We're surrounded by smart stuff now that's so easy to use, we forget how.

[Paul Thurat]

It is a bit of an exaggeration, but I know when I had an Amiga when I was younger, before the Internet became a big thing, for years and years and years, I would be up until 3:00 in the morning doing something on this computer. And I can't tell you what that was for the most part. I mean, I can sort of. But before the Internet, I don't remember, you know. Yeah, I was doing. Yeah, I was right.

[Leo Laporte]

I was balancing your checkbook.

[Paul Thurat]

That's what everybody programming and things like.

[Leo Laporte]

That and typing in basic programs from COMPUTE magazines.

[Paul Thurat]

No, that Was earlier. I used to do that too, but. Yeah, yeah. Or not even basic. They would be like that. Like Run magazine would have, like a weird code you could do instead.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Paul Thurat]

You had to write the codes and then, you know, never ran the first time. So. Yeah, it's probably Hex. Yeah, yeah, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, I take it back. Steve Gibson just texted me. It wasn't on this show. Steve Gibson and I were talking about Woody and how he had ended up in Thailand and whatever.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay. Because we have brought this up. This has come up. I just don't remember it recently, but the Thailand thing with him has come up.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Steve. That's right. That makes sense because Steve, like you, was a columnist in the early days. He, you know, his column was fantastic. You, Steve Dvorak, Pornell and Woody. What was so different from all the other stuff people like me were doing? You had voice, you had personality that you could tell in there.

[Paul Thurat]

I. I've not read anything you wrote, but please don't undersell the fact that you also had a voice. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but my voice is better on the radio than this.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, you have a great voice. No, but. But I also mean a voice in a like a personality sense, because I. I used to. I used to watch you in the afternoon. Like when I went back to school after buying this book and trying to become a programmer. I would come home in the afternoon and watch whatever. Various shows. And at some point tech tv, or. I don't know if it was a predecessor, whatever tech TV would come on. And it was you and Ed, right? Ed.

[Leo Laporte]

Ed Bott.

[Paul Thurat]

Ed. No. Who was the guy you were on?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Patrick Norton.

[Paul Thurat]

Patrick Norton. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And Ed Norton's an actor. Patrick Norton.

[Leo Laporte]

All the Nortons are related.

[Paul Thurat]

All the Nortons, yeah. And Peter Norton from our street. No, but I remember would watch this thing and I don't know, a friend that came, someone, somehow, something. I talked about it and I said, you know, I. I'm already up on everything. Like, I'm not. I don't feel like I'm going to learn anything, but I just really enjoy the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, like, I left it on. I would just leave it on, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, you people talk.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's probably true. A lot of people who listen to this show and all of our shows.

[Paul Thurat]

Is, yeah, no one's going to learn anything from me, that's for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's as much companionship, it's as much hearing people who share your Interests, talking about things.

[Paul Thurat]

It's a community kind of thing almost. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I, you know, Jerry Purnell was always talking about S100 buses and adding cars and stuff. I couldn't care less.

[Paul Thurat]

I didn't. I wasn't part of the world then. Right. So I would read. I read about that stuff later and it was fascinated by it. Yeah. I will say, in his case, I not only got to meet him, but had some awesome interactions with him and his. And his son. And I really, really enjoyed those times. But got, you know, Dvorak. I mean, in passing and. Yeah, I never met Woody Leonard. I feel bad about that because he.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't think many people did. That's the thing that's most interesting about Woody is he is still kind of an era. Even to people who worked with him. Even to people computer.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, his blog, they talked about he lived in Phuket from 2000 to 2014. Like, no wonder you didn't meet him. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But nobody knows why he moved to Thailand or, you know, why he came back. And I mean, it's all a mystery, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But sad is he, you know, 74 is a little. Especially as I reach that age.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know, it's kind of a ripe old. Oh, I'm sorry, we say something else?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I mean, it's kind of, you know, normal life expectancy, I guess, but it feels like too young. Right. That's.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. It always had.

[Leo Laporte]

He stopped writing completely.

[Paul Thurat]

So I think. Yeah, I think so. I. After, like I said, after I wrote that, I looked. I kept looking. Right. And. And I was interacting with the guy from the newsletter a little bit. And I did find his last column from Computer World where he announced his retirement or whatever. Susan Bradley took over for him. She's also part of the Ask what he's still today. You know, a lot of. I know a lot of people. Lance Whitney's over there. Mary and Simon Besson are over there, who I know very well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now I remember. This is what Steve and I were talking about.

[Paul Thurat]

This is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So no wonder you don't remember it. It was on security.

[Paul Thurat]

It didn't happen to me. Well, thank God. I don't remember it, but. No, it vividly, Steve.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. We were having this conversation not so long ago, a couple of weeks ago.

[Paul Thurat]

We, we have discussed this. Like this Thailand has come up on the show, but it's been. It's been a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So in a way, you know, it's more interesting because he was an enigma.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We wouldn't have been talking about it so much if he.

[Paul Thurat]

Right, yeah. When I go, it's gonna be like, finally, yeah, Paul's gone. I never thought he'd shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

We knew way too much about him.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. A little too transparent.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like, you know, they'll say the same about me. All right, well, it's not. I'm glad we could talk about Woody and the good old days. It was a different time. I think I feel kind of bad for anybody under 40 who really didn't grow up in the same way the three of us did with technology. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

These are all re reading those books. Like I said, the early days of Microsoft and the industry. And as you get into the 90s, of course the Internet happens and Netscape and everything. But I always, I used to read those when I was young and I always thought, man, I missed it. You know, it's over. Like, this happened. And I would, you know the books about Apple as well and IBM. Right at the time when they were still big in the PC and what were the PC. I guess I thought I missed it, you know. And then the Internet happened. I was like, oh, okay, there's a, there's another wave. We can ride this wave now. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

And now for young people, you're not missing it because AI is happening right now. There's a whole new. And us old timers are looking at it going. By the way, there are some books that have lived forever.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is one of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Telephone sized animal with that book. Oh, wow.

[Paul Thurat]

That book exists because Borland, they did not thoroughly document their own APIs at the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it needed to be. This is the Delphi 3 Super Bible, which is in effect the manual for Delphi. I mean, it's everything you need to know if you want to use Delphi.

[Paul Thurat]

It's an API reference. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which was Turbo Pascal.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Object Pascal into that. And then. Yeah. And they had a C product. And I'm not going to get this right. It's close. It was Object Windows, Desktop maybe, something like that. That was their class library. And so the vcl, the visual component library in Delphi was sort of the equivalent, but the language was. By the way, it was the original Rust. When you think about it, the Object Pascal, you couldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Couldn't screw up with it. Yeah. I think we could do like they do in some British churches where you have the Bible open.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

A reading of the church. And you just, every, every day you, you turn a Page or you go to.

[Paul Thurat]

You go to a wedding and. Right. Okay. Actually, that's a better. I was gonna say, when you go to a wedding, if someone. The Bible, it will always be like someone's best friend. Nine times out of ten, it is. Love is never selfish. It's always the same quote. You know, for me it would be like. No, it's like the T object is the root of all objects in the bcl. It is the object from. With. From which all objects descend. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Every day a new page.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, this will only take us three years.

[Paul Thurat]

It's going to take longer than that.

[Richard Campbell]

On Net rocks. We used to do. Well, we still do the bit, but we used to do a bit called Better know a framework. And it was literally pulling. Calling classes out from the. NET framework is so huge.

[Leo Laporte]

But you get through those days when you had all these API or maybe it was an SDK, I don't know, or function calls or library calls. And you had these giant manuals. I have Apple's inside Macintosh.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes, I, I owned all of those. And then, by the way, those first. I don't know, five, seven, whatever it was. This also Pascal. That's right. Pascal based. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I learned Pascal because of that. I loved Pascal, actually. I thought Pascal was a great language.

[Paul Thurat]

I never did every time. The worst teacher I ever had was past. I had took Pascal of my senior year of high school. They just started offering computer programming classes. So in my junior year, it was basic and I got an A plus. And the teacher was so horrible in the Pascal class, I almost flunked out of it. And I used to just copy my friend's homework. And then one day he decided he was going to call me out in front of the class and he's like, maybe you could explain to me why your homework is always identical to Dave's. And I said, yeah, I can explain it. I'm actually struggling in this class. So Dave is taking time out of his day. Every day we meet at lunch and we go over the homework together. So he knows that I understand what's happening and that's why they look the same, because we do them together. And he says, you know, I hope the rest of you are paying attention to this, and I wish the less of you would take this class as seriously as Paul does. So then I later wrote the Delphi Super Bible, like you said there. And I'm like, I wanted to send it to this guy and be like, go f yourself, you idiot. Jerk. You know, I wrote the book yeah. Is it?

[Richard Campbell]

You left it the part where it's like, I found the teaching here holy inadequate. So I've literally had to go to a different.

[Paul Thurat]

I just, I had to go into it as a career. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It does look like Pascal a little bit. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

What's that?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just wondering how Pascal like it is. I see colons.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, it is Pascal. It's object Pascal.

[Leo Laporte]

It is Pascal.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. It's an object oriented Pascal class library.

[Leo Laporte]

Niklaus Wirt Wirth. Never. Never knew. Mr. Wirth. Professor Wirth. I am going to write the book. Okay.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, that thump you just heard was me putting it on the.

[Paul Thurat]

I know. Just dropping it lightly, causing a 3.1 earthquake for their surrounding area.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to take a little break. Come back. We have actually. I don't need to take a break. Let's. Let's keep going. Let's talk about Windows. We haven't really.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it's been a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Haven't delved into the Windows thing yet.

[Paul Thurat]

I, as I do so often, forgot that yesterday was Patch Tuesday. But yesterday was patch Tuesday.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, if you forget when. Microsoft will remind you.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. One of my machines was rebooted this morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So we've already talked about everything that's in this update, but 24 and 23 H2 both got. They got different updates, but it's the same contents. Right. So jump lists off of app icons in the taskbar that support documents. You can access those and share, if I'm not mistaken. Let me look at this one, actually, before I say that. Is there a way to. I don't have a thing. Anything with documents. Nevermind. Anyhow, I believe share is part of that. If not, that will be next month. There's some Windows Spotlight stuff for both lock screen and desktop. Just about finding more about the image and so forth. If you see that start backup icon in a OneDrive folder that you're not backing up, you can actually pause that, not turn it off. They're not that nice, but baby steps. I guess at some point it will come back on, but if that irritates, you can turn it off. Multiple camera support, which is kind of cool. So you can stream two or more cameras at the same time and then have that be a view that any app should be able to use. So I've not tried that yet, but that's kind of neat and I would say that's most of the important stuff, but. Yeah, that's most of it. But. But I Do we're gonna. Well, actually, let's talk about this first because. Well, let's not. Who cares? So in a couple of minutes, we're going to talk about some of the things that have occurred over Canary beta 23H2 and then Dev and beta 24H2. And actually, we're kind of getting back on this faster. More, you know, stuff's happening. So this is probably the third year in a row that I'll sort of wonder aloud whether we're not going to get something different later in the year, meaning a new version of Windows or a major new version, maybe, you know, we don't know. Later on, we'll talk about some big AI updates that are coming on the client side. It's possible they might tie it to that. I think originally the plan for Windows 12 was for it to be kind of the AI release, but then they realized, wait, we need to get this out everywhere. We have to force people to use it. So they kind of put the brakes on that. But I do wonder if it's starting to speed up again. You know, it feels like it is, especially when we get into the insider stuff, which represents things we'll see in future. Patch Tuesday. So January was nothing, because December, everyone's gone. They didn't do anything for that. But now we have two months worth and, you know, they're what I would, you know, functionally medium quality, whatever, or medium number of new items and so forth. But I think it's about to. I think it's going to get bad. I think April, May, et cetera, it's going to speed up again, it looks like. So.

[Richard Campbell]

The best proof that Windows 10 will actually go out of support in October would be a Windows 12.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, there you go. Although as dumb as Windows as a service was back when they first announced it especially, and as bad as it was for the first couple of years, I did sort of appreciate the message, which was, we, Microsoft, want to get as many users as possible on the latest version of Windows, which at that time was Windows 10. Except that it wasn't right, because Windows 10 was revved every six months and there were at 1.6 or 7 or 8, even whatever, supported versions. Windows, it was the opposite, right, of what they want it to do.

[Richard Campbell]

But, you know, I appreciate also that they were experimenting with trying to iterate faster on Windows. They were pressing a team that wasn't used to that to doing something different.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. And then they.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't rev an operating system like an SDK, and that's what they were doing.

[Paul Thurat]

You can. It's just terrible. And the reason is everybody's. Richard knows this better than anybody. But the problem is you're tying new features for developers to specific versions of Windows 10 in that case, which means no developers ever going to use them because they can't be guaranteed that everyone has them. So with the Windows app SDK, they separated church and state, so to speak. And now the developer features, the new APIs, et cetera, are all on their own schedule. They're not tied to a specific Windows version. They will work on any supported Windows version.

[Richard Campbell]

They learned.

[Paul Thurat]

They learned. Yeah, it took a while. It took a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Over on the run, as we had this period where our developers are asking us to update Windows in the Office.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So that, so that we can run. That's running Win ui. That's reacts, right?

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yeah. So that was a. You know, it's one of those things, you look back at it later and like, this should have been obvious, but. Yeah, but they, they picked it up, I would say. I mean, maybe you know more about this than I do, but I feel like, you know where.net is on a very steady cadence. One might say a little too steady or at least maybe a little too aggressive or however you want to say it. The Windows app SDK stuff is often fantasyland. I don't know what they're doing. There are multiple pre release, experimental, whatever they're calling them, versions of this thing out in the world. But the stuff that they announced for AI developers last May at build is not unstable and there's no indication it's going to be there anytime soon. I don't know what they're doing other than taking a really long time to do anything. I don't know. I don't know what's going on over there, but at least it's not tied to a version of Windows. I guess. I don't know. You win some, you lose some.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and the point of the insiders, especially stuff like Canary, was to experiment. Right. Like, I'm kind of delighted the idea there might be experiments in Canary that get reverted.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yeah. And every once in a while, even in some of the other channels, they'll use that language. You know, we're experimenting with one thing that might be considered that is actually in the next thing we're going to talk about, but it's actually that probably is a Canary feature. Yeah. I like the idea of putting UI in front of people and saying, hey, is this better, worse, different you know, and letting people kind of vote on it. It's not always that transparent a good but. But yeah, I think my bigger issue though, I guess, or my bigger takeaway is just that there's this kind of constant churn of change and just beating the dead horse, so to speak. I feel like for the past several years I've been kind of saying the same thing, which is just I'm not sure Windows needs a constant cadence of change, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I think it seems in general we're starting to feel like operating systems are going the way of stuff like Microcode and uefi, where what you want out of them is just a stability. We don't care about anything else.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. I mean, but no one gets the shift towards Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Being a cloud company has messed with the Windows team. They've been the center of the universe for Microsoft for 30 years and suddenly they're not. And one hand that's freeing, like you should be able to go experiment now. On the other hand, it's like your best and brightest went to work on Azure. That's where the action is.

[Paul Thurat]

There's also like the seven stages of guilt phenomena or grief phenomenon where you deny that you're not the center for a while and then you kind of evolve or in this maybe devolve into a new situation. But yeah, it's very clear that Windows is not the primary concern of anybody with any cloud at all at Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

And yet we all still have to run an operating system.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah. I keep mentioning the past for some reason today, but in addition to those books I've been rereading that we mentioned with Woody, I've also been rewatching these like Computer History Museum has these oral histories where they bring in people like Dave Cutler, which this is the one I have been watching lately. Ave Tavanian from Apple, who Mark Kernel and OS X, et cetera. And these are vital histories. But you kind of forget and like Leo said earlier, how different things were. But in Dave Cutler's case, they asked him, do OSS matter anymore? Are we going to quickly move on to something else? And the point he kind of made was VMS is still running today. So in that sense, yes, they do matter. And he also made the case and he's correct. I mean there's fundamentally two operating systems in the world and one runs a Unix or Unix like kernel and one runs an NT or NT like kernel and all the phones and a lot of the IoT stuff is Linux and infrastructure servers, et cetera. And you know, he's like, these things, these things could go forever. So we may not see or need that level of, I don't know, a foundational architectural OS development like the fresh, like greenfield OS development. You know, when Microsoft hired away Cutler and his team in 88, 89, whenever that was, it took him, what, five years, ish. To bring nt to market and really 10 years to make it be viable for every, you know, for mainstream or more for mainstream. But you know, they take, these things take time. Who wants to go? Who wants to. What's the payoff? You know, they're running to the money, right? That's why we see the AI thing happening today. You know, when mobile happened, Apple made what today I would say was the right decision. I wasn't sure at the time, but to take their Unix, their FreeBSD, OS X, whatever, and chop stuff off until it was small enough to run in this device and then add touch to it. Right. Smart. It worked out great and they had a great foundation there. So I don't know, I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. All right, so in the Insider program to your experiment point, there was a canary build last week. I believe that they're experimenting with what I would say is a ridiculous feature that nobody needs. So it's almost certainly going to make it into Windows, which is that in the recommended section of the Smart menu, which isn't super Smart in Windows 11, in addition to recommending apps that you may want to install from the store, it will recommend two apps that it feels will go together well side by side on the screen that you already have installed. And their example, of course, is WhatsApp and File Explorer, which are terrible example of what you might do with this. I think the best use case for side by side apps is reading, taking notes, watching a video, taking notes. You know that whatever it might be, or here are my notes, I'm writing my final article, right? I. I don't know that side by side apps are a big deal for most people. I think most people run apps full screen, even on a big computer screen, I bet.

[Leo Laporte]

But okay, they still have Windows Snap, right? I mean, you, that's what it's for.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Snap them.

[Paul Thurat]

You can snap them. You can snap them different ways. You could do all kinds of different things. But like so much in Windows, I don't think a lot of people use that stuff. Unlike a lot of the stuff they've added to Windows 11. I actually do see the value in it. I'm not Dumping on Snap. I think the Snap functionality is a great idea. I think the people that use it love it, it's fine, there's nothing wrong with it.

[Leo Laporte]

But really, I thought everybody used it. Is that a weird thing to use Snap?

[Paul Thurat]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, on a big screen it makes sense. Yes, I guess because a lot of people are on laptops now. Yep. So you don't have a lot of real estate, you go full screen. So that's certainly how I use mine.

[Paul Thurat]

The trends here are kind of strange for Snap because we went widescreen with computer screens for a long time because of media, because movies were widescreen and for a long time you could only get like 69, 16 by 9 laptop screen. It was not ideal, but that would have been good for Snap. Right. But now we have 16, 10, or if you have a surface, obviously three by two. It's actually not as good for Snap because it's skinnier. But yes, obviously big screens. But I still, I look, Microsoft isn't super transparent about this anymore, but when they were still talking about this, their experience based on telemetry was that most people just run full screen. Full screen, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But again, I think that's laptops. I don't think that's. But maybe most people.

[Paul Thurat]

But that is most people, right? I mean, that's most people. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

There's certainly a three by two screen.

[Paul Thurat]

It's not great unless you like a. Like a skyscraper style window, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

But on my iPad I always go full screen on everything and just swipe between.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. You have multiple displays. You could do two full screen display side by side, which is effective. You know, that works. The other, the other, excuse me, the other change that they're making, and this one was in beta channel for 23H2, but it's also in beta dev for 24H2, which tells me this is happening is they're adding a recommended section to the File Explorer home screen, for lack of a better term, that if I'm reading this correctly, will actually replace the. What do you call it, the quick access view, which is. Tip is just look at that, Paul. I guess just look at the stupid screen. Yeah. Which is at the top of the screen. The top of the window by default, I think it's actually going to replace. So if you have signed into Windows with a Enter ID account for the past possibly year or more, you would actually see this recommended section. And the idea there is that you're working possibly in a team of people on a project. So the recommended documents and other files would often be from these projects that you're part of but not necessarily the only author of. They didn't add it for people who sign in with a Microsoft account. So are consumers. But now they are. And again they don't actually say this explicitly, but based on the shot and the language of the post, I believe that they're actually going to get rid of the quick access view which is duplicated in the navigation bar. So the folders that you have pinned desktop download document, music video might be missing one by default were replicated in the main home view I guess we'll call it. But now they're not. I guess they're going away. So that's whatever, that's fine, it's fine. But it's kind of an interesting update.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And then 24H2 so I talked about how all of a sudden there was a bunch of stuff happening, right. So I don't think this is unstable. I can't tell because I'm on the dev channel. But at some time the past couple of months they added not just live caption support which was already preexisting in as an accessibility feature in Windows 11, but live captions with live language translations with support for dozens of languages in both directions. So to date the only way to see that is to have a Snapdragon X based PC like the Surface laptop. And I think it's still not. I don't think it's in stable yet but with this latest build they have rolled it out to the AMD and Intel based copilot plus PCs. So probably coming soon.

[Richard Campbell]

So that's Lunar Lake and Zen 5 for lack of a better term.

[Paul Thurat]

The recommended files for everybody. The recommended SNAP groups the thing I just said, right? If one actually this is a truly useful feature if you do sign in with a Microsoft account and you have not configured a they call it what does they have a weird term for this, an account proof. I think of it as like an authentication prompt or whatever a way that you can that it can determine is you maybe if something is wrong with your account, right. Maybe you can't sign in. Maybe you have to do a 2fa type thing and you don't have your authenticator or whatever it might be, you can set up one or more email addresses, one or more phone numbers as well and if you don't have either of those installed or configured for your Microsoft account, but you use it to sign into Windows, you'll actually get a banner notification say hey, you might want to secure this a Little bit better, which to me sounds like a good idea. So that's good. Just kind of a way to remind people, hey, you should, you know, you want to keep up on this. And then the final one, this is just kind of goofy, but maybe this is like the recommended section where it's a recommended section of File Explorer, where it will happen more broadly eventually. But they're adding something called Top Cards into what I think of a system about. So if you right click on the Start menu, start button, sorry, and choose System, it goes to the page in the Settings app that's setting System about, and it gives you information about your computer. Right. So the device name, the processor, the ram, et cetera. They're actually going to call that out in cards, which is, to me looks a little bit like. Remember Windows Vista had that scoring system for how powerful your system components were. You would get a score, like a Windows Experience Index, if I'm not mistaken.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Wei. Score, Exactly.

[Paul Thurat]

So it looks a little bit like that. And it's going to separate out ram, cpu, gpu, whatever you might have. And I think it's just a. It's only going to be in desktop.

[Richard Campbell]

This gets really fun with three different chipsets and different MPU designs.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So at first it's only for desktop users, and I don't know why. And it won't be rolling out to commercial PCs at first either, but. So we're talking about gaming users. So, like me.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the type.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, the type of people who might want to say, like, what exact Nvidia graphics card did I have again? And if only there was a, I don't know, a score of some kind where I could determine whether or not I wanted to upgrade it. That would have been useful to keep, but they didn't anyhow, so that's coming, but for a limited subset of users. So I guess looking at this list, that's not dramatically different than we got in stable on patch Tuesday. But remember, this isn't everything, Right. So we've seen other dev beta builds over the past few weeks. I think we're going to start getting a lot of the new features. Well, I think we already have, but I think there's gonna be more.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm just amazed that we're not talking about a 25H2 yet.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait, what year is this?

[Paul Thurat]

Right? 2500. Leo, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurat]

No. So the first step in that direction, or whatever the next one is called, was when they started having the same build go to Devon Beta. This is the beginning of the Shift. Right. So at some point, beta will shift firmly to 24H2. And that means that Dev will switch to that thing, whatever it is, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

The next One is, probably 25H2. I mean, it is March. Like it's time.

[Paul Thurat]

I could not agree more. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. I don't know what's. Yeah, I don't know. So a lot of times when Microsoft does this sort of thing where they use the term window, Right. There's a window that's open for now, and in this case, the window lets you move between beta and dev without any repercussions. Right. You can just switch, get the same build. It's no problem. If you want to get out of there, you can switch to beta and go to 23H2. Right. Which is. Okay. So you're like, I'm just. I'm out. Usually those close pretty quick, but I think we might be closing in on a month. It's been a while, so. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's taking so long.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we've known for a while. 24H2 is basically a new version of Windows, so they really struggled with it. And they still are.

[Paul Thurat]

Maybe. Yeah, maybe there is some. I don't want to give them too much credit here, but maybe there's some thinking that we need to make sure this one's right before we move on. You know, make sure that. Yeah, maybe that's.

[Richard Campbell]

But it would also speak to 25H2. Should be a minor one.

[Paul Thurat]

Should be. Unless they call it 12. Right. So, yeah, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Naming is that argument.

[Richard Campbell]

If 24H2 was actually a new version of Windows, the 25ht should be minor, which means 12 shouldn't be until 2026.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to take a little break right here. We'll talk about AI in just a bit. I do have a reminder that right after this show, if you're watching live, Intelligent Machines is coming up and Ray Kurzweil will be our guest. This is one of the most interesting people I know. He was. He has an 86% prediction rate because. And he's made some wild predictions. He says we are going to have AGI by 2029 in five, four, four years now. And that the singularity is.

[Paul Thurat]

That's good, though, because that's just enough time for your retirement savings to bounce back. You know, you.

[Leo Laporte]

You joke, but actually that's.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm not. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if that came off as a joke.

[Leo Laporte]

Joke.

[Paul Thurat]

I am.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a joke.

[Paul Thurat]

It's not joking.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. And, and, and I might make it another 20 years because he says the singularity, where we merge.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

With machines, where we extend our capabilities beyond what genetics gives us, is only 20 years off. Is. Is 20. This will be very interesting. And as I said, he's been amazingly right on in his predictions over the last 30 years. He's a fascinating guy. He's coming up in just a little.

[Paul Thurat]

Bit, but he's like the Nostradamus of our era.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, he invented the first text recognition stuff and the Kurzweil synthesizer for Stevie Wonder. And on and on and on, which is amazing. And veteran. I'm looking forward to talking. I'm all a little intimidated. I've talked to him three times before, but I'm still always intimidated when I talk to him because he's kind of smart. Let's take a little break. When we come back, we will talk a little more about AI and browsers. Did you try that browser I recommended last week?

[Paul Thurat]

You bet I did.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Paul Thurat]

I did an episode of Hands on Windows because of you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like it. I like it. That's the show that Paul does for everybody but the videos in the club. So it's like a quasi club show. And we really. Micah does hands on Macintosh that way and hands on tech and so forth. Good. We'll talk in a bit, but first I want us to talk about our sponsor for this portion of Windows Weekly. And that's the fabulous folks at 1Password. I know you know that name, but you may not know about their newest product, 1Password. Extended Access Management. Now this answers the question that. Well, I think I know the answer to. Do your end users always work on company owned devices? Right. They only use the laptops you provide and the phones you provide. They never bring foreign devices into the network. They always use all the IT approved apps and never anything of their own. You know, they probably don't even watch YouTube when they're at work, Right? Well, okay, we know the answer. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all these BYOD devices running all these unmanaged apps? Well, There's a way. 1Password has the answer. Extended Access Management. 1Password. Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. If you think of your company's security like the quad of a college campus, the nice brick paths between the buildings, those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from point A to B. The paths people really use. Right? The unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities like contractors. Problem is, most security tools only work on the happy little brick paths. But many security problems occur on the little muddy shortcuts. 1 password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices and apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. 1Password of course knows how to do that. But it also ensures that every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's such a great combination. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified. They have regular third party audits. They exceed the standards set by all the major authorities. It's a leader in security. And this new 1Password Extended Access Management is security for the way we work for real today. It's now available generally to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra, still in beta, but available for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly that's all lowercase. Windows Weekly 1P A S-S-W-O-R-COM WindowsWeekly and we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. And we thank you for supporting us by using that address so they know you saw it here. 1Password Weekly okay, Paulie, press to Talk. How exciting is that, huh?

[Paul Thurat]

Well, like a walkie talk in isolation. Not that exciting. However.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurat]

One thing I neglected to mention, or if I did, I only mentioned in passing, was that when Microsoft announced the new version of Copilot in Windows 11, which by my estimate is the 17th version of the app. Something like that.

[Richard Campbell]

Were you just counting the icons?

[Paul Thurat]

And the second in which they claimed it was a native app, but in this case it is a native app. I had learned something about this app that I don't think we discussed and that was that moving to this new architecture, I hate to use that term, moving to this new app design was done so that they could add more features features to the app. And one of the features I knew that was coming was something called Press to Talk, which they are now testing in the dev channel of the Windows Cider program. So yes, this is a. Well, I think it's just a. It's a way to quickly start Copilot in speech mode, where you're going to speak through a microphone and interact with it. So the conversation will be audio based instead of text based. Right. But okay, not super exciting to me anyway. But it is one of also 17 apps that use Alt Plus Space, including one of my app picks today. Hilarious. There's that. They don't have any way to customize that to be your own keyboard shortcut. What was wrong with Windows Key plus C? It was.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought there was a copilot key.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, not everyone has a copilot key. And for you peasants that can't afford to buy. No, yeah, so Microsoft. Well, look, when they announced that copilot key, I thought it was going to be only on certain models. It's like everywhere all of a sudden. So, yeah, eventually we'll all have copilot keys, but yeah, so for now we don't. And yeah, in that case, I believe you just hold it down and that will start the voice interaction. So. Okay, I mean, that's fine. Fine. It's fine. But I think the more interesting thing here is that this new design gives them the ability to do things like we talked about last week, including bring back those Windows actions, the Windows commands. I think we talked about. I think we talked about phone integration. If you have an Android phone, you can do things with your phone as well. But the list of other features that I got from Raphael, by the way, I should say, is a daily briefing, which was in the previous version but is gone. This is the audio podcast like sort of Amazon Alexa like feature where it kind of talks about the day's news, you know, in a really jaunty style. Literally a feature called Walkie talkie integration with the Windows screen, snipping something called Windows Vision, Windows Core Audio, Windows Wake, Word. It's like Windows Safe, Word, Windows Pro enabled. No idea what that means, but possibly there are going to be certain copilot features that will only work in Windows Pro because this isn't confusing enough. And something called Windows Context, which sounds a little bit like some of those AI features that we see on Copilot PCs related to recall and click to do. I don't know. And then there's also, I should say Windows file uploaded, Windows. Oh, I said Windows context. Sorry, I think. I'm sorry. Windows File uploaded, Windows Context, I think technically are in Copilot today. They don't really reference them by name, but I think they're in there now. So there is a bunch coming. So we'll talk about this a little bit later in the show. But there is an consumer AI event coming up and this might be tied to that. You know, maybe this is the launch time frame for these new features. Much like the original CoPilot for Windows 11 was launched at a special event in September 2023, if I'm not mistaken. Seems like a million years ago. But yeah, do people.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you guys. So there seems to be two ways, two kind of primary paths to using AIs like Copilot. One is to chat with them chatbots and the other is, you know, kind of more informational to use it with your data, to query it, to do people like to. I guess they do, but it just.

[Paul Thurat]

Feels like first of all, people, they think they're people now people.

[Leo Laporte]

Who are these people?

[Paul Thurat]

No, I, I think we're a little early to know for sure. And it's interesting because even just within this year, right, Starting with Deep Seek, I always struggle with that term. We have this notion of reasoning models that spell out in front of you how they are getting to the answer. Well, everyone loves that. So that's something OpenAI specifically hid from you. But now what we've learned is actually this increases trust in the AI because. Yeah, so I think these things evolve. I will say that I'm going to talk a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

That's primarily a text mode because you don't want it to do that while you're chatting.

[Paul Thurat]

Look, my, my knee jerk reaction when I saw what they called at the time, Big Chat, three years ago, two years ago, whatever that was when they first announced it was. I'm sorry, you're telling me we're going back to a text based interface? Yeah, 30, 40 actually years after the GUI kind of arrived. That didn't make any sense to me. That said, I mean we do these short textual interactions all the time in messaging apps, in Google search, whatever. It is notable that Copilot or all of these AI, these chatbot things seem to work well in a conversational context. And I, I think I'm positive I talked about this, but if I didn't, I'm going to. During my tip there is, I've, I've seen this with normal people, like mainstream non technical people and I've now heard about this from a guy who is more technical where they walk around and, and they, I'm going for a walk and what they want to do is offload some ideas onto chat GPT or whatever and they prompt it to say, look, just don't interrupt me, I'm just going to talk, but I want you to Collect all this information, and when they get back, they're like, all right, now why don't you summarize the ideas I have? Tell me which you think are the most viable. Right. So people starting to do this. That, to me, is fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

And I distinctly do this with a little tape deck. And then you handed it to your.

[Paul Thurat]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Assistant.

[Paul Thurat]

It's like, yeah. You're like, click, idea. A vampire. But it's in medieval times. It's crazy. You know, whatever. Like, so, yeah. So there's like, yeah, right. So people.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I wear this little B computer, because it's always listening. And I could say, hey, remind me to. Or things like that.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. I've never done this, but I'm fascinated by it. Like, I actually do think this is. Remember when the little Bluetooth headsets first arrived? Probably right around the time people are.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy talking into there.

[Paul Thurat]

You'd see a guy walking out, talking to the air, and you're like, look at that. Insane. Now we're used to it. So now going forward, a lot of those people will be talking to AIs and we won't think anything of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I felt a little guilty because I was doing this in the restaurant last night, and the. I was talking back, and I felt like, maybe that's rude.

[Paul Thurat]

You should say something like, you know, like, the guy comes over with the bill. You're like, hey, copilot, based on my experience tonight at this restaurant, what do you think the bill should be or the tip should be? And then it's like, oh, really? I'm like, why don't you tell him? And then, you know, I was thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I should tip Paul and Richard for an excellent show. What do you think a good tip would be for a couple of podcast hosts?

[Paul Thurat]

Is a tip. Watch both ways when you cross the street.

[Leo Laporte]

I should mention that a good tip.

[Richard Campbell]

For a podcast can vary, but generally around 10, 20% of the ticket price is a nice gesture. If you felt they did an exceptional job, leaning towards the higher end would be great. Consider what you think reflects their effort.

[Paul Thurat]

And quality of the show. I have so many problems with that.

[Leo Laporte]

One is just like, J.K. simmons, which is unbelievable.

[Paul Thurat]

Which, by the way, I kind of like, I have to say, I love.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's my choice. If I can't get Scarlett Johansson, I'll take J.K. simmons.

[Paul Thurat]

No, he's good. Yeah. What story?

[Leo Laporte]

As Patrick, I want Mike ehrman, trub. Actually 20% of Darryl Saul, but, you know, I don't think he's available right now.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, look, you know how everyone has stories and then some. So I, I have some stories that are things I've never actually witnessed myself, but they were so good, I just, they were in my brain. And you remember the show 30 rock from this or 30 who? Third rock from the sun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, third rock from the Sun, Yeah. With John List.

[Paul Thurat]

So aliens, Right. The fish out of water. Right. So someone teaches about a tip. So he goes in a restaurant, he puts down a, a stack of $1 bills and the waiter comes over, he says, this is your tip. Every time you screw up, I'm going to take away a dollar.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's.

[Paul Thurat]

Now I've never seen this show, I've never seen that episode anyway. And I think that's one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard in my life. So I think, yeah, I just think like AI could be used like that. Like AI, like pay attention to this experience and you know, let me know, what do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, you're getting 10% tips.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, we underperformed. I get it. It's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurat]

All he did was put tea in water. Like what would anyway, which is pretty much what a bunch.

[Leo Laporte]

But I, I, to be more serious, I think you're exactly right that what's these are becoming and this is the chat interfaces, companions that you interact with and get advice from.

[Paul Thurat]

Literal companions. Yeah. So they tried to, we're gonna, you know, of course we're gonna have an AI section later. But they, they, they, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft tried with these digital assistants, these digital personal assistants to achieve this type of interaction. Right, right. In the beginning you would say some word, you'd ask it a question, it would come back and that was the whole thing. And then eventually they got kind of conversational where it could remember the context and keep going so you could ask it follow up questions. But it was never super sophisticated. And now it, it is, you know, now it's really good. It's good enough that people are talking.

[Richard Campbell]

To it, to her, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, that's what I really want. And so in a way I'm preparing for that day because they're not that useful. But the fact that I'm recording every interaction I have, everything that's going on, my emails, my calendar stuff, I'm hoping, you know, this may be 5, 10 years down the road, but that this database that I'm building will be of value. Right.

[Paul Thurat]

You're going to be in a supermarket and you're going to walk, you're going to be Done. And you're going to walk to the aisle where you pay and it's going to say, hey, you forgot the butter or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

You will know. Right. It's going to become proact.

[Leo Laporte]

You want, Right. Or is it what you want?

[Paul Thurat]

This is. Well, I think. I know, but I think it is. I think it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it is.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It depends on the person and it.

[Paul Thurat]

And it depends on how annoying and.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Intrusive it is. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that more or less useful than the typed AI interactions that you have?

[Paul Thurat]

I don't think people can type, so. Right. The only thing that saves it is most people who are typing to AI are doing it on a phone and it's pretty good auto correct, you know, depending on the phone. And that might save it a little bit. And I watch my kids. My kids are like, they draw straight lines and words. I don't even know how they do it. And, you know, it's kind of astonishing. So I guess if you're younger than I am, maybe it's even better. I don't know. But yeah. My initial reaction to typing was, I mean, I'm a writer and I was like, what is this? No one's going to type.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

You know, complicated things to an AI. But actually, so what do I know? I know people are doing it, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I use it all the time.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm fascinated by this. I understand it's not yet completely.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurat]

But you see those moments where you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, every once in a while it's like.

[Paul Thurat]

And you can tell, you know. Yeah. It's getting there and it's happening so fast. Whatever complaint you have today might be out of date.

[Leo Laporte]

That's two weeks from Ray Kurzweil's book, which we're going to interview him. Even experts in the field have been surprised by many of the recent breakthroughs in AI.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They seem to occur suddenly, without much warning. Like we didn't even, you know what.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. Which, by the way, feels like, I know, Richard, I know. I just got to qualify this by saying, I know. But it feels like intelligence. It feels like developing intelligence. It feels like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he also points out there's an interesting thing that before the AI can do it, you say, oh, yeah, that's very human. No AI is going to do it. He talks about an expert named Poggio Tommaso Poggio, MIT expert in AI in 2014, said, you know, the ability to describe the content of an image would be one of the most intellectually Challenging things of all for a machine to do.

[Paul Thurat]

And now it's not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost the next day.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, right. Google the. The on device offline version of that. Updates on my laptop every three days.

[Leo Laporte]

But his point is. And then what happens humans do is. Oh, well, that wasn't that hard.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. There we go.

[Paul Thurat]

We're going to be doing this until we are all in caves with barely fire, and we're going to be like, I just still don't think it's that smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course.

[Paul Thurat]

And they're flying over some spaceships. Like it's. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Of course it'd be the Matrix, champions of chess and go in the world. Of course it did. That's just a. It's just a calculation, you know. Of course it can make images, you know, but that. But is it human?

[Paul Thurat]

Of course it can do my job, but I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's where it's going.

[Paul Thurat]

My job's ludicrous. I mean, that doesn't. What does that mean?

[Leo Laporte]

That's where it's going.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy. It's very, very interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, I was down on campus the past two days, and I'll tell you, it's not happening magically. There's a whole lot of people working.

[Paul Thurat]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, absolutely. But even. And Stephen Wolfram said this a couple of weeks ago on intelligent machines, even the experts at chat@OpenAI, I think this is the price.

[Paul Thurat]

They're surprised. Exactly. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

When.

[Leo Laporte]

When ChatGPT3.5 came out, it was like, like, like people.

[Paul Thurat]

You don't want to be surprised by things. Those guys, the doctor operating on you, who goes, whoa, I've never seen that before. You're like, no, dude, what the. Like what?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, like, we've all written code where, you know, you know it's not going to run the first time, and when it does, you go, oh, it worked, actually.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But usually pretty deeply suspicious.

[Paul Thurat]

This is gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

That can't be right.

[Paul Thurat]

This is gonna come up in my. My tip at the end. But I wrote. Wrote code that was doing the opposite of what it should do. And I went through it and I was like, no, this is wrong. I took it out and then it worked properly, and that should not happen. Right. So I had that moment where I was like. And it turns out it was somewhere else. It was some code somewhere else was doing it. But it was like, for. I had this one moment where I was like, okay, I have now proven that computer science is magic. And now I need to bring it to the world. And no, it was just a human error.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's fun.

[Paul Thurat]

That AI helped me find, ironically. Yeah. Okay, we're going to get back to AI. We do have a bunch more AI stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's talk browsers. How about that?

[Paul Thurat]

Wait, first. Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Remote desktop.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So yes, in the list of things that Microsoft community folks could be outraged by the most. Skype. Right. Which my wife, as I told the story, said they still make Skype, but now in our world, you learn of every single human being still uses Skype. Outraged that they would kill this thing that no one is using and be most outraged that the feature they want to use is the thing that nobody really needs that much anymore and whatever. So there's outrage there. The new Outlook, the perennial favorite Windows 11 falls into this list as Windows 10 goes out the door. Windows 10, which debuted with a UI that came from a phone that hasn't existed in a decade, somehow is now nostalgic or beloved. And it's just the ugliest, plainest looking thing in the world. But whatever. But now we have a new one. I don't think it's going to beat them all, but it's definitely going to make the top five, which is.

[Richard Campbell]

The admins are anxious, let me tell you.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, the Remote Desktop app, right. So Microsoft announced something called the Windows app, which I have to say, everybody loves the name. It's completely obvious what it does. It's no problem. You can run the Windows app on Android. It's hilarious. The jokes never stop. But. But in sometime last year, they announced that they would replace the Remote Desktop app with the Windows app. And then they released the first stable version of the Windows app just before Ignite last year, if I remember correctly. So the Windows app is a way to access remote instances of Windows in the cloud, right? So that's Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, which is sort of the Predecessor to Windows 365. And then the Microsoft dev box, which is where you can get the big hawking computers to run Visual Studio on and test things against different configurations. Sorry, but when I hear Remote Desktop, what I think of is that feature that's been in Windows since, I don't know, NT something probably, certainly Windows xp. And actually that Remote Desktop is actually still in Windows. If you run Remote Desktop from your Start menu, you'll see a Windows Vista UI, which is inexplicably lasted forever. I wrote a tip last year about how you can connect to another PC on a home network or the same network when you sign in With a Microsoft account. This is part of the problem with this technology. It predates Microsoft account sign ins. It only works with local accounts natively. So you have to kind of work around it. It. Right. That's not the thing they're getting rid of. That's going to still be in Windows. If you go to the Microsoft Store, you'll find something called the Remote Desktop App. And I believe when that was first created, it's a store app. It was supposed to be a modern replacement for that thing that's in Windows, but it never did replace it. I believe it does still work with what I'll call local computers. Local meaning they're on your current network, typically the home network. Right. The Windows app does not support that, interestingly, which explains the outrage because. Because the thing I'm describing where I'm sitting like I am now on a home network and I'm on this computer and I want to access the file share on the laptop over there or whatever it is. Almost nobody does this. That said, the people listening or watching the show represent probably a high percentage of people who do that. And they're the people who still do that. And of course IT admins and whatever else. So there is some outrage there. They will be adding this capability to the Windows app app. And in the meantime, they are recommending that users use the Remote Desktop App that's in Windows, the one that I believe debuted in xp, until they add that to the Windows app. So. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is called Remote Desktop Connection.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes, thank you. Yep. So fun.

[Richard Campbell]

I get the local copy of the installer for the Remote Desktop Manager, which was the. The fancy version that allowed you to manage multiple services for a long time. But.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, right, right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, you know what really got me using less rdp? Not having any servers.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes. Yep. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I bet RDP usage exploded when they added Server Core to Windows Server, because that was headless, essentially. It had just a command box or whatever. And I'm trying to remember when that was about 2000.

[Richard Campbell]

2008.

[Paul Thurat]

Had 2008. Yeah. Along with. Yeah. And then Hyper V follows shortly thereafter. Yeah. So, yeah, so it probably had a resurgence whenever that was. Jesus, that was like 18 years ago. 17. 18 years ago. It's tough getting old.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and the other, the other tool in 2018 was Windows Admin center, which was really supposed to be the thing that got us away from rdp. Everyone hates the commanding control.

[Paul Thurat]

No, that's not fair. I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know what it suffered from? It uses the plugin model, which means every single time you opened it, there were 47 things to update and it was going to do them sequentially and you were going to wait.

[Paul Thurat]

That's why I love using this laptop for Windows Weekly. Because every time I log in, notion has to update, Discord has to update, my web browser has to update. Like I can't just use the computer. Apparently my career is 50% managing updates or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Now you literally want to half an hour before the show, open everything, twitch for a while.

[Paul Thurat]

I am not that kind of person. But I will say today, I was reading this morning, I looked over at this thing, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to do exactly what you said. I'm going to turn this thing on. And I. And I had the patch Tuesday updates. It was like, it was, it was great. This computer was busy.

[Richard Campbell]

When all of that is done, reboot the machine.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And then of course.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, and just since we're talking about it, I saw something today I'd never seen. So if using Windows 11, I don't know, 10 does a version of this too. But it's super common in 10. There's a checkbox and settings you can use to turn this off. But when you do a Windows update or you reboot your computer, you log in and it throws up that Windows setup looking screen. It's like, hey, we'd love to see you set up Windows Backup or, you know, whatever. And you're like, yeah, remind me in three days. And I do that every single time. And today that screen came up and it was blank. And so I sat here for about 60 seconds looking at it, thinking surely it's going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you're going to ask me to do something. Ask me to do.

[Paul Thurat]

And I'm looking and I'm thinking, ah, Lunar Lake. You'll never learn. No, sorry, Meteor Lake. Sorry, not Lunar Lake. And I had to turn it off and then turn it on again and Windows. Yep. Okay, so what else can I complain about? Oh, right.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's always something.

[Paul Thurat]

The web browser thing. So last week Leo mentioned, I almost said arc.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Zen Browser.

[Paul Thurat]

Zen browser, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

And I had come across, yeah, I'd come across something called Sidekick, which by the way, may not be supported anymore. I've only recently found out, and I mentioned Opera Air and I decided to do an episode of Hands on Windows about the like new browsers. When Arc came out, it was very interesting to me because as these people say, that the browser company and others will say too, you know, web Browsers are the most used there is. Right. But there's no desktop.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no economic upside. But also.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, there is. You are. No, you can't charge for it. But it's bizarre that the basic UI has not changed in 30 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, that's true, yes.

[Paul Thurat]

I've been really confused about this and it's fair to say that Ark was a bridge too far for a lot of people. There were people like Leo and others who, sorry, I loved it. This is what I wanted want. But. And they say that too. They're like, look for some percentage of the people, nailed it. But the other 80% or whatever is like, oh, that's too much. Right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa's still using Chrome.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. And that's. So is 60, 70% of the whole world. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So totally dominant.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. I had, you know, I started wondering like we're starting to see these kind of. They're almost like third tier companies. Right. So you have the browser, the. Actually the platform makers, Apple, Google, Microsoft that have a browser and it kind of behooves them not to be radical here. Right. Like they're trying to keep people in their little gigantic ecosystems. Really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I feel comfortable. I recognize that it's familiar, I get it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But the job of the browser from those companies perspective is to capture your digital effluent so you can monetize it.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's like a giant, if you notice, isn't that what you're saying?

[Paul Thurat]

But I think what's. I think something's going to change with browsers and browser makers or. Yeah, no. Browser makers are starting to talk about how these things will become agentic. Right. So a week or two ago I mentioned that Opera talked about hadn't released yet, but discussed how their agent in their browser will work and it will go out and browse the web for you. You'll say, I want to buy 10 pairs of socks, whatever. And you give it some parameters and it actually does the browsing like it understands the browser. It does it for you. It's not taking screenshots and doing stuff like it's actually using the browser.

[Leo Laporte]

If you think about it, that's not so far from what we're already doing. I mean, if I search with perplexity, it gives me a bunch of footnotes with links and there's no reason why it couldn't follow those links.

[Paul Thurat]

We're in a weird little space today where things are transitioning. So sometimes with AI, you'll say, I want to do whatever the thing is.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Paul Thurat]

And sometimes it'll do it for you and sometimes it will say this is how you do it in the app as you're talking. Right. So we're kind of making that transition.

[Leo Laporte]

I do that all the time. I'll say, well, okay, in Linux I need to install mosh. How do I do that? And it'll give me a step by step, which I will type in copy.

[Paul Thurat]

Paste for no reason.

[Leo Laporte]

It couldn't just type in, could you just do it?

[Paul Thurat]

Which I think is the, well, is the Windows action thing to do in a copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Don't tell me how to enable dark mode. Just enable dark mode. You know, that kind of thing. But a side topic to this is our declining attention spans. Right, right. I'm a, a lifelong reader.

[Leo Laporte]

We're getting stupider and stupider.

[Paul Thurat]

Well that's what's really look, we are, but I, I'm not 100% sure this is any different than it was 50, 120. You know, you could find any generation and be like, oh, the jet airplane is going to make you stupid. You don't have to walk places now that's ridiculous. You know, whatever. But it's just a fact. You know, I, I, I've read thousand to a thousand page books, I've apparently written some and I have a hard time keeping track of this stuff. So the notion of browsing is something that may sort of go away. Like we may still call these things browsers, but they will actually be these things that go off and do stuff for us. Right. Even something simple that we do have today. Like you bring up a web article and you're like oof, that's a little long. AI, could you summarize this for me please? You know like we're already doing it. Right? Yeah. So I think these two things together combined with what I will call minor advances in UI in browsers are, I may be pointing at how these things will advance. Right. So the best example of this new UI I'm talking about is probably Opera actually, although it's not complete. But you have these class of web apps or services that are notification driven, which are social media, which are email maybe or calendar based, where today in my case I might have some of them up in my browser or tabs taking up resources or whatever. Or maybe I have standalone apps like for like Slack or Teams or whatever it is. And they're running because they have to be running. They don't actually have to be, but they run because you don't know any Better. And you're like, well, someday someone I work with is going to contact me. I need to see that thing. But I think this notion of these sidebar apps, which could be email, like I said, calendar or social media, take them out of the browser bar, the tab bar, they run in the background, their background processes, and they just pipe up when they're needed. Or you could go over and click on it and say, I want to send a message. Right. I don't have to have this app running all the time. Like, I think that's an interesting little. It's a baby step, but it's a, it's, it's interesting, you know, and it's something that like existing browser makers could do. You know, Edge and Chrome both have sidebars, but they're like, the one in Chrome is actually really stupid. It doesn't, doesn't do almost anything. The one in Edge, you know, has Copilot, has image creation, has a few things. They have sort of the notion of apps. But I think Opera is maybe the best example of this now and is. I don't know, it could be pointing this. I think maybe this is where we're going, you know, I don't know. So I don't know. I'm. I'm kind of hoping through writing about it and then mentioning it, someone's going to reach out to me and say, hey, hey, look at this thing. You know, like, your Zen browser thing was very interesting. Sidekick, which may or may not be.

[Leo Laporte]

In Zen's open source, which I kind of like. And it uses Mozilla's engine, which I also think, you know, good, we need some diversity.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I forgot I didn't write about this today, so it's not in the notes, but I don't know if you saw Mozilla came out and had their own reply to the DOJ suggestion that Google not be allowed to have any payments to partners for search, which is what's keeping Mozilla in business. I'd say they made a pretty good case. And their case was based around the fact that, forget market share, look at what we're doing for the web. And if we disappear, who's going to do that? Nobody. And you're arbitrarily killing us because you're trying to lash out at this company that has this dominant monopoly. I kind of see both sides of this one, frankly. But unfortunately, Mozilla is sort of right now, unless something changes, collateral damage here. But yeah, Leo, I'm with you 100%. I think this is important. We want to keep this thing alive.

[Leo Laporte]

It's important.

[Paul Thurat]

Even if you don't use it, you should agree it's important.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we should be paying for browsers. I hadn't really thought about this.

[Paul Thurat]

It's probably too late. Netscape was onto something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because if it was going to give you control over the data stream coming from you, that'd be pretty darn interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's how they're monetized advertising. Absent another way to make money. They, you know, they get money from Google to use the Google search.

[Paul Thurat]

It's bizarre that, like I said, this is the most important app for almost everybody. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the most.

[Paul Thurat]

And if you, you could pull anyone who uses it all day long and they would all say the same thing. I'm not paying for that. What are you talking about? It's free. You know, it's crazy, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Think about M365 family could easily allow you to use a version of Edge where that digital stream is now directed for you so that you as the family manager can see the digital effluent of your family too. Which might make you sad, but I.

[Paul Thurat]

Believe that exists essentially. But yes, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And again, even if you paid for it. But it's like, hey, if you're an M365 customer, you're already paying Microsoft. I figured they do go down this path right off the bat with the new browser. Except that it sounds like the affluent is just so valuable.

[Paul Thurat]

I know this goes back to. We've, we had this conversation in the context of Windows, especially Windows 11i, the browser I would add to as well, which is back when Chris Capicella was a thing at Microsoft and would come on the show once a year. I would say to him, why don't you let me pay? Take away all the garbage. And his, his argument, which I kind of get is, was, well, that would be like admitting that what we were doing was garbage. And I'm like, no, it isn't. The ad supported model is very common in the digital world and you can pay like I could get Spotify for free, but I have to listen to ads. I think that's garbage. But I would like to pay for Spotify and have it without ads and maybe have other little things that are better, whatever that is good. This is very common. You just adopt, you know, and I don't, I don't, maybe the number is, I don't know, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not just about how much is your data worth to us as Microsoft. Microsoft as it is the collective body. And if we take, if too many people do this, then we become less valuable.

[Richard Campbell]

Although empirically it's typically only 2% are going to pay. So it's just not that big of a deal, it seems. Take that noisy 2% out of the loop.

[Paul Thurat]

I know, I know. And the complaint, it's a win, win. I don't understand. Just blows my mind. Anyway, so I keep. Leo messed with my head last week when he mentioned Zen. I'm like, okay, I thought I knew what was going on. Now I'm like, I have to look at this. It is very interesting, you know, And I. Yeah, there's so much it addresses. I feel like ARC browser addressed some issues with browsers, but also raised some issues that I don't think anyone was paying attention to was important. But Zen answers some questions or issues that people might have had with ARC as well. Right. By being open source and based on gecko, et cetera. So. So yeah, anyway, I don't know. I don't know where we're at. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know where we're at either. That's my problem. I'm confused. I don't get it at all. It's moving pretty fast. When you guys first kind of glommed on to technology, I bet you, Richard, you didn't feel this way. But I felt like, wow, it's going so fast, I'll never keep up.

[Paul Thurat]

I. I embraced it when I was younger. And then as I get older, I realize a lot of this is just change for change's sake. And we're making it up as we go along, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's.

[Paul Thurat]

That we don't necessarily know what we're doing. We release things, we put them out in the world and it's like, just kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody wants throwing spaghetti against the wall.

[Paul Thurat]

The most bizarre thing to me is that we're still doing that with established platforms like Windows that don't need it.

[Leo Laporte]

But do you feel like you can keep up?

[Paul Thurat]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, you. You are super smart. You obviously feel like you can keep.

[Richard Campbell]

Up is a relative term. You kind of have to pick your areas. Right. Of what you're going to focus on.

[Leo Laporte]

You're good at deep research, but.

[Richard Campbell]

And I have, you know, the upside to what 3000 podcasts and all those relationships at Microsoft is like, I just spent a day and a half. Oh, that's briefings of all the new products.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

What you're describing is almost like the in person version of, of what I would Say about programming or any other skill, which is like, not necessarily that you have to memorize everything and know every fact, but know who to ask or where to look. Right. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But now you're a schism where they've shown me all the next generation stuff they're working on and I can't talk about any of them.

[Paul Thurat]

And so let's talk about that for a second.

[Leo Laporte]

I just feel like I'm sipping a fire hose through a straw. I just, just. And it's, you know, maybe it's because I put myself in the position of not just covering Microsoft, but covering everything. Yeah. Which is a lot.

[Paul Thurat]

When Microsoft went through its antitrust stuff in the United States in The very late 90s, very early 2000s, I had to. And many people like me had to all of a sudden have to understand antitrust. Right, right. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of history there, there's a lot of law, a lot of whatever politics, you know, and, oh, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Have nearly enough time to read everything I need to read. There's so much to study now.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, that was bad enough. I don't know if I brought this up on this show yet, but I haven't written this, but I started thinking about the times in the industry where I was so overwhelmed by that, I just couldn't understand it. So quantum computing was the big example.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect example. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

When they first announced Microsoft Azure, I was like, nope, nope. The whole online, whatever we were calling at the time, the Net related, xml, whatever service architecture, whatever that was, I was like, ah. I'm like, this is the perfect time for me to get out of programming. I can't, I can't do it. I can't get it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there is a certain one way of dealing with it is a certain willingness to just be in uncertainty and. Yeah, okay. I don't.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I, I briefly mentioned this moment where the code was supposed to do one very explicit thing and very explicitly was doing the opposite. So I deleted it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's actually a good sign.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, I deleted it to doing something, to do, whatever, to debug it. And when I ran it, it did what I wanted, but the code wasn't there. And I was like, like, I'm like, I don't. If I hadn't found that, that might have been a moment for me where I'm like, I'm always like, I'm like, I give up, you know, like, I don't know anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Backwards.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm in backwards world. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And we are feeling like the PC revolution, the Internet revolution, the AI revolution. Like this is what you're feeling is it's the same caliber of event.

[Leo Laporte]

I do feel it.

[Paul Thurat]

I think each of those, yes, at the time, absolutely. But the truth is I think they're almost exponential to each in a way.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right, yes.

[Paul Thurat]

And I had, I was at, and I would have told the story, but a few months back I was at some HP event, I was talking to Michael Miller and I said, hey, I said, can you think of anything that has exploded as fast as this? He said, yeah, the Internet. And I'm like, not exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet took longer.

[Paul Thurat]

It was big. But to go from everyone had a dial up to everyone has broadband and it was just pervasive. That was 10 years in many ways still just happening. Depending on where you are. I mean, I mean now you can come to Mexico or Europe or Australia or anywhere in the world and probably get online with your own phone, high speed, no changes to your, you know, if you're depending on your account, you may have to pay extra, whatever it is. But like I just get off a plane now and it's like, welcome to wherever you are you're online.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, isn't it?

[Paul Thurat]

This is not like it was 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Years ago, by the way.

[Paul Thurat]

20 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Ray Kurzweil predicted that 25 years ago that we would always, we would have universally connected Internet, Internet all the time. 26 years ago, he predicted.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, well, he was right.

[Leo Laporte]

He was right. I want to take a break, come back, we've got lots more to talk about. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell.

[D]

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[Leo Laporte]

I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call, talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh. Somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous. And I do want to mention, if you are not yet a member of Club Twit, that Paul does this great hands on Windows show. You can see the video in Club Twit. You can watch us do a lot of fun things. Gaming, coding, knitting. In our Club Twit Discord. There's great conversations going on and you get ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this little message unless you wanted to. And actually a lot of our club members do listen to the ad infested versions because they like the ads. But that's up to you. Seven bucks a month, which is an incredible deal for all this great content. And most importantly, it helps us continue to do it and continue to grow. And we, we really need that. So if you are not yet a member, please, if you would consider Twit tv, Club Twit. That's all won't go on. I won't go on and on. What do we have? We did a bunch of stuff in the last couple of weeks. I think Stacy's book club is. We're going to, we're going to make that quarterly to give me time since I have so much reading.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, plus you have to read. I mean, that's the thing. I don't understand how you can do it so quick.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's just so much. And I'm good at skimming.

[Paul Thurat]

AI, could you give me the Cliff Notes version of this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that actually has been very helpful. We do have something new we're starting. Anthony Nielsen did this for the first time a couple of weeks ago. And it's great with members of our club, the AI user group. So we get together and talk about how we're using AI and suggestions and tips and stuff like that. It's a traditional PC style user group, but for AI. And it's in our Discord on the fourth Friday of every month. The next one one's March 28th at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. So if you're not a member, join. So you can be part of that too. That's really fun. That's really fun. Stacy's Book Club. We got Hands on Tech Monthly recording in there. Chris Markworth's photo. It's a whole bunch of stuff. Twitter, TV Club, Twit. All right, sorry I didn't apologize for interrupting. Let's talk about something much more interesting. Microsoft 3. 6 5.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, is it interesting? So I think it was late last year Google talked about some of the features they were going to add to Chrome OS for Chromebooks to make it better for those in a Microsoft 365 environment, which sounds oxymoronic, but that work is now complete, so to speak. Although I'm not sure it goes far enough. But you can Access the Microsoft 365 web apps. Worry. Power. No, yeah, PowerPoint, sorry. And Excel in Chrome OS like you can anywhere, but they're not, you know, if you, if you bring them up in Chrome or Edge or whatever, you don't get an option to install them. You could. And if you could install it or pin it, you'd always go back to that kind of Microsoft 365 portal site. So in Chrome OS they've done work so that you can actually pin those things discreetly and run them and then associate them with file types and, you know, kind of make it more native looking and acting. So actually that's kind of interesting. Single sign on, pass through. So you can sign into a Chromebook with an enter ID or a third party authentication manager, which is cool. OneDrive integration into the Files app and Chrome OS, which is something I did actually try myself, that's kind of interesting. You don't get that local sync thing, which I think is key for this kind of service. But you could also as an IT admin specify that, that you can't even see as a user. Local storage, everything will go into OneDrive, including whatever downloads and screenshots you have, and keep that stuff, you know, inside the environment. So kind of cool. I mean it's, you know, you don't see a lot about these two companies working together. I don't think they actually work together on this either. But it is, you know, you know, I think it's important.

[Richard Campbell]

I wonder how well Google Workspaces works on Chromebooks. That, that would be my question.

[Paul Thurat]

I think it works really well. Well look, there's the world. That world as the commercial space I guess for lack of a better term is kind of like two halves, right? There's the Fortune 500 managed heavy infrastructure Microsoft World, right. Microsoft 365 where you basically get everything from the same company. And then there's the. It's not really ad hoc but it's like smaller businesses, startups where you might go with Google Workspace, it's a little cheaper, maybe you don't need the desktop apps, et cetera. And then you start picking and choosing other things like Slack and Notion and whatever else you might use, right? And these things work together to some degree, but they're not all from one place and whatever, these are the trade offs. But at some point, if you're lucky or if things go well, your business grows. And the question was always sort of like, well what happens to a small business? It becomes maybe a medium sized business or whatever. Do they stay on Google Workspace or did they move to Microsoft 365? Right. And I don't think there is an answer to that question. I think it's going to depend on the company. But I think this is a recognition that Google hasn't necessarily made a lot of inroads into a certain part of the market. And that's the part of the market that you know, standardizes Microsoft. Right? Because for a while there it seemed like Google will just duplicate every single thing that Microsoft does. Right? Which is what they did in the build up as they were where you know, as we get to what we now call workspace. But I don't know, at some point it's like, well actually maybe not everyone needs all that stuff and maybe some of it's a little top heavy. Actually we never talked about this but last week someone asked me about Loop and said is this thing still a going concern? So I'm like only look into it, right? And if what you're concerned about is Loop as an app, right. The notion like app that you can run on Windows, it's a web app or on mobile, that stuff's moving like a glacier, like it's barely happening. But the thing people need to remember is that Loupe is the front facing implementation for something called the fluid framework. And it's this kind of component based design, a modern Olay com, whatever you want to call it, of sorts. And there are other things going on. So they just added something to, not to teams to Copilot called Copilot Pages. Copilot Pages is Loop but inside Copilot and is designed to be a workspace where you can collaborate with, in this case Copilot and others on the types of things you might. If you weren't using Copilot or AI, you might be doing a loop if you knew what it was and most people don't. So to answer the question, yeah, sort of. But if you look at it as a broader platform, actually, yeah, really aggressively. And the first thing that kicked me off to this was is if you look up Loop on Twitter X and find their official account, all their local, their recent tweets are all about co pilot pages. And I was like, why are they tweeting about this? You know, it's like they're promoting some other thing. It's because it's Loop.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Under the hood.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So I, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I get that Loop lives is the point.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it lives.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got that problem of there's so many different products inside of Loop. In some ways, like it's notion client on the phone is questionable. Like it needs to have a perfect connection. Its authentication is kind of nightmarish. It has a nasty habit when it has problems of just making pages disappear so you think you've lost stuff. It's still got it.

[Paul Thurat]

It's why. Yeah, this I'm going to not remember when this came up. Leo asked the question earlier and I almost made this comparison with whatever the thing was. Oh, copilot. Copilot. Well, I should say Loop to me is the same experience I have when I use Copilot in Windows or Bing on the web, which is I should give this a shot. Maybe it has gotten better. And then we have one or two interactions. I'm like, right, that's why I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Use this terrible member.

[Paul Thurat]

Then I stop. And so look, when you bump into.

[Richard Campbell]

An old girlfriend and wonder why.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. You're like, oh yeah, yeah, there's it was that. So yeah, could be a friend, it could be anybody. It could be a brother, whatever. Whatever it is, you're reminded instantly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Why? And I. Yep. So yeah. And like you said Richard to on Loop on mobile, like I'd bring it to the gym. I have a copy of like the stuff, the weights and things I need to use in notion. I made a copy and Loop and I look at it like, okay, and I go to the next machine, I bring it up and it comes up on a blank page. And I'm looking at it like, where'd you go? I'm like, all right, kill the app, go back. Doesn't come back. I'm like, I'm just going to use notion. Notion comes right up. It works. And I just. You kind of move on, you know. So, yeah, that's my. That's been my loop experience anyway. Yeah, I would like it to be better. It's pretty. It's a good looking app. It's nicely designed. It's just terrible. And then speaking of terrible, so Microsoft killed Skype. I. The guy Laurent writes news for thrott.com he's a great guy, guy. And he pinged me and he said, do you. Did you know that Microsoft has something called Groupme? I'm like, that sounds vaguely familiar. He goes, well, you know how they just killed Skype? Well, they're continuing to update this thing called Groupme and now it works with Copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like grope me.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, A little too much, right? So Groupme is a mobile group messaging app. Up. Because God knows we need one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Yammer?

[Richard Campbell]

Is it something else? It was an acquisition. It says something else again.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds familiar. It sounds like something Lotus Novell Groupware.

[Paul Thurat]

Or something back to the 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

So Microsoft probably did it but forgot about it or something.

[Paul Thurat]

Microsoft bought this company in 2011. 11. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And has it been a product this whole time and nobody just.

[Paul Thurat]

I guess so.

[Richard Campbell]

Fruitbeat.com, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So they're integrating it with. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurat]

That's all I can say. I don't know. So build 2025 is happening in May in Seattle, but the registration is now open. So if you're interested in paying for this and want to go, you can sign up and I just, I checked it this morning. You could still do that. You know, in the past this thing used to fill up like that.

[Richard Campbell]

It was sell out in an hour. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Really quick. Like by the time I could write a story about it, it was already sold out. You know, so I'm not saying you have to get on it very quickly, but if you. I mean, obviously if you're serious about it, you should go do it. We don't have any idea what the session list looks like yet. I'm going to guess you're going to see the word co pilot. A lot. So we'll be putting that one in the middle of our bingo sheets. It's going to be a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

By the way, this is a crazy low early bird rate. It was not that long ago. The build was $2,000.

[Paul Thurat]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

The early bird's 1100 bucks. Like.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yeah. I mean, if you wait long enough, they'll probably play for your plight or your flight as well, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think Bill's had a tough time. Time. And I know the leadership has changed. I, I know Hanselman's working content plans, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Some of the stuff I saw this past couple of days make me think that the upcoming build is going to be impressive.

[Paul Thurat]

Okay. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And Hanselman will show us how to eat chips at Chipotle.

[Paul Thurat]

I hope.

[Richard Campbell]

Most likely, Hanselman will do the Hanselman and Racinovich show. Like, yeah, that's a fun show. I like this.

[Paul Thurat]

I bought a croissant today in the West. Woman asked me if I, I, I, she said the word Chipotle. She said it slightly differently, but that was the word. And I was like, what? She, she was asking me if I.

[Leo Laporte]

Wanted chipotle, I think sauce on your croissant Sauce. No, thank you.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. The answer was no.

[Leo Laporte]

That's these, That's a smoky chili. You don't want it.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't want that.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't want it.

[Paul Thurat]

Chipotle.

[Leo Laporte]

But some do, apparently, yes.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Well, some people like chipotle in your coffee. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Okay. I had someone last night, got a tequila espresso martini, and I said, I'm sorry to bother you, but I have to ask. Could I have a taste of that, please? No. Could I. What is that? I'm like, I have a slight. Could I, Could I.

[Leo Laporte]

Excuse me, sir.

[Paul Thurat]

The back score is a little strange. Okay. So this year is Microsoft's 50th anniversary. They're having an event at the campus in April to celebrate this. Apparently, I don't know, a couple months ago, I was invited.

[Leo Laporte]

A minute. I have to show you this. You're people all together.

[Paul Thurat]

See, I would have changed this to they think they're people.

[Leo Laporte]

This is horrible. This is straight out of 2012.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't understand what's going on with this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I know this is the group me because does it. Nobody uses. Does anybody use this?

[Paul Thurat]

I've never. I mean, obviously I've heard of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a campus. Maybe they're going after the college crowd.

[Richard Campbell]

College centric. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Established 2010 in New York City. That's their. Oh, wait a minute, here's use cases. Campus alumni, team sports. Yeah, yeah. They're going after the. Well then faith groups.

[Paul Thurat]

So in other words. Yeah, in other words, groups of people that don't want the overhead or couldn't even handle it of an actual managed and environment of some kind but need to get together maybe we're going on a.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't Everybody just use WhatsApp for this?

[Paul Thurat]

I think so, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, just checking.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. In this country they do. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. I wish WhatsApp could just do SMS MMS. I would just use one app. I'd give anything that one app, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Can'T have it be your. Your messenger yet. You can with signal. I don't know why? What's holding them back?

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know either.

[Leo Laporte]

Is GroupMe encrypted end to end?

[Paul Thurat]

Leo, are you kidding me? I barely even know the name of this thing. Encrypted.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, I didn't mean to go back in time. I just found the site and I went, Whoa. Hello. Hello, GroupMe.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't even.

[Leo Laporte]

So Microsoft, it's Build.

[Paul Thurat]

What day is Build?

[Leo Laporte]

So should we do something with Build Build?

[Paul Thurat]

Well, yeah, that's a good question actually.

[Leo Laporte]

So are you guys going to be so rich going?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I believe I'm gonna go. I just talked to Mary Jo this morning about this because we've not heard about press registration or anything yet. But I gotta figure this out because.

[Leo Laporte]

Haven'T you in the past done things at Build?

[Richard Campbell]

We were there. We were there last year, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

I mean, yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yes, I like Build. Build was where my favorite show, you know that. That we saw Panas Binet humiliated. And we saw.

[Richard Campbell]

And we saw Richie. Yeah, tripped him.

[Leo Laporte]

Stevie Batiche do the amazing explanation that.

[Paul Thurat]

Is less well understood follow up a year later. But yes, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a good conference. I mean this is one.

[Paul Thurat]

The problem is as Microsoft shifted into cloud, right. Super focus on cloud. Cloud Build became this thing where it was like, are they going to even mention Windows? You know, there were builds where Windows never came up. You know, and it's kind of shifted a little bit. I mean they obviously AI is the big thing, but. Yeah, but you see Windows because they're trying to push Windows or AI and Windows. So you know that's happening. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I will go if I can. I gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sounds like fun.

[Paul Thurat]

Wait till the end. In the meantime, however, I. So like I said, a couple of Months ago I got invited to go to a New York local Microsoft 50th anniversary kind of celebration thing, which if I was home, I would have gone to, but I was here and I'm not flying home to go there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. It's 50 years old.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. But now they're having the main one on the campus. So I got invited to that a week or 10 days ago, whatever it was, and I did actually say yes. So I haven't, I haven't booked this yet. But if I go, it's going to be too quick. I'm just going to fly one night event one night and go home. Like it's going to be quick. But the interest, well, not interesting. Aside from the. Just the anniversary of related stuff. They are going to announce something related to consumer AI. And I think this is tied to some of the stuff I mentioned earlier with the Copilot features that are coming. Right. There was a report this past week that internally, Microsoft's in house developed AI models have finally reached the quality that we see with OpenAI and anthropic models. And this is the work being done under Suleyman as part of Microsoft AI, the consumer part of the company.

[Leo Laporte]

So they've replaced Phi or Phi with Mai, Right. Or something. They have a new model. Yeah. We were talking actually on Sunday with Lumareska who is working in AI for Microsoft. He did the really cool thing. He put Python in Excel.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Super cool.

[Paul Thurat]

That took a while, by the way. It took him 18 months or 2 years between announce and release. If I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but what a great idea, right?

[Paul Thurat]

I mean, it's still Visual Basic, but you know, vpa.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah, and he says he uses it every day. He's using the Microsoft models. I assume it's the newer one, not.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of them. It's. They have the local models, they. I think this is their cloud. I think what they're really talking about, although they'll be both, is the cloud models that there have been rumors for a long time now that Microsoft would like to figure out a way for copilot to use other models, either either mixing and matching or just outright replacing OpenAI where possible.

[Leo Laporte]

For sure. They don't want to be dependent on OpenAI.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you guys followed the drama over there, but there was a Little event at OpenAI where Microsoft was like. Like, we gotta kind of fix this. So they've been working on that ever since and I think this is gonna be them coming out and saying, all right, you know, here's where we're at. We're actually, you know, pretty far along, so we'll see. But that's happening in early April, right? So we're not that far away, less than a month now. So that's kind of interesting. Just in passing openai03mini, I believe they make you pay to access this. You can actually get that for free now in Copilot by clicking that Think Deeper Thing button. And so we're in a weird place. I don't know, I don't know what's going on. But I think Copilot and what Copilot uses on the back end and all that kind of stuff is going to shift pretty dramatically. And then I think we're going to start seeing more in the way of actual end user features. Like those things I mentioned earlier. Whatever those are, we don't know yet. This story happened late yesterday for me here and I'm starting to freak out a little bit here. So I tried to explain this to my wife last night because I can't, I can't sometimes I just can't stop myself. But in case it's not obvious that Big Tech is terrible, right, they're doing everything they can to move as fast as they can with AI without any regulatory involvement whatsoever. So for example, in the past, if we were, this was 10 years earlier or something, Microsoft absolutely would have purchased, which just would have acquired OpenAI outright. Right? But they know they can't do that, right, because they'll be stopped at every level by everybody antitrust regulator on earth. And so they came up with this, you know, partnership that's a kind of a special relationship. And that relationship is, is being investigated all over the world. Of course, actually the CMA just came out and said it's fine, we had big problems with this. But the thing that made it fine, which is fascinating to me, was that announcement recently, a month or two ago, where OpenAI can use other AI infrastructure, which is actually kind of a win win for Microsoft. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And that was immediately followed by the Stargate announcement because I suspect Microsoft said, yeah, we don't want anything to do with that.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep, of course. And for the cma, which I think we've established, not necessarily the brightest tax in the bunch, so to speak.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a lot of people stuffed in one car, right?

[Paul Thurat]

I think, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a clown car?

[Paul Thurat]

It's, it's only funny when it's, when it's a small car. I'm just saying, you know, it's a.

[Richard Campbell]

Bus, unfortunately, sticking out of the sunroof. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

They. Okay. So anyway, they're okay with it, but other jurisdictions, we'll see. So there's that there have been overt meaning explicit public things where like, say, Amazon now twice has invested in Anthropic. Right. So they've been upfront, I think to the tune of about $8 billion. But the news came out yesterday through the New York Times, which filed. I don't know if it was Freedom Information or how they did it, but they got some of the court documents from Google, usb, Google that were heavily redacted. And they were like, no, we need to see the full. We need to see this. This is public interest, whatever. They got the full documents. And one of the things that was redacted was Google secretly owns 14% of anthropic. Never told anybody that. Ownership doesn't come with decision making. It's a lot like the Microsoft open AI thing. Like it's kind of. It looks like that it's currently worth about $3 billion. Their agreement is that they can. Google can only own up to 15% of anthropic, maximum, which is less than, by the way, Amazon can and does own. But here's my question. This is a company when the. Actually, it was the same antitrust trial, when this trial was underway late last year, end of summer, whenever that was, was, it came out that Google was paying Apple over $20 billion a year to be the default search on the iPhone. And I raised the issue at the time. I want you, anyone, to explain to me how it's possible for two companies to have a deal that's worth over $20 billion in revenues every year. And no one announces this. You don't reveal this to your shareholders, to your investors. You're a publicly held company. Money. You have SEC requirements for disclosures. And somehow this is just a secret. And this is rounding error, man, $20 billion. I mean, this is a major chunk of Apple services invest revenues, which is their second biggest business, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

This is astonishing to me. Now this is a smaller number, but same company. They're doing the same thing with Anthropic. And by the way, while they're doing this, just in case they're not hypocritical enough, I want to remind everybody that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has on multiple occasions ridiculed Microsoft for using other companies AI that I guess they're not smart enough to make their own AI like we are. Oh, well, guess what? They're also using someone else's AI? Not exclusively and maybe not even yet, but they're clearly hedging their bets as well. And what is this world we live in where these gigantic, the biggest companies on earth, all publicly held, can, are no longer required to disclose anything? This is something I bring up every quarter. Not every quarter, but I see it every quarter when they do their financial results which are not just reporting as a joke.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

It's just a bunch of made up numbers that don't have anything to do with anything. And you have no way to know where the money's coming from. And now what we're seeing is we also have no way to see where the money's going. It is astonishing to me. And you know, so we have these companies that are going to the, in the us in the EU and elsewhere and saying, oh please, please let us continue making our AI we just want to help the world. They're, they're, they're bigger than most countries by revenues. Like how, how is this happening? It's astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to take a little different, different tack on it, which is, I think this is unique. Yeah, there's no monopoly, there's no lock in on AI because all the papers, all the seminal important research has been done publicly, in public. So Anthropic doesn't know more than OpenAI knows, than Microsoft knows. It's all kind of well known.

[Paul Thurat]

I think these are speculative bets that one of these or the other will somehow be successful.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think they want a, a piece of the pie in every arena. Right. But what I like about it is, you know, this is what made the PC revolution happen is somebody reversed engineered IBM's BIOS and so was able to make compatibles. And I tell you, If IBM owned PCs, it wouldn't have been the same world.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, that's. No, I'm sorry, I'm not disagreeing with this.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know this is orthogonal to what you're talking about. I agree with you. This should be revealed.

[Paul Thurat]

The issue, the reason this is an issue is for the classic antitrust type.

[Leo Laporte]

I completely agree with you. I understand it.

[Paul Thurat]

Continue.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just pointing out there is another interesting side to this, which is that there's no monopoly on how this works. It's well understood, which is great.

[Paul Thurat]

But each of those companies that I mentioned does have monopolies and this is how they extend other era. So in other words, like, but they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Not going to be able to. But see, that's the difference.

[Paul Thurat]

We're going to Find out it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

A monopsony, it's not a monopoly because they don't control it. Even China can make these things.

[Paul Thurat]

I'm sorry, I'm with you. I'm not. I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm with you. I agree. This should be reported.

[Paul Thurat]

The problem is the attempt. In other words, what they're attempting to do. Right. Is continue their and extend their dominance through illegal means. When you have a monopoly. Right. And yeah, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is I don't think they're going to be able to because there's no.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. And I think I'm on board with that. I some time ago wrote something to the tune of if everything is AI, then nothing is AI and this notion that if, you know, Microsoft adds these features to copilot but then I can get them free from notion or you can't own it, then what's the difference? Like you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. So maybe you could make one that's. I don't know, maybe you can make one that's better than somebody else's. But they're all, you know, kind of.

[Paul Thurat]

Exactly. We're very quickly moving into a point where almost any AI will be good enough and the ones that aren't will be gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is what we want. We do not want one company to be the source of all of this.

[Richard Campbell]

That is absolutely.

[Paul Thurat]

If we had to pick one, I think Microsoft would probably be the choice.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want Microsoft.

[Paul Thurat]

They've never misbehaved when they owned everything. What do you mean?

[Leo Laporte]

You think Sam Altman would be a just custodian of all the world's AI?

[Paul Thurat]

No, but fortunately we are so fortunate he's a person.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. But we're so fortunate that no one has a monopoly on this. That is really good news. Has nothing to do with.

[Paul Thurat]

I agree with you.

[Leo Laporte]

The SEC should force these companies to disclose because as an investor you have every right to know.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. So the point that I would make about earnings is that the SEC has not changed the disclosure rules for earnings at all in this entire period. But every one of those companies companies has slowly, every quarter stopped, stopped, stopped.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you don't enforce it, you might as well change.

[Paul Thurat]

It's astonishing. So now Microsoft's earnings, which is the one I pay the most attention to, is just a bunch of blunder numbers that don't have anything to do with anything. It's ridiculous. Like you have no idea of knowing you could pick any part of the business you want.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the gerrymandering of corporate reporting. You tokenize it in a way that makes it look the best.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep. Yeah, so what? Right. And Microsoft actually maybe is the best example because Microsoft has an invented non business called Microsoft Cloud that they created so they could have some big number to compare to aws and they cherry pick what goes into that but never tell you what it is. And it could be different every quarter. We have no way to know and it is nonsense. And somehow Wall street is not just okay with this, but Microsoft is, as I speak, peak, probably the third biggest company on earth by market cap. I think trillion, something, something. I mean, 3 trillion, whatever. It is ridiculous. Okay. Anyway, sorry, I just, I saw this and I was like, you got to be kidding me. Like, I just don't understand where this ends. This, it's insane, it's astonishing, it's. It's unacceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, you can. It's clear that I don't know how many people even work at the FTC anymore. It's clear that it's not going to go. So it's not going to change for a while. And you know, the stock market should be going up because of that.

[Paul Thurat]

Let me check. I think it is. Yikes. No.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so maybe investors are going. You know, I can't trust anything I hear from these companies.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the only thing that will really kick off a change is a big loss. Is this secrecy. Covers up the fact that the company is failing. Yeah, that's a good point. It's failing. That's a good point. Point.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, there might be a rebellion from investors. Yeah. I mean, it's not the little guys like us, but if institutional investors stand up and be counted, that's who has to enforce this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You make Berkshire Hathaway upset, you got a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They need to say, we need these numbers. Here's what I fear. They're getting those numbers.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just not getting.

[Paul Thurat]

Probably right. That makes me crazy. I had the thought that that might.

[Leo Laporte]

Be happening, which really just. It tilts the playing field for small investors again.

[Paul Thurat]

And there's never been an example where dominant companies ever tried to do that. So I don't know how that could be happening. I don't know why I would assume that. Yeah, crazy. I will get off of my.

[Leo Laporte]

Get down from that horse soapbox horse.

[Paul Thurat]

Thing, whatever it is. Google launched Gemma 3. Gemma 3 is like their version of Phi. It's the local model stuff, what I would call a small language model. There's a family of them with different parameters, etc. Etc. But the big claim to this one is, is if you're hitting this with a single GPU or a single npu, which you would be at locally, like on a device, this is actually the most performant AI in its class, followed by it's in a class of its own anyway. And then this. I don't even know why this is in the notes, but AI is going to use. Amazon's going to use AI and vice versa to dub movies and TV shows automatically. Because of course they are. Right? I mean it's going to be used to do everything like this. I mentioned watching those Dave Cutler videos again and I don't remember when they were recorded, but let's call it, you know, 8ish years ago, they in the discussion about the future of operating systems and what comes next and blah, blah, blah, someone asked him about AI and he says, you know, he goes, and this is before this current boom. He didn't say this recently, this was.

[Richard Campbell]

Several years ago, eight years ago go.

[Paul Thurat]

He said, you know, people are dumping on AI, they don't understand it. But he goes, I. I've seen miracles come out of this. And one of them that he mentioned, he called it Skype Auto Translate, which is now coming just to PCs. But this note or. Well, at the time, I don't think it was translation. I think it was just. Maybe it was translation, I don't remember. But either translation or just auto captioning. Right. Where you can just on the fly do that Babel fish thing, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where it's amazing, isn't it?

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, that's so incredible. And he's right, you know, it's a good point. You know, it's. And that was before it got exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, back then the imagenet thing had already happened by then, so we already were now expecting software to recognize images. Like all of that stuff that was impossible was changing.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And it was the beginning of this generation. It's finally gotten the language.

[Paul Thurat]

There are these stages you go through with this stuff that. And this is where the acceleration of AI is just so crazy, where you have a. Some software, maybe you paid for it or something, and the software can and remove the background from an image, like Photoshop. I do. And you're like, oh, this is cool. And then you're like, I can do this on my phone and now I can do it in paint. And now I can do it in a video. What? And you can go in and say this thing is the foreground, this object, now track it through all these frames. And then in real time, it changes or removes the background. It gives you basically a green screen effect or whatever. I always point to Jurassic park as this line in the sand, so to speak, where I saw that movie. And I said, now they can put anything on the screen. Which to me at the time meant, now they can make a Lord of the Rings movie. Because this was just impossible. You could not do the scope that this would require on screen.

[Richard Campbell]

But deep required an astonishing how.

[Paul Thurat]

And I saw Jurassic park and I'm like, if you can think it, you can make a movie about it. Now they can do anything, you know? And I think that's where not. But now. But that was Hollywood, right? Hollywood probably had whoever, you know, well, whoever did that ILM probably had all these, like, Silicon Graphics workstations and blah, whatever. Now it's like, I'm out. I'm waiting for, like, to pay for something in line. I'm like, I think I'm gonna use AI to make a movie, you know, on my phone. It's crazy. Like, it's just crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's happening so fast. I know, but there's still that effect that Kurzweil talks about, where as soon as a machine could do it, we go, well, oh, that wasn't that hard. I could do that. We are making a lot of progress.

[Paul Thurat]

It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Wild world. And the thing is, I don't know, you could predict what's going to happen next, because I don't even try. It feels like all paradigm shifts.

[Paul Thurat]

You know the joke. Every single place in the United States and maybe on Earth has the joke. You're in Boston, you're in Seattle, you're in British clan. It doesn't matter. Matter. Don't like the weather. Just wait 15 minutes. Right? We've all heard that joke. Don't believe in AI. Wait 15 minutes. Yeah, don't worry. It's about to get a lot better.

[Richard Campbell]

And we don't say, wait 15 minutes. Change weather here. We say it only rain twice this week. Once or three days and once or four. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little more consistent.

[Paul Thurat]

Right. It's like we have. Yeah, we have two. We have two seasons in Mexico City. One last nine months and one last three months.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. So glad you're here. We'd do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. We are now on Summertime in the States. Not in Mexico, in British Columbia. You also changed the following year. Yeah. So this means that we are now at 1800 UTC, not 19.

[Paul Thurat]

What time is it for you guys now? Like 10 o'clock at night or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait to follow. Yeah, on Sunday, Mike Elgin said let's just all do UTC as and and screw it. Said, no, I am not getting up at 1400 and going to bed.

[Paul Thurat]

They do a 9am thing with Brad, which is 8am here, which is now 7am and I'm like, nope, I'm not doing it. I can't get up for that. No way.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't do anything before eight. That's just not, not going to happen. Even with a Chipotle croissant I couldn't do. Although it probably does wake you up a little.

[Paul Thurat]

A Chipotle croissant, which is like a just a random mix of words that doesn't make sense together.

[D]

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[Leo Laporte]

Hey, glad you're here. Keep watching. We do stream by the way if you want to watch live on eight different platforms. Discord for the club members, YouTube, Twitch, X.com TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook and Kick. So watch live if you want. If you're watching live, I watch the chat. You can participate in the chat. That wonderful to have you there and after the fact, TWiT TV, WW or Subscribe and your favorite podcast player. I think everybody needs an amuse bush right now. There's a little, a little something citrusy sherbet, a little sherbet for the, for everyone, aka the Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurat]

Mr. Thomas. So we've been kind of tiptoeing around this for quite a while now, but we finally have our first report that may be pointing to this future which we've all sort of understood is coming. Right. Which because Microsoft themselves, Phil Spencer and others in the Xbox. Org have talked about this briefly right here and there, which is that there's some future fusion coming between Windows and Xbox, which you know, we already have to some degree now, right, that there is a, an interest in these portable gaming devices. Microsoft has explicitly mentioned both Xbox and Windows as the platform for those things that it seems like there might be both. Right. We've talked about Xbox as a platform and this presumed move. Well, not presumed. They talked about it internally to arm. And what might that look like and how would that would be particularly good for a portable gaming machine? Right. There have been advances on the Windows front to make the Xbox app a front end for these devices, similar to what we see with Steam on a Steam deck. Right. Or SteamOS. So Windows Central has a report that actually doesn't offer anything new over what I just said, but it kind of. Well, other than the codename, so there's a codename Keenan, which is a gaming handheld that will look like an Xbox device. Not coming from Xbox, coming from a third party hardware maker. If you look at Lenovo and their handheld device that they have with steamos and they had said at the time I believe this could run steamos or Windows. Right. Your choice. The question here becomes. It's actually a little bit like that thing we talked about briefly earlier. You are Apple, you're going to make the iPhone. You take this big monolithic OS10 thing and you chop it down and make it smaller and it's better for the small device. Is that what you do for an Xbox handheld? Or do you go with the Xbox os, which is fundamentally Windows platform, but specially optimized for essentially running a single app with a separate background service, which is lower, resource intensive and gives all of the priority for what resources you do have to the game you're running. So it's a good experience. So we'll see. Right. According to Windows Central, this device could appear as soon as the holiday season this year. And it's almost like a test run the way they present it in that if this takes off, maybe we'll see one from Xbox, we'll see some from other companies. Not clear if it's really Windows or really Xbox or if that matters because I think these Things are actually going to. To kind of consolidate if you will, from the perspective of. For gaming anyway. And then we'll. And they also mentioned that we're going to get console replacements for the series X and s for 2027. So two and a half years. So interesting. But yeah. So that publication specifically mentions that. Well, I feel like. I think they've actually said this. I think Phil Spencer said this. Exactly, exactly. Microsoft wants to make it easier for game developers to create a game that runs on both the PC and the Xbox. That's the point. Like they're almost like A1 Windows if you will. Like when they were doing well nobody would do that. Yeah. It's silly. But a universal platform of sorts. When Microsoft did do that. Uwp. Of course this was for apps. Right. Not games. And the idea was that you at the time it was HoloLens, the Surface Hub, Windows PCs and tablets, Windows Phones, Xbox. Right. You could write an app and it would run on all of those things and would adapt. Right. If it had to depending on the screens and so forth. So this is a little different but also a little bit similar. Right. That we're going to have this one gaming platform probably based on, you know, DirectX or whatever, which is how Xbox started. And if you, you know, you can basically credit a game as a game maker that maybe it's not the same exact. You know, maybe it's one of those forked kind of compilation deals but you, you know, it's easier to make a single game that will work great on both. So that sounds like a good idea to me anyway. That's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

You think they just go directly to arm.

[Paul Thurat]

I think so too. He doesn't. They don't mention that part of it and I. That might be because that part's not known. I don't really know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Oh I think is pretty bare met. They just need to do some recompiles and some of the hardware things but it probably wouldn't be.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. I almost let this week go by without crapping on Siri. So I just want to take a slight break and make sure I get onto that. No, I'm kidding. But yeah, then the AI bit I forgot to mention Apple delayed the Siri features they mentioned announced last year to possibly next year. That's going great. Great. And in the. And I mentioned Loop and co pilot and Bing and I would add Siri to this list. Please do not pipe up on my phone. I can't stand you where I use it and it's just laughably bad. Yeah. I think I mentioned last week how we were up in the mountains, we were offline, and it actually popped up. And if my phone could have drooled, my hand would have been wet. It was that stupid. Anyway, sorry, that. That's. That's a digression. And then Microsoft released a firmware update for their Xbox wireless controllers, actually about two weeks ago. And apparently it's caused a lot of problems. So there's going to be a fix for that. So if you're experiencing, like, latency or dead zone issues, those were caused by this, your control is not necessarily bad. It's just drawn that way with software. So they're going to fix it. They're going to release a new version of the firmware update, which is something I've not done. You have to think if you use an Xbox controller with Windows, you actually have to think to see if there's an update. You download an app from the store, you check. If you do that, it will always say there is one because you have never checked. No one does. So don't do that yet.

[Richard Campbell]

And why would you install firmware updates on a device that's working?

[Paul Thurat]

You wouldn't. But on the case of the Xbox console, you actually get prompted. You do it. I don't think you even have a choice. I think you have to do it. So it's probably impacting people on Xbox, not on PC. Well, more people on Xbox, I would say.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was the briefest amuse bouche of all.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah, it was heavy on the bush.

[Leo Laporte]

More boosh than a moose. I don't know what that. That means.

[Paul Thurat]

You got your bouche and my amuse. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm all in hr.

[Paul Thurat]

You wouldn't be the first.

[Leo Laporte]

Heavy.

[Paul Thurat]

Bring the folder over.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Windows Weekly on the air. We have come to that point in the show where we all look forward to the back of the book kicking things off. Mr. Paul Thoratz, tip of the week.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, I think I talked about this last week, but then since then I've written it up. I would say right now I still struggle to use AI for writing. And I don't mean to write for me. I mean, in any capacity. Even though I now have a lot of good examples about how you might do it. I've done some writing recently where I could have used AI to summarize something or whatever it might be. And, you know, I don't. I'm just struggling with. I think I just. I'm stuck in my ways. But, you know, I'VE been working on this. This.netpad app and I'm working on the version that will support multiple tabs, multiple documents. Very complex. I've hit my limit intellectually and also just from a knowledge perspective. I did figure out the fundamental background thing I need to do to make it work, at least on my own. But I did write something about how I'm starting to use this. So if you use Visual Studio, as you would for this type of an app, this also works in Visual Studio code. If you integrate that with GitHub Copilot, which is free, right? And you can pay for it still and get more out of it. But for most people, you could probably just go with the free version. It takes over the auto, like the code completion stuff. That stuff is black magic. And I think that's what I talked about last week. It's like, it's crazy how good that is. Like, it's crazy good. If you write a comment, it will then give you the block of code to do that thing that you say you want to do. That's crazy. But when you don't write a comment and you start, you like just start a line and it fills in like a block. Oh my God. Like, that stuff's really good. I've also gone to AIs that are kind of outside of the product, right? So you can go to anthropic cloud or ChatGPT or actually probably Copilot. I can't say I've tried that. Very specific. I'm using the Windows Presentation foundation, which is 25 ish years old. 20, 25 years. Has a rich body of stack overflow data, you know, and people helping people. It's just awesome. Very specific things. I'm writing a C Sharp app for WPF using the specific control, the specific property I need to get you to do this specific thing. Thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It.

[Paul Thurat]

This stuff spits it out. It explains the code. It's awesome. It is awesome. And then I may or may not have mentioned this. I think I mentioned this, but I mistakenly used the cursor AI editor, right. Which integrates with Anthropic by default, but can also use Copilot to do a code review of the entire app, which was not what I meant to do. I was not ready for this on so many, like, psychologically not ready.

[Richard Campbell]

It wrote criticize you quite this hard.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh my God. Yeah, it was. No, but, but it was, it was like, listen, I don't know what you think you're doing. No, it was, it was actually, it was kind of Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

So you said something interesting though. I love that it explains what it's doing.

[Paul Thurat]

It's the best.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the most valuable part because it's not just spitting out a bunch of code.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I find that very useful for learning.

[Paul Thurat]

I, I, the fact that, that the cursor thing blows my mind because I had decided on my own own that I wanted to further modularize this. I'm not going to use like a design pattern or anything, but I, and it literally, this was the previous version of the app. I had already done some of this work, but it said no, you got to pull out the setting stuff should be its own thing. The file operation should all be its own thing. And I was like, oh my God, I already did have. That's like, I was blown away by this. And then I, it just, I, because of AI, I realized that, like, it's not a big deal, but I had this part of my design that was just unnecessary. Like it just was redundant, you know. So I went through this entire list. So since that happened, I actually went through the entire list and I made the changes I thought I should make and then ignored the ones I didn't care about that I disagreed with maybe or whatever. But yeah, I mean, this is like, I'm not a professional developer. I get it. But this has helped my, this has helped this project. There's no doubt. Right. For me. What's that?

[Richard Campbell]

You've upped your coding game.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, it really. Yeah, yeah. I know enough about it to know that this is incredibly like, it's just incredible. Like these this year. If you're a developer ignoring this, you're just hurting yourself. You're being.

[Richard Campbell]

Now we're sort of at a point now where you're not employable if you're not using it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep, yep. Yeah, you still know what you don't.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the groups I talked to yesterday were the guys working on the Visual Studio Code Insiders edition. So I don't know if you've played with that, but if you want to see some of the new stuff happening in that space showing up in Insiders.

[Paul Thurat]

I've only looked at it. I think it's an extension that might be called. Well, I don't know. I'm always on the wrong computer. I think it's called AI it's not AI Studio. It's some kind of AI add in. But it allows you to run local AI models within.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they're all using Claude.

[Paul Thurat]

You can pick. Well, the thing that's cool about it is you can filter what you're getting. So in my case, because I have the Snapdragon thing, I can say I want a local AI that specifically targets the mpu and that shrinks it down nicely, by the way. It's like three choices. But then you can interact with it. Of course, you can write code to it. You can do that, but you can interact with it in a chat interface as if you were using like anthropic cloud or chat GPT, whatever. It's fascinating. I mean, anyway, yeah, that stuff is really cool. Just, you gotta. Just don't be stupid. Just look at this stuff. Super good. And then two. Two things.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't let it completely rewrite your code.

[Paul Thurat]

No, no, no, no. So by the way, you could do that now for an app. This app, which I would have described as a simple app app, is actually fairly complex now. And I don't know. No. But Brad described to me how we used. I don't know if it was ChatGPT. I think it was ChatGPT to write a game. And, you know, you're not gonna ship it to store or anything, but his kid plays it now and it's like basically like a Tetris type game. And in that case too, he mentioned explicitly that it had a coding problem where the blocks could fall below the part you could see on screen. And he looked at the code and figured out where to change that and fixed it. But I think even the most cynical developer on earth would be shocked by what this can do. And that the right way to use it now at least is you're trying to get over the hump of something. Whatever it is, you can't figure something out. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Ask it. And I think I used the Mark Russinovich example where he said, good, now make it back better. Good, now make it better. Good. Oh, there it is. It's perfect. You know, it's. It's kind of astonishing how little direction you could give it. But you berate it a couple times and then it's like, yeah, no, it's perfect. You know, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's, you know, sufficiently. This will do, right?

[Paul Thurat]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's.

[Paul Thurat]

It's better than you think it is or you already know how good it is. I. That's the.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it's only getting better. Like that work they're doing in that area is astonishing.

[Paul Thurat]

That's astonishing. Yeah. Okay, so for apps, I've got a couple. Speaking of Red Fences 6 is out in beta. This is the Desktop organization utility that they have where you have discrete areas of icons. They've added tab support for that, which is smart. And I know from adding tabs to my app how hard that is, so I appreciate it now. And it's like icon tinting support like you see on mobile, right. Where you can have that kind of style on look, so you can have color schemes and so forth. So if you buy it while it's in beta, it's $899. I think it's going to go up to, I don't know, the final price, $15 or something when it's finally out. It's also available in object desktop. And then separate from that, Pocketcast, which last year made their mobile clients free. And then by the way, you open source them, which is kind of interesting, has now made their desktop and web clients free. And this is the podcast app that I use for the veg. I think, I think kind of a classic.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's. You know, I should. Patrick probably knows if he's listening. For a long time, itunes was completely dominant, right? That was the.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the only way people listen to podcasts. And it was maybe 80 or 90% of our downloads. But I thought podcast is now number two and might even be number one.

[Paul Thurat]

I wonder if it's tied to streaming versus download.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's that. By the way, that's one thing that has changed a lot.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because people are watching YouTube on their TV at home.

[Paul Thurat]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

And watching podcasts. They're watching this show on their screen.

[Paul Thurat]

I know, it's very interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

That's changed. I did not. I would never have predicted that.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't watch. Let me think about this. Yeah. I don't watch a single video podcast in Pocket Cast. I. I think of that as audio. I think of it as one of the options when I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't commute by car anymore, right?

[Paul Thurat]

No. So I have to kind of. Yes. And it's worse when I'm here because. Well, for a lot of reasons. But when I'm home, I'll listen to either a podcast or an audiobook. When I'm at the gym, when I walk, when I'm in the car, when I shave and, you know, getting ready and stuff like that. Here I don't have as much opportunity for that because I don't. I don't go to the gym and I don't explicitly walk, although we walk everywhere, but we're always together, so I don't listen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't Put in head. Headphones.

[Paul Thurat]

No, I'm like, I'm paying attention. So sort of, you know, I'm listening. What are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

People, probably just for future reference. It's a great thing about hearing aids.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You can listen to podcasts and books and look like you're paying attention.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't know. They think it's a hearing aid. So you can hear them better.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. You're like, no, no, I'm talking to AI. It's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

I pulled up my listening methods for run ads and yeah, podcast is not number two behind.

[Paul Thurat]

What's number one?

[Richard Campbell]

ITunes.

[Leo Laporte]

ITunes still.

[Paul Thurat]

ITunes still. That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the same still for us. I don't know how that happens. Yeah, yeah. By the way, if you listen on itunes or actually on podcast or Spotify, please give us a good review. Review. Bombing has hurt us a little bit. Makes it a little harder to sell advertising. If you like this show, just go and give us a. A five star on any of your. Whatever platform you use.

[Paul Thurat]

And if you don't, you know, shut your trap. That's all we're saying.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you hate it, just. Yeah, go away, by the way, because itunes is still dominant. That's where advertisers look. So if you are using.

[Paul Thurat]

It's crazy how. And it's crazy. It's crazy how dominant they are.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, isn't it?

[Paul Thurat]

And there's all these other things. Well, yeah. Spotify is in there. And Cast box. Well, okay. I use Castbox for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick says, oh, wow. For our podcast, itunes is still three times, 300% longer than that of podcast.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. It's crazy. And if you add in, like, oh, well, you don't add it then. I'm sorry, I don't. What does Chrome mean? What's Chrome?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what Chrome is.

[Richard Campbell]

Weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Chrome is people streaming it. Probably.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Oh, just play. Oh, they go to planet. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd also want to filter it to, you know, recent, because I think Pocket has made some big moves lately.

[Paul Thurat]

There was a brief moment where those guys jumped the shark. They did some terrible things with the ui. I used that Castbox app for about a year, and then they finally fixed it all. And at one point, I paid for, like, a lifetime license for all of their clients.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurat]

Which were all separate fees. But this is great. Like, this is a great app. It's the right app. They do a great job of syncing. It's really, really good. It works.

[Leo Laporte]

Do we still have the issue Some of the club shows people were having problems with pocket casts and so for a while we weren't recommending pocket casts. Patrick would not.

[Paul Thurat]

There was something wrong for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Like yeah, yeah, I think it's probably better, but who knows. And he says by the way, yeah, Chrome equals website views. That's what they're on. Chrome watching.

[Paul Thurat]

By the way, just real quick. Have not had a chance to look at this, but it just hit my little, little RSS feed. The FTC is going to continue their antitrust probe of Microsoft that was started by the previous administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh, that's kind of a surprise.

[Paul Thurat]

Well, they also agreed to or not agreed, but they're continuing their attempt to break up Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that one is because they Google lost. Yeah, like that's over. The trial's over. The judge is now.

[Paul Thurat]

But their recommendation could have been like, well, we don't, we don't see a reason that's true that they didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

They said they haven't fired all the lawyers yet.

[Paul Thurat]

Obviously we'll get there.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get there. Just be patient. Just be patient.

[D]

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[Leo Laporte]

What I'm good recommendation. Now it's a time for run as a radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, gentlemen, I give you Richard Campbell. A few weeks ago, I think it was for 9:19. I was talking about this bit of crisis that happened on February 11th when an update to server enforced strong certificates for active directory and if you had been keeping up with your updates for everything, this wasn't a big deal. It was reference to a, to a knowledge base article, a security issue from like two years earlier, almost three years earlier. And but for some folks it did hit them. And for actually some folks that were very contemporary, like if you were using intune esep you had to configure some things and if you hit that date with having not done it, it just locked people out. Now you could disable it. You had to go in and do.

[Leo Laporte]

A reg entry, you had to know.

[Richard Campbell]

What was going on, you had to do all that. But it kicked pretty good messages. So for I, I know folks who had prepared for it and literally sat in waiting all Feb11 waiting for something to die and they were fine. But I did get a chance finally to circle back with Richard Hicks who's been warning about it for forever and he's, you know, the certificate God in this space. I think even Microsoft calls him to, to get some things explained. And so we walk through the whole process and what changes need to be made and what the enforcement looks like. And the bigger case, which is a company right now, there's a regentistry to just disable it so you can keep going as you are, but in September that registry will stop working. So you have a few. What I appreciate was sort of the way Microsoft is signaling this. It's like we're really serious. You need strong certificates for ad to work correctly. And the issue here is lateral movement in an exploit. Typically your exploit is a phishing email of some kind that drops a piece of code on the local machine and that person's probably operating with admin privileges because stupid. And they now do a lateral. And the lateral they usually do once they're inside the network is to attack Active Directory because active directory is 25 years old and some people are still running it like it's 1999. And so there's known exploits. If you're all patched up, you're fine and if you're not, you're not. But this certificate issue, there was just no software fixed to it. You had to get the cert straightened out. And so this was just getting through, getting this stuff done and, and the solutions to. Turns out that through the course of that conversation I was actually able to reach out to some of the Windows people themselves. So I might be having some Windows cert folks coming on in the next few weeks to go a little further into this just gets a good conversation. And you know, Active Directory like Windows isn't going anywhere. It does need a certain amount of care and feeding to keep it running reliably and to keep the system safe. It should not be a path of exploit. And it's. If it's up to date, you're fine. And if it's not, your bad guys can move on you pretty hard and they'll quickly get an administrator account and then you're really in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Runasradio.com show975 I think we've come to the most amused bush of all. Whiskey Bush.

[Richard Campbell]

It's whiskey time. It's whiskey time. Whiskey time. Felt like going to Islay today just, just because you know the land of peat and. And specifically to Ardbeg, which is an Anglicized Scottish Gaelic word meaning the small promont. Which by the way, there's only 3,000 people living on the. On the isle of Islay and about a quarter of them still speak Scottish Gaelic. Like wow, that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Middle Ages wow thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean things to know about island. We've talked about this before. It's. It's one of the. It's kind of the warmest bit of Scotland actually in the sense that it's almost never. Almost never gets snow, rarely even gets a frost. But it's always wind windy. It's only degrees of how windy you know, it's. And the climate is such that it's not good for trees but it is good for peat bogs which is why they, they dry their malt with peat. And where the peaty whiskey comes from is Islay. They're all Petey there. Now the particular part of Islay we're talking about here is in the southeast corner which is right on the coat, right along the coast. And there's actually almost four distilleries within just a few kilometers of each other in a row row from Port Ellen, which is the port area and one of the largest ports on island. And its distillery is actually closed. Then Lefroy, then Lagavulin, then Art Bag. They're right beside each other. They're all on the A846 and they're small, they're little distilleries, they're cute and they've been around some of them around a long time. Ardbeg opened in in 1815. Duncan McDoodle and that's from the McDougal families that had been been the leading klansman with the McDonald's in that area for the previous thousand years. Wow. Set up the. Rented the farms in the area to grow barley and open a distillery. And the McDougall family would own Ard Bag for about 140 years, operating in with just a pair of still small operation. The only time it really shut down in those early days was a cross prohibition when everybody was struggling. But it wasn't until the 1950s when this whiskey business was changing as a whole. And Hiram Walker, that's the Canadian company alongside the Distillers company, which is Scottish, made an investment, basically split the company, bought it from the McDougalls and split it between them. And although by 1979 Hiram Walker owned it up. Right. But it didn't go particularly well for them. They tried to modernize it, but it's quite a small distillery. You know, Ils got its access problems. You really can only get there by ferry. So you know, heat and power and all those things are expensive. So it actually shut down for eight years in the 80s, 81, 89. It's completely shut down and then reopened under a temporary. In a temporary owner, basically a private equity firm who eventually in 1990, 1996, sold it to Glenn Marangie. So that's the Spey side. And they tooled it up, got new things running, switched over to centralized maltings out of Port Ellen. And that's where Ardbeg comes from. The Ardbeg 10 that we're talking about today, first produced in 2000. So the, the 200 year old Ardbag that mostly sold in the US with the barrels and so forth. Largely that company disappeared. It was reborn with Glamorangi in that time. And a few years later, lvmh, that's Moet Hennessy. Louis Vuitton bought both Glenmorangie Ardbag and a few others. And that's the conglomerate that kind of runs it today. And they immediately started winning awards. They had a lot of old laid up barrels and things. In fact the most expensive whiskey ever sold in history now is an Ardbeg. In 2022 they revealed cask number three, which is a cask that was laid up in 1975. And they auctioned it off and got £16 million for it.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you drink that or just put it on a pedestal?

[Richard Campbell]

That's a great question. Here's the scary part. How do you know if it's good?

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like that's been laid up a long time, but I imagine they probably thief from it. And they made a huge deal. More than a million pounds were donated into the community in Iowa.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it that they Build this as the peatiest, smokiest, complex single mold of them all.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, when we. When I generally think about drinking a peaty whiskey because, you know, I have a momentary lapse in reason. It's probably going to be a Lagavulin, which runs at about 35 ppm, or 35 parts per million a peat. Ardbeg is 55. Oh, wow. Okay. And it's. And it, by the way. And that's their lightest. Right. They're supernova's over a hundred. That's a lot of pad. Yeah, it's dirty, right? It's like you have. If you had an urge to lick a dirty ashtray, this is the product for you. But the crazy part is like, They've only had one set of stills the whole time until 2018. They finally built their second set of stills because they're gearing up because as they got themselves reorganized, they do really well. They make very good whiskey, but it is extremely peaceful. And the Art Bag 10, which is not particularly expensive, you'll find it for about $70 US is only 10 years old. It's a pale straw color. It's aged in bourbon, like I said, at 55 ppm, which is quite high. Probably the highest regular production. And the only way you can describe the taste is oily and peaty. It is a big, rich smoky.

[Leo Laporte]

On their website, the tasting notes are sea spray. Tari rope.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

An immense smoky intensity.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know, all those distilleries I described, but even the ones up in the north, like Bomar and Budhaven, they're right on the coast, so they take a lot of salt with that windy.

[Leo Laporte]

Ocean all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it's often a character of these whiskeys. But let me tell you, you don't taste any salt. Nard baked 10. You taste smoke, smells what you taste.

[Paul Thurat]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

But people. There are people who. Who enjoy it.

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's like I said, it's a style, right. It's like, do you like this sort of thing? And when I'm cooking a brisket is when, you know, so I'm already full of.

[Leo Laporte]

You're already smoky, right?

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. You know, but, you know, I'm covered. I'm carting with smoke already. Then a smoky whiskey goes very nicely with that. Typically smoky whiskeys and cigars go together, but I don't like cigars, so I'm not gonna do that.

[Paul Thurat]

That's because you have a mouth and with taste buds in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Cigars are fantastic. What are you talking About.

[Richard Campbell]

I am. I am instantly nauseated.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you a pipe smoker? What do you smoke?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I don't smoke anything.

[Leo Laporte]

The new thing I just read an article in New Yorker is these little white pouches that you put in your cheek.

[Paul Thurat]

Not.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's not tobacco. It's just nicotine.

[Paul Thurat]

It's like a tea bag full of nicotine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a nicotine delivery system.

[Paul Thurat]

And if you throw it on the ground, it explodes.

[Leo Laporte]

And the flavor. Flavors are like mint coffee from the.

[Paul Thurat]

From the companies that brought you vapes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's sort of like chew, but it's not tobacco anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So it's going directly to. Concentrated cancer.

[Paul Thurat]

I was gonna say. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't know. You know, the. The main side effects are heart disease.

[Richard Campbell]

Great.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, how pleasant.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I was looking for something to do this weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing carcinogenic. These are called Zinn tins.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or in. Or in. In Sweden, they're called snooze. And I just read this whole article about how it's taking the world by storm.

[Richard Campbell]

Wall street loves them because, you know, because vaping's come falling out of style.

[Paul Thurat]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Enough kids now. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

This is direct nicotine.

[Paul Thurat]

This is as. As pot has become legal across the United States, I always figured that this terrible smoke. Smell of pot. Smoke would disappear. Beer. But no, it's just everywhere. It's like, guys, gummies are a thing. Look into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Like, what are you doing? Why do you have to stink the whole place up?

[Leo Laporte]

It really stinks.

[Richard Campbell]

And, you know your dosage, too, so no surprises.

[Paul Thurat]

Right, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, you know, often get one of. I get one of these as a.

[Leo Laporte]

Gift every so often.

[Richard Campbell]

And I will drink it, but I rarely would ever buy it.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the art of it. Okay, you're back to the art.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. He's back on. He's back on topic.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm. I'm on topic.

[Paul Thurat]

He's like, we've. I've allowed you to digress long enough. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fascinating as always. If you're looking for tari rope.

[Richard Campbell]

Tari rope.

[Leo Laporte]

We got it.

[Paul Thurat]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

I remember. I remember a whiskey described as old leather and pencil shavings. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one thing if whiskey tastes like that, but there's wine that tastes like that and really draw the line.

[Paul Thurat]

At the taco bar. They always want us to try, like, new things. Right. I don't like smoky drinks, as Richard knows. Yeah. So it's like, oh, you got to try. Like, you should try to spaghett it with Mezcal instead of tequila. And I'm like, no, I don't like smoky drinks. The guy says, you should like it. I'm like, no, I'm with you. I should like it. I. But I'm telling you, I do not like it.

[Leo Laporte]

What does that mean?

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You should like it.

[Paul Thurat]

You should like it. It's. I like it. You should like it. You know, it's like, you know, you should like it. I, I, I have failings. This is among them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hysterical. My friends, we've come to the end of this fabulous edition of Windows Weekly. Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find the podcast, runasradio or.net Rocks the show he does with Carl Franklin. Or am I doing that backwards again? No, I think I got it right this time.

[Richard Campbell]

I nailed it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I got it right this time. He hails from British Columbia. Are you going to stay home for a little while or are you headed out?

[Richard Campbell]

Nope, we got, I think we got one more week.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

But the grandchilds do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy, how exciting. So you're gonna go into town for that one?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we'll be in town for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In town. I love that.

[Richard Campbell]

I suspect I won't see my wife for a few weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, she's gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

She's already loaded a set of stuff over there. She's got a bed set up for herself.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this your, Is this her first.

[Richard Campbell]

First grandchild?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

So I'm not ready for that date. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You got a little while yet there, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

So you'll be all right? Maybe.

[Paul Thurat]

We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we all have adult children now, so. Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

But, yeah, they'll find a new way to disappoint.

[Richard Campbell]

End of March's MVP Summit, and then followed immediately by the Fabric Conference in Vegas.

[Leo Laporte]

We call that March Madness around March Madness.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thorat'[e-mail] Become a Premium Member there. I mean, there's plenty of free stuff, but there's even better stuff behind the paywall, and it's not expensive. I've been a premium member for years. T H U R R o t t.com his books, Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11 are [e-mail] and he's joining us from his second home in Mexico City, Roma Norte. You gonna stay there for a while? Are you coming back home?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You're having fun?

[Paul Thurat]

Beginning of May, probably.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, that's Nice. Basically skipping winter.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was supposed to be an eternal spring. Come on, man.

[Paul Thurat]

It is an eternal spring. But I. You know, taxes were hard from here. This is not easy.

[Leo Laporte]

Some things were hard from here.

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah. I mean, I started as I told my wife. I mean, we could probably just wait on this because I don't think anyone's checking anyway. I mean, what's the difference? Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I, you know, I really. No, that's not. I don't want to get on a list or anything.

[Paul Thurat]

I think it's a little late for that.

[Leo Laporte]

But when you fire 6,300 people from the IRS, it seems as if maybe nobody be looking at these. I mean, if I had a refund coming, I might.

[Paul Thurat]

Right, But. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They want money a lot.

[Paul Thurat]

I don't get a lot of checks from the IRS.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not lately. Actually, we did. We got a $1,200 check a couple of years ago. Then we got a letter a year ago just saying, oh, that was a mistake. Can we have our money back?

[Paul Thurat]

Yeah, we want you and you have.

[Leo Laporte]

One week to give it back or we're going to start charging you double interest.

[Paul Thurat]

Oh, God. Well, maybe they should be fired. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe they should be. You know what it is? It's a computer problem. You know that. I mean, these are old mainframes and stuff and, and cobol. And there's nothing they can do about it. If they would just move to Delphi.

[Paul Thurat]

Just hasn't been the same since Y2K.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, I'm Leo Laporte. We are so glad you are here. We do Windows Weekly on a Wednesday at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Please join us if you wish live. But of course you can get it at the website TWIT TV www. There's a dedicated YouTube channel. Great way to share clips and, you know, subscribe. Patrick tells me that the issue with pocket casts is rare. It happens sometimes to people who put their club feed into pocket casts. And he says usually if you just wait a bit and do it again, it will be fine because you have.

[Paul Thurat]

A custom URL or whatever. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're in the club, you get your own private URL that's ad free.

[Paul Thurat]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And so you have to re enter that in Pocketcasts and for some people that was a problem. It's not very. It's not very common and it's easily resolved just by trying again. Try again.

[Paul Thurat]

Turn it off. Turn it on.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned. If you're watching live. Ray Kurzweil is coming up. Intelligent Machines. And we will be back here next Wednesday with Windows Weekly. See you guys.