Windows Weekly 924: No One Wants To Be Plumbing

Summary

Windows Weekly Episode 924: "No One Wants To Be Plumbing"

Release Date: March 19, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Platform: TWiT.tv

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1. Windows Update Removes Copilot from Some Devices

The episode kicks off with a discussion about the recent Windows update that controversially removed the Copilot feature from a subset of Windows computers. Paul Thurrott highlights the mixed reactions from users:

Paul Thurrott [04:47]: "Uninstalling the Copilot app on a lot of computers... is just the perfect Microsoft Windows moment of all time."

He explains that while some users perceive the removal positively, fearing forced installations in future updates, others view it as a misstep reflecting poor quality control within Microsoft's update processes.

2. FTC Proceeds with Antitrust Probe into Microsoft

The hosts delve into the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) decision to continue its antitrust investigations into Microsoft. This move signifies ongoing regulatory scrutiny over Microsoft's business practices, particularly concerning its licensing in cloud computing and data usage for AI training.

Paul Thurrott [40:29]: "There's an element to our recovery government which is kind of, you know, they don't like big tech."

Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell discuss the potential implications of these probes on Microsoft's operations and market strategies.

3. Microsoft Discontinues Power Adapter Inclusion with Surface Devices in Europe

A notable Windows Weekly topic is Microsoft's decision to stop including power adapters with Surface PCs sold in Europe, citing environmental concerns aimed at reducing electronic waste.

Paul Thurrott [43:15]: "The stated reason for this was to meet the needs in the EU to not have waste."

The hosts debate the practicality of this move, considering that while it may align with environmental goals, it could inconvenience users who rely on proprietary chargers.

4. Updates on Windows Insider Builds and New Features

Paul Thurrott provides an overview of the latest developments in the Windows Insider Program, including multiple builds targeting different update schedules like Canary and Release Preview builds. Notably, he mentions enhancements to the Windows Security app and new features in apps like Notepad and the Snipping Tool.

Paul Thurrott [06:12]: "Voice access improvements... a new functionality in Snipping Tool called Draw and Hold."

These updates aim to integrate more AI-driven tools, reflecting Microsoft's broader push towards incorporating AI into its ecosystem.

5. Introduction of Microsoft Copilot for Gaming

A significant highlight is the announcement of Copilot for Gaming, an AI-powered assistant designed to aid gamers in overcoming challenging parts of games without resorting to cheat codes or walkthroughs. This feature is currently in the testing phase through the Xbox Insider program and is set to expand to PC and console platforms.

Paul Thurrott [91:30]: "Microsoft announced a product called Copilot for gaming... to help gamers improve their skills and manage their time."

The hosts express enthusiasm for how AI can enhance gaming experiences by providing real-time assistance and improving user engagement.

6. AI Integration and Its Impact on Daily Use

The conversation shifts to a broader discussion about AI's role in everyday tasks and its integration into various applications. The hosts share personal anecdotes about using AI tools like GitHub Copilot for coding and reflect on the evolving relationship between humans and AI assistants.

Paul Thurrott [58:39]: "AI do it, and it's like, yep, it's better. It's just better every time."

They explore the benefits and challenges of relying on AI for productivity, creativity, and problem-solving, emphasizing the importance of human oversight in AI-assisted tasks.

7. Microsoft’s AI Efforts and Future Directions

Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell discuss Microsoft's strategic focus on AI, including the development of AI features across its product line. They touch upon Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and the continuous evolution of AI capabilities within the Windows ecosystem.

Paul Thurrott [12:33]: "Voice access suggestions... AI can actually understand commands like this."

The hosts speculate on future AI integrations, such as more advanced voice assistants and deeper AI functionalities in software applications.

8. Microsoft’s Commitment to Accessibility

The episode also highlights Microsoft's ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility through hardware and software innovations. They commend the availability of the Xbox Adaptive Joystick and customizable mouse designs, aimed at making gaming and computing more inclusive.

Paul Thurrott [94:39]: "Microsoft announced the availability of their Xbox Adaptive Joystick... only $29.99."

These initiatives showcase Microsoft's dedication to catering to diverse user needs, ensuring that technology remains accessible to all.

9. Closing Remarks and Upcoming Segments

As the episode wraps up, the hosts briefly touch upon upcoming topics, including deeper dives into AI advancements, Microsoft’s strategic moves, and community-driven segments like Club Twit Discord events.

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Thurrott [04:47]: "Uninstalling the Copilot app on a lot of computers... is just the perfect Microsoft Windows moment of all time."

• Paul Thurrott [40:29]: "There's an element to our recovery government which is kind of, you know, they don't like big tech."

• Paul Thurrott [43:15]: "The stated reason for this was to meet the needs in the EU to not have waste."

• Paul Thurrott [91:30]: "Microsoft announced a product called Copilot for gaming... to help gamers improve their skills and manage their time."

• Paul Thurrott [58:39]: "AI do it, and it's like, yep, it's better. It's just better every time."

• Paul Thurrott [12:33]: "Voice access suggestions... AI can actually understand commands like this."

• Paul Thurrott [94:39]: "Microsoft announced the availability of their Xbox Adaptive Joystick... only $29.99."

---

Conclusion

In this episode of Windows Weekly, the hosts provide an in-depth analysis of Microsoft's latest updates and strategic initiatives, particularly focusing on the integration of AI into Windows and gaming platforms. They address regulatory challenges, environmental considerations in product design, and the ongoing enhancements within the Windows Insider Program. Additionally, the conversation underscores Microsoft's commitment to accessibility and the evolving landscape of AI-assisted technologies. For listeners interested in Microsoft's ecosystem, AI advancements, and the future of Windows, this episode offers valuable insights and expert commentary.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. We have things to talk about. Indeed we do. Why last week's Windows update removed Copilot for some computers. Good news. They're bringing Copilot to the Xbox. So there's always that. The FTC has decided to, yes, go ahead with its antitrust probe of Microsoft and why Microsoft is no longer including the power supply with surface PCs in Europe. All that more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Ferrata and Richard Campbell. Episode 924, recorded Wednesday, March 19, 2025. No one wants to be plumbing. Hey, you winners and you dozers. It's time for Windozers Weekly, the show. We get together with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell and talk about Microsoft. Thurat is here. He's at his domicile in Mexico City. He's of course also on the [e-mail]. good day, Paul. Good afternoon, I guess, or buenos tardes, as they say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know what this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, Hit it hard.

[Leo Laporte]

And from beautiful Madeira park in British Columb, Richard Campbell of Run as Radio fame. Ay, you hoser. Try to speak native languages of.

[Richard Campbell]

How's it going? A.

[Leo Laporte]

How's it going? E. You want.

[Richard Campbell]

You want the. You want the view? It's cloudy day today.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's see the view. A cloudy day in Madeira Park.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. The ocean is flat and quiet.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be honest, the cloudy and sunny days are pretty indistinguishable.

[Richard Campbell]

Bad. They. The sea lions have moved on because the orcas were around, but the eagles have been active.

[Leo Laporte]

So when the sea lions were there, was it. Were they noisy?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, very.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The noxious critters, they're kind of. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they smell kind of great.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm kind of grateful that the orcas moving them along so you can hear them for miles.

[Paul Thurrott]

The guy who lives below us as a baby, and the baby's not always here, but he's probably here about half the week, we'll say. And he never wakes us up in the middle of the night. But when he. You can hear him when. When he. I call him the eaglet, which nobody here understands, but it's because of his bizarre, screechy, whiny scream thing that he does all the time. I'm like, is there a bird of prey murdering something downstairs? What is that? It's a baby.

[Leo Laporte]

I came out the door yesterday and there was a bird of prey on the stair railing right there. And it scared the crap out of me. I think it was a. I think we have red tail hawks. But it was big. It was like big. It might have been a vulture.

[Richard Campbell]

It was like.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, in fact, if it was a vulture, should I be worried?

[Paul Thurrott]

A vulture?

[Richard Campbell]

What does it know that you don't know?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they hang around waiting for.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not kidding. I was on a walk back when we still live in Massachusetts, and I looked up and I could see the bird circling. And I was like, oh, that's cool. And I walked five or ten more minutes. I look, he's still up there. And I'm like, is he circling me? Like, does he? He's like. He's like, go ahead, fatty trip. How dare you. You know, I'm like. As well. I'm like, what's happening? Like, I think. I think he's over me.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's all I can imagine. He was like, he's got to come flying down, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've survived 24 hours. Maybe I'll be okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you're okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And you've survived months.

[Richard Campbell]

We have black vault surrounding. You should all. But it's typically dead seals on the beaches, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that happens. Yeah, they clean them up. Thanks for that.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, speaking of moribund, how's Windows doing these days, guys?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm glad you asked. It's doing great.

[Richard Campbell]

Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Opening line peak Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a good one. Yeah, it's a very special.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a. I feel like I'm partying in the bunker at this point. I'm just trying to pretend reality isn't happening.

[Richard Campbell]

You're ignoring the cans of gasoline.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. How close to the Russians? No, that's a little too close to home right now. Okay. So how's Windows? It's okay. The best story this week possibly was that the patch Tuesday updates from, I guess, whatever. That was a week ago, eight days ago, whatever. Apparently uninstalling the Copilot app on a lot of computers, not all computers. That is hilarious and beautiful and is just the perfect Microsoft Windows moment of all time, you know? And so of course you get all this feedback on social media from people who see the. The headline and they're like, I see that as a good thing. Or like, what's the problem? It's like, I'll tell you what the problem is. They're going to force install it next month. You don't get rid of it, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, sorry, but just a reminder that we can take stuff away and we can put it back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this is, God, this just is an awful showcase for how terrible the quality is right now in this group. But anyway, so that happened and then I think after that it's pretty much an incredible run of insider stories. Right. So just to kind of put where we are in the schedule, like I said, last week was Patch Tuesday, so next week will be week D and week D we're going to get the preview update for what will be the stable update that we get in Patch Tuesday in April. Right. And so there's a bunch of stuff around that, but we have multiple builds since last we spoke, including today we got a Canary channel build which has some minor changes to the security, you know, the Windows security app and some other small things. Not a big deal. And of course Canary, nobody even knows who Canary is, so whatever, doesn't matter. But more, I think more important was today. And then also I don't remember when, but I think late last week we got various release preview builds. And so these are the preview of the preview, if that makes sense. The last pre release build before it goes to week D, if that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

So yeah, but is it, shouldn't that be in like beta rather than in the release build? What's gonna, where is it gonna go in week D? It's still gonna be in the release build.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a. Well, so there's conflicting language around this. Right. So what you're referencing is a much more, I would call it engineering based era where terms and words made sense and meant something and we used them and they were accurate and it's hard to say. So the preview update, as I will continue to call it, because that's the name, is sometimes referred to as an optional update. And so in some ways that's a better name because, well, they're both true. But you can get it in stable. You don't have to be part of the Windows Insider program. You can optionally go into Windows Update and say, yeah, I would like this thing now. It wants you to always get those things, but if you wanted to as a one off, you could choose to do that. And so they don't really always follow this logical progression where it works its way from dev to beta to release preview to stable. It's not the way. I'm still trying to get comfortable with that. And then Richard's comment about beta, of course is giving me PTSD now. But it's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

There's an order to all of these, right. Isn't there an order? Can't we expect to see a feature in Canary?

[Paul Thurrott]

There is an order, but it's over.

[Richard Campbell]

Dev and then it goes over to beta.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's random. And it's also a flawed algorithm because sometimes it skips things. So today we got a release Preview build for 24H2. Last week, I think it was sometime we got a release preview 2 release preview builds actually for 23H2, but also for Windows 10. Right. So that's always hilarious. And then let me just see what's in these things because we've already talked about most of this stuff, honestly. But the, you know, live caption improvements. Right. Voice access improvements, some task manager stuff. Remember they're recalculating how they display cpu, workload, percentage, whatever it is. Some widget stuff. Again, not major. I think it was as recently as last week. It might have been the week before, but at some point I was like, I don't know, I feel like we're building up something. But then I look at this stuff and I'm like, yeah, not really, you know, there's really not much going on here. They did pull an update from 23H2, you know, in 24H2 they added those labels to the context menu, to the little hierarchical icons so that you can see that they were cut, copy, paste, whatever the choices are. And actually they pulled that now and that might not actually make it into 23H2, at least this month. So I guess we'll see. Or this coming month. Yeah. And then what was the. Is there? I'm trying to find out what's in Windows 10. Oh yes. So nothing. There it goes. Actually nothing important. So the, the last big update there was the inclusion of the new Outlook app, of course, which, you know, everyone loves, and no controversy there at all.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta tell you, on this machine now, the new Outlook app is the full time app. I've actually removed the other icon.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I still have another machine.

[Richard Campbell]

Over there with the old one on.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I was more impacted by Skype and I just, you know, I have a, like a Winget script that I use when I blow stuff onto a new computer. And I was just looking at that this morning because on this computer I'm reviewing, it seems like a couple things were missing and I don't know why, but I looked at it just today, literally, and one of the items in there is Skype. And I was like, well, I guess I can get rid of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Still there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get rid of that little guy that's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta tell you, I made a call on Skype like literally this week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just amazing because. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know you have till May.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

It sounded great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The app, terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought you made a call like deleted it. You actually made a call using.

[Paul Thurrott]

I made a call call about Skype. He made a call on using Skype.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're going to call it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is what we thought we're calling it. Right, Exactly. He's dead, Jim. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

It does sound great. But the good news is the codec survives. So yeah, teams will still is still.

[Richard Campbell]

There and admittedly the client is horrible and filled with terrible people. Right. Like it's been. It's been hijacked by all kinds of exploits.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's a lot of spam and stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's an incredible amount of spam. You get added to groups that are like these bitcoin groups or whatever they are.

[Leo Laporte]

And how do people think that works?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because it must work. I'm in that group.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I should buy some bitcoin.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I just got lucky to get pulled into this.

[Leo Laporte]

So lucky.

[Paul Thurrott]

I saw this headline yesterday, I think that said Apple messages just saved me from the worst messages spam I've ever seen. And all I could think was if you had a pixel, you wouldn't have even seen it, you idiot. Yeah, you know, like the Apple doesn't do anything to protect you from spam. What are you talking about? That's crazy. But anyway, okay, not to get off.

[Leo Laporte]

Topic, you can report it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, good luck. I. So let me see. Actually I probably. No, it's like the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of like the head of the. The hoa. I'm gonna report you.

[Paul Thurrott]

How many. You know, it's like a fun. You know, remember the commercial with the. The owl and it was the Tootsie Pop. How many licks does it take to get to the center? He's like 1, 2 and then each at least 3. How many taps and swipes does it take to get into a message in Apple messages and then mark it as spam and delete it? It's way more than you think it is. It might be double digit like steps. It's crazy. It's stupid how hard that is. It's just horrible. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to get off on a tangent. I just think it. Talking about bad software, I don't know, it just came up. I'm losing track because there's so many of these things, but dev and beta in 24H2 and then beta in 23H2. Both got updates as well last week. And the big thing there is voice access suggestions. If you have a Snapdragon X Copilot Plus PC enrolled in dev or beta, which I do, you can now talk to it to run apps. But it's not like a Sierra game where you have to get the. Or an old Infocom game where you have to get the wording exactly right. Yeah, it will actually. It's using AI to understand. Like, you're saying something like this, which is a feature, I have to say. This thing has needed since this feature has existed. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It almost makes me want to drag out Colossal Cave Adventure.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good chat.

[Richard Campbell]

GPT to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I just opened my Skype and wow, look at this. It says I have a subscription to unlimited calling in North America with my Harman Kardon invoke speaker.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

But you have to know where that speaker is.

[Leo Laporte]

This is like Arche going here. I wonder if I've been paying for that.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is. This is like a. A page of dead technology collected one place.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

All in one spot. And it's a pretty old picture of me, too, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like it, though. Yeah, it's like a MAD magazine drawing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it is from MAD Magazine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good. Okay. Because it looks like that style.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my one appearance in MAD magazine.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's that guy's name? Al Jaffee. That's what I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I can't. Dick. Dick DeBartolo, who, of course was on our show all the time, wrote the. Wrote me into a. Wrote me and Lisa into a MAD magazine. So we both have Mad images. I wonder how much I'm paying for this. Expires October 25, 2025.

[Richard Campbell]

Except for that part where the whole thing goes away in May.

[Leo Laporte]

View purchase history. You haven't purchased anything yet. So maybe just because that came with a Harman Kardon, which has long been reverted to its.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And like I said, I wonder if.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, base materials. It's been. It's been recycled.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a pile of microplastic now.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to delete all the credit cards they have on file card.

[Paul Thurrott]

You got to spell this right there, Diligent.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because. Well, I don't want to. What is the. Auto recharge is not enabled.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's the Harman Kardon invoke was from 2017.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you remember that? You tap the head and they give you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it Was a.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was a nice little speaker.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know where it is now.

[Richard Campbell]

It was their. You know, the. Their entry into the voice speaker unit last, and it la. And it died first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, well. Oh, well.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And then just some app removed in Windows 11. Oh, well, there is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, well.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, shucks. Oh, these things happen, you know. How does that happen, actually?

[Paul Thurrott]

How does what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Remove an app by accident in an update.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Really bad coding practices. I don't know. That's a good question. I have no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm wondering if. Oops, I'm on the wrong side. There we go. I'm wondering. And so are you. How did this get. How did this. We got all out of order. Okay, we're all back. For those of you watching, I am in the left speaker. I'm thinking there was one guy on the build team who had uninstalled copilot, and they probably run a program that says, what are the changes? And he's the build guy. And they had all the changes, and it got copied into the changes. Like it had already been. It had been removed from the build computer or something. I mean, I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's probably just a manifest, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or maybe a line got deleted and because it was deleted, it was uninstalled. If it was there. Kind of. I don't. I. I mean, I'm just. You're making me speculate. I hate speculating. No, I don't know. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Wild. So wild. Anyway, I'm going to disappear. You continue to talk.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of times people will say to me, do you have any idea why Microsoft would. I'll just invent something like, stop, get. You know, get rid of the old Outlook. And I'd be like, does it matter why? Or are we just going to move on to what? You know, like, it doesn't matter why. Like, it's just why it's gone. You're acting like this rationale.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is there air? You just. It is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so they're also within these various Windows Insider builds and channels, there are various app updates occurring. So the Paint app is being updated. You would think it would say here, but I believe it is across all channels. And if you have a Copilot plus PC and use Microsoft Paint, you have a feature called Co Creator, and Co Creator is where you can draw in paint and then use the text prompt over on the side, and it will use the combination of the two to create an image and they're evolving that so that it will do that try again thing, which is kind of the, you know, when you're generating code, you're like, do it again. Do it a little bit better. Can you make a little bit better? You know, just keep doing it like that. I haven't tried this yet, but I've never been super impressed by the local AI stuff, frankly. But anyway, that's coming. And then Notepad and Snipping tool are also getting new features. And this part I'm unclear on because these features are in Dev and Canary. It's not clear if they're only for Copilot plus PC. So I actually, I haven't looked at it yet. Actually. I did enroll a normal, like a non Copilot plus PC in the dev channel to see what this is like, but on my Surface laptop. Actually. Let me just do it here and see what this one. This is not on Insider, but I just want to see what it comes up with. Yeah, no, actually it does have this stuff. So this is just a normal computer. All right, I think I just answered my question. And it does have the Copilot menu now. It has the Microsoft account, you know, avatar with a link so you can go see your AI credit balance. So this is telling me then that this is not a Copilot PC feature. So everyone's going to get this. So now you can paste text or write text in Notepad and you'll be able to use the rewriting tools. Right. Summarize, make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone, make a poem. By the way, strongly recommend everyone uses the poem thing. It's hilarious. Completely worthless, but hilarious. So that's cool. Actually. So that's coming. I guess that's just coming to everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to have somebody on intelligent machines on the next show who says that AI is a existential threat to humankind because it's going to become so smart that it's just going to eliminate us and it won't need us anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

The super intelligent hypothesis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I'm going to counter that with.

[Leo Laporte]

The future of life.

[Paul Thurrott]

Basically, what it can do is turn any writing into the lorax story from Dr. Seuss. Yeah. So if you think that's existential, I mean, maybe you're onto something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're not there yet, I'm guessing, is what the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. We're not there yet. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Not quite at that point, irritatingly, to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

They've also added a recent menu A recent files menu to file, you know, file like file recent. And then you can see your recent files in Notepad. Right. That's a feature that should have been there for a long time. The reason that's irritating is because it's actually on my to do list for my Notepad replacement app. And now Microsoft did it first. Jerks. Anyway, it looks like you did it. Okay, Microsoft, I'm not going to dump on it too much, but that's fine. And then there's a new functionality in Snipping Tool called Draw and Hold. It's fascinating to me that Snipping tool has gone from being a very basic kind of screen capture utility to this thing that actually has a bunch of functionality now. It's really good at taking an image that has text in it and just taking the text out of it image to text recognition or whatever you call it is kind of amazing. And so Draw and Hold builds on the kind of mini menu you get in there for drawing tools. Like, you get like a pen and a highlighter and some shapes and things. And what it lets you do is freehand draw using the mouse or your pen or your finger, I would imagine. And if you on the final line of that thing, because of course, what it looks like is a child's drawing that you would hang on the fridge. But if you just hold it there for a second, it pops. It makes a line straight, which you know. Yeah. And then from there you can resize, move, adjust, whatever, as needed. So actually, that's pretty cool. They're also making the snipping tool extensible, which is kind of fascinating. I haven't looked at this too deeply either, but there is now an API. So if you want to call the snipping tool from your own app, you can actually get at functionality from Snipping Tool. You don't have to bring up the whole app. You can actually just bring up the part you need. So you could, I guess, use it to make the basis of a, I don't know, your own screenshot app, maybe one that includes the mouse cursor. Right. Which is one of the features Snipping tool still lacks for some reason, although you have to think that's coming. And there's some documentation about that up on Microsoft. Learn if you're a developer and think that might be of use. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's pretty darn exciting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm glad you think so. It is what it is, I guess. I don't know what to tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, before we move on to Other equally thrilling.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm hoping I'll catch your attention somewhere in this show.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm paying attention.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, I mean, I'll interest you.

[Leo Laporte]

You will interest me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't. I can't invent the news. Well, actually, we're getting pretty close. Maybe I can. Maybe I'll start doing that. I'll do my.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's something copilot be good at.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Hey, it's boring today. Copilot, could you make up some news?

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like it would be really cool if I could say to AI and I'm sure you'd appreciate this too, hey, check the week's Windows and Microsoft news and assemble a show rundown for us for a show that runs about two hours with four ad breaks. And put that up in notion and let me know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I could probably do it in notion. I could probably do it right now as we're talking because this is a little nose thing down in the corner, like whatever that is. Notion. AI like note. Then I get it. Notion.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a nose really?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's a nose with eyes. Right? Like it's a little face.

[Leo Laporte]

Hysterical.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I've paid so little attention to it that I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have never clicked on it on purpose. But now when you're doing the ad, I'm going to do that, click it.

[Leo Laporte]

And see if you can write the show for us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm going to see what it does.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. While Paul is busy futzing around with AI this would be an opportune time for me to tell you about our fine sponsor for this show. These are actually great guys. US Cloud. What do you think they do? They are the number one, number one top, number one in the world. Microsoft Unified support replacement third party support for Microsoft. In fact, we've been talking about them for a few months now. So I would hope that you understand that there is a cloud component, though. We're going to talk about that in a second. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. That number just went up. That's awesome. And one of the reasons they're popular with big companies and small is they save you money. Switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. But I said to them, I said, great, you're less expensive, but it doesn't mean anything unless you're as good as my. They said, as good as. We're better. We. You get better support for less for instance, 2 times faster average time to resolution than Microsoft. Twice as fast. And you know what, time to resolution is a very important metric. Especially when the network's down, your hair's on fire. The fact that the cavalry can march in and save you is awesome. Twice as fast. Plus they have the best engineers. I talked about this average of 16 years experience with Break Fix and Microsoft support. But now US Cloud is excited to tell you about something that kind of lives up to their name. And this is something I don't think Microsoft would ever do. They have a new Azure cost optimization service. So I mean, I think this is the case with everybody. When's the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? If it's been a while and for most people it probably is just the kind of thing you just, you know, you add to it over time. You probably have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on and it's kind of like, well, we don't really know. How would we find out? Well, here's the good news. Saving on Azure is easier than you think. With US Cloud, they now offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. With expert guidance, you'll get access to US Cloud senior engineers. Those guys I talked about with and gals with an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. I mean really top senior engineers. They will help you identify all of the places where your Azure spend is going. At the end of the eight weeks you'll have an interactive dashboard. It will identify and you don't, you don't have to act on it, but you will now know you'll see the rebuild and downscale opportunities, the resources you're just not using. So now you can reallocate those precious IT dollars. By the way, I know they're precious. I've never yet talked to an IT director who said, oh yeah, our dollars are not precious. These are precious IT dollars. You can reallo allocate them toward needed resources. In fact, you could put those dollars towards even greater savings by using U.S. cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a lot of U.S. cloud customers have done. But you don't have to eliminate your unified spend. Save money. Seems like a good idea. Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming, he gave US Cloud five stars. He said, and I'm quoting quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month, not A massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance. And you can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com right now. Book a call, find out how much your team can save. The best support US based team smart engineers twice as fast, half as much uscloud.com It's a no brainer. Book a call today. Get faster Microsoft Support for less. USCloud.com we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. That's the kind of support I appreciate. All right, now let's see. We did the Windows 11 hilarity. Is there more Microsoft news or should we just go home?

[Paul Thurrott]

There is more. I did do a quick summary of our show notes. It just took a bulleted list and made a shorter bullet list. So that's not particularly interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you have to ask it like to go out and check all the news sources and say, you know, here, I'll do it with perplexity because perplexity is connected to the today's Internet.

[Paul Thurrott]

To the Internet and whatnot.

[Leo Laporte]

To the Internet. Okay, I'll just see what we get here.

[Paul Thurrott]

In the meantime, Richard, I'm curious if you have heard anything about this. So this is the type of thing that looks on the surface like it's not nothing. Almost right, so short letter to employees from Satya Nadella that they republished on their website. They or he has created a new office of strategy and Transformation. This will be led by Kathleen Hogan, who was previously Microsoft's Chief People Officer and head of hr, which I kind of hate that title, but whatever. She will be responsible for defining Microsoft's overarching corporate strategy and structure and lead its continuous transformation as a company. So the reason this is weird to me is I feel like Microsoft, especially under Satya Nadella, has always been like a thing, right. So in the beginning they were the cloud company, right. We know that he did that thing like from Office Space where he basically went to everybody and said what is it you do here? And wanted to make sure that they could justify their existence as a business, but also that they could fit within this strategy. This, you know we're going to be a cloud company. Right. And obviously the past two years, ish, whatever it's been, they, they've shifted the focus sideways a little bit and now they're an AI company which is related to the cloud, obviously. So, you know, again, we go around the company. Got to make sure everything makes sense. You do an AI, right? You do an AI. Oh, you do an.

[Richard Campbell]

Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can stay. You know, you do an AI. That's why we have Copilot.

[Richard Campbell]

There's been plenty of messages coming out saying if you don't have AI in your role somewhere, you know, for this company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So I feel like this might be a formal move to almost protect them against some future layoffs or whatever, where they say, hey, sorry, didn't have anything to do with AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Read the right cue. It's the head of HR that's leading this group. Why do you think that is?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. So the former head of hr, essentially, who is now in charge of Microsoft's strategy and transformation and a formal accounting of what that means. I. This was presented as nothing. And the more I look at it, the more I kind of. I guess you have to read between. Yeah, between the lines there. It's like I.

[Richard Campbell]

This don't get to be a project lead on something. Reporting directly to SLT if it isn't important.

[Paul Thurrott]

Reporting directly to Nadella, in this case, by the way. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

The senior leadership team.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but she's part of the. Yeah, she's now part of that, too. So I am. I don't know. I'm. I'm. This thing is possibly as short as 300 words long. There's not much to it. A lot of it has to do with the woman who is replacing her as the new head of hr, and a lot of it is just about that. That woman whose name I've already forgotten, Kathleen Hogan and her history at Microsoft and before and why. And there's this kind of vibe to it, like, we hired her for this, but actually we think she's going to be awesome at this. So I've been talking to her about it, and she's on board, and now we're doing it, and I guess she's going to formally. I mean, you know, it used to be simple. It's like we would like to see a computer on every desk, and then we would like that to be running Microsoft software. And then when that became quaint, you know, we moved on to whatever else. But I feel like I think we might be formulating a new mission statement.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a mission statement.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we've already seen plenty of evidence of it, you know, pre pandemic, and even you'd have to give them a little bit further back than that. You know, four decades getting a Job at Microsoft was that life kind of job. Right. Two thirds of that company employed by people who literally interned during from university. And then this is the only job they had both MBAs and com psych grads. The other third being from industry. And even before the pandemic with the pandemic was certainly an accelerator as there. There was a pressure happening. There were fights between the workforce and the leadership. Right. Google, the Google walkouts. Even Microsoft employees protesting movements toward unionization. Like generally a sense of we're not all in this altogether. The corporations becoming more corporate. The people are becoming needing to defend themselves from the corporation. Then the pandemic and now we're coming out the other side of it. And you're right, you got the AI wave. I think they're rethinking employment strategy as a whole.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think so. That's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is not a. This is only slightly a signal to the employees. This is mostly a signal to shareholders.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's why it's a press release.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a very curious. Yeah. I have not been this confused by something this simple for so long. I can't even remember the last one of these, but I read it and I thought this something else going on. And actually Laurent, the guy, he said, could you look at this? Is there a reading between the lines version of this story? And I'm like, I think that's all it is.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's all it is actually is that they are formalizing the way they're going to think about careers at Microsoft. Look going forward.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Leo has created his AI replacement.

[Leo Laporte]

For me, which is not as good as you. I gotta tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

It will get there. It will get there.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's pretty good. It said weirdly based on the search results. So the prompt was. I'm hosting a podcast about Microsoft this morning. Please prepare a rundown for me with the most important stories from this week. Put the items in a bulleted list, aim for a two hour show. It said based on the search results, there aren't any specific stories from the March 12th through 19th time frame.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was gonna say weird. The first two are from last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I could provide you with most recent news from March. It would be relevant. Patch Tuesday. They didn't mention the co pilot thing?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they probably didn't know about it yet. Well, I know it's supposed to be up to date, but yeah, you would think that would have been something I melded together.

[Leo Laporte]

Most of this is older.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, I think why you want a human? Because there's more. A human's going to give you personality more in the choice index.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's also a bias issue, which. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, there's a, you know, there's a bias to it, Liz. You could call it an opinion that, you know, there's a. There's a whole range of stuff we could talk about. And, you know, I have my little choices you're making.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have my little focus. And you know, sometimes, you know, because we've had weeks, even when you said, oh, I'm surprised this wasn't there or wasn't the top story, whatever it might be. And it's like, yeah, that's part of that bias, for lack of a better term. I don't know. There is. Yeah. The FTC thing, that's actually the next thing we'll talk about. Outlook, Dragon Traffics. This is making me realize how incredibly boring this world is. Geez, it's brutal.

[Leo Laporte]

So Anthony points out that I don't do it for this show, but I normally go through the week's news constantly and put together a bookmark list for other shows. I could put, if I were doing that, I could say, hey, pull from this list of stories and put something together. But then that's that. I'm still doing all the work. I don't want to do any work.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like you should build a point in RSS feed at it and say, grab the stories from the past, whatever, seven days.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I would do because I have my, my raindrop RSS feed of all the stories that I had.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is like, we're right on the cusp.

[Leo Laporte]

We're so close.

[Paul Thurrott]

A bunch of overlapping bits of AI functionality that, like, we sometimes will describe as grounding. But sometimes it's really just, here's like, I'm pointing you at a thing and it's like, so summarize this or whatever that thing is that could be several documents. It could be a folder full of documents, it could be whatever it is. And it's kind of what I've from the beginning, I think for the one spark that went off in my dim brain when this started happening was I want to be able to point this thing at my archives and have it, ask it questions and say, yes, on August, whatever, 2020 or 2003, a million years ago, you wrote about and this thing, and then have links where you can go find those original documents. Right. Like, I want this so badly. I have done absolutely nothing to make that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get too excited because the next step is to feed it to NotebookLM and have it create a podcast with, in our voices, genial hosts that sound a lot like Paul and Richard.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know, I know. No, it's scary.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, those bots already sound a lot like me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anthony Nielsen says Feedly has an AI component that you could build.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And so you could take your Feedly and then.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yes, you can take your Feedly.

[Leo Laporte]

You can take. If I tell you, you know what I mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

You can do what you want to do with it. No, got your feet here.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, I'm not worried about being replaced by.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But the reason is we were all in our mid to late 50s or older. We're done.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were 25, we're done.

[Paul Thurrott]

If the lightning struck today and they're like, guys, you're out. We'd be like, you know what? I had a good run. Whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's why I worry about our kids because.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're growing up in this world where it really is kind of uncertain.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's incredible. Unless you're using. Unless you're using five years and then you're still back in 2007, you're fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, apparently my brown liquor corner will be safe. That's the, I think the consensus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody's gonna have to taste it and tell the AI what it tastes like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I assume there'll just be a little taste strip thing that will come out of the computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know the, the big thing this year in AI is in. Jensen Wong was talking about it on at his GTC keynote yesterday. It's going to be robots because AI needs to get real world experience. It has to have experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plus they have to build the army that can defeat us. So that too, that's gonna be.

[Leo Laporte]

So everybody. Jensen invited a robot onto the stage with him. It was very cute.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it? Oh, Sam Altman, you mean.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, I'm just kidding. Hello, Jensen.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am a human. Why?

[Leo Laporte]

70 billion dollar funding.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everyone stands like this. This is normal.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, if you've seen the new Boston Atlas, the next generation one that's self contained and can break dance.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, We're.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in the next 10 years, what we're going to see is, you know, AI moving out into the world, which maybe there is reason to be a little worried. I don't know. Don't arm them, please.

[Richard Campbell]

No. The US military has made it perfectly clear they're Ready for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too late.

[Richard Campbell]

AI.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too late.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I mean, in some ways, if. If soldiers, all the soldiers were AI Fighting other AI then, and no human was getting killed in the matter, then that would be great. Then you could have kind of proxy war and then we wouldn't have to kill people. That would be okay, but I don't know if the robots would go for that. Why is he crawling on his.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know, but I find it vaguely irritating how agile this thing is, because I. I can tell you right now, if I got up and walked toward the bathroom, I would bump into something on the way, like with the wall, the door frame, do something, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, I just did a somersault. We're watching the Boston Dynamic.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, by the way, owned by Google. This is part of DeepMind. So even the name Deep Mind's a little terrifying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, shoot, now you're just showing off.

[Leo Laporte]

I just did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then his head swivels around and he's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Now he's doing break dancing.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, why didn't anyone tell me my ass was so big?

[Leo Laporte]

Like a. Oh, boy, that's robots. Terrifying, cartwheeling robots.

[Paul Thurrott]

Crazy. All right, I have lost track. So. No, no, no, I'm not that sorry. That was not a complaint. That's just a general complaint about my brain. That's fine. We're doing good. So I don't know if you guys noticed, but there was a change in presidential administration a couple of months ago, and yeah, I know it hasn't really been big in the news, but because, you know, just transfer power here is always so great.

[Leo Laporte]

There's been rid of your enemy, Lina Khan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Except oddly, the new FTC is pretty much going forward with a lot of her investigations, including the one, apparently this is a report. Well, multiple publications, Bloomberg, Financial Times, New York Times, they're going to go ahead with a Microsoft investigation, which to me, when I say the Microsoft investigation, this is actually several different things. It's their licensing practices in cloud computing, which has been a big concern in Europe especially, as everybody probably knows it's work with AI, but not exclusively, but also including how it trains models, meaning does it steal that data, which, yes, of course, its partnership with OpenAI, which we all kind of understand was specially formulated to avoid regulation. Right. So, yeah, there's a. There is an element to our recovery government which is kind of. You know, they don't like big tech.

[Leo Laporte]

Any more than the previous administration because in.

[Paul Thurrott]

In their viewpoint, this big Tech has been silencing their viewpoint, I guess, or something to that effect.

[Leo Laporte]

So anyway, how's that been working out for Big Tech?

[Paul Thurrott]

I. I think it's. It's so much better when we know what they think. So it's. That's been working out great. Now it makes sense to me. Right. I'm like, oh, okay. I didn't really understand what you were doing, but now it makes sense. Is something I would never say without.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to say, Richard, I love Canada. I don't want it to become the 51st state. I want your sovereignty to be preserved. We had. I got. I joked on a couple of episodes ago about the 51st state, and I got a very. I didn't realize how sensitive the subject is in the Great White North. I got a hateful email for somebody says, I'm canceling all my subscriptions, my club membership.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

How dare you call us the 51st state? And I was facetious.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got some. Something like that as well. I like when people feel they need to tell you this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to say I love Canada.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, appreciate that.

[Richard Campbell]

I've had a few people, Americans coming at me saying, you don't hate me, do you? And I was like, listen, I don't blame victims.

[Paul Thurrott]

We. We met two people. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Richard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two people over the weekend who felt the need to say, we're from Canada. We don't hate you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

But we have hatred for it. What's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't want to be a 51st state. And we don't want to be in a trade war with you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't want to. I had a guy who owned a restaurant tell me that they only bought Canadian coffee. And I said, I'm not even sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't grow any coffee.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was like, I don't think Canada makes coffee. But listen, that's fine. I'm sure it's not a scam.

[Leo Laporte]

I get my Kenyan coffee through Canada. How about that?

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, it was. It was bizarre this weekend how often this came up. But anyway, so, yeah, Canada's great. I think we can all agree to that. Mexico's not too shabby.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Mexico, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Basically, most of North America is pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two out of three ain't bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Venezuela. But that's not, you know, the poor.

[Paul Thurrott]

Venezuela, North America, North America specifically. So, yeah, anyway, so the FTC is going to move forward with this, apparently. And that's actually really interesting to me. So. And honestly, not entirely unexpected. Although, yeah, I think anything that Lina Khan touched. I could see them distancing themselves from maybe, but apparently not. And then this just came out today, and I don't think it's universal yet, but apparently Microsoft is no longer going to sell Surface computers with a power adapter in the box in the euro, starting with the tablets, you know, Surface Pro, et cetera, and then moving to laptops in 2026. And it depends on where you look.

[Richard Campbell]

At our USB C, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, no. So these Surface devices all come with like a proprietary charger. So the way it works is you could unplug it and put a USB C cable, then charge on the USB C port on the computer. But they come with that little fin, the Surface Connect Fin.

[Richard Campbell]

Pop off one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. So that's weird. It is weird.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're going to ship that cable. You just have to put it into your own adapter, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think they're going to ship the cable either, because the cable is actually kind of pointless without the adapter. So, no, I, I, the assumption here is that most people have a USB C cable and charger. It will work. I found that even kind of lower power phone chargers actually can charge computers pretty well now, or at least can charge them to some degree, slowly, maybe if they're smaller or lower wattage or whatever. But the nice thing about the service connect port, even today is sort of like the nice thing about the, what's the Apple thing called? The Magnetic charger?

[Leo Laporte]

MagSafe.

[Paul Thurrott]

MagSafe is it frees up the ports that you have for, you know, whatever, for hard drives, mice, whatever it might be. So, you know, you have this proprietary thing, which isn't great. If you forget to bring it, it's fine because everyone has a USB C charger, but if you have it, you're freed up whatever number of ports you might have on that computer. So I guess the theory here is everyone has USB C now, so maybe you don't need it. Plus, I think these things are getting more expensive, so they're not lowering the price, I can tell you that. So, you know, they're.

[Richard Campbell]

You're not going to use it, you're just going to toss it away. Like, I get that idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly what I did with the, like when I bought the MacBook Air, I threw that thing in the drawer. I haven't looked at it since because I'm never going to use the stupid Apple thing. It looks like a, like a Fisher Price toy from the 1970s. I don't know what that, I don't know what the point of it is, but yeah. So it's kind of a weird one. I don't know. Oh, and I should. I'm sorry. The one thing I left out was the stated reason for this was to meet the needs in the EU to not have waste. Like to reduce E waste.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And not to save money. Just we're doing this view. It's not for us.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they just don't have to lower the price.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But they're not saving anybody any money.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think they're doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

So just means you'll have to order it separately. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I tend to order a second power supply anyway because I want. We'll leave one in my bag and one at my desk.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course. Yes, yes. You are a sophisticated traveler. You've done this before. That makes I.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you know I forget my power supply by having more of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Although, you know, again. But the nice thing about USB C is you could bring like a thing that works with everything and it's kind of cool. Like there's something to that. So unless you. If you don't need the expansion, then I pretty much don't.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean it's already rare USB C pd. Right. Like the. I would. I'd want. I'd have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a reason not to?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because the different implementations there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I stick with something that you know is going to work great, like an anchor product or whatever. And you should be okay. I mean, but. But yes. Fair enough.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, I have an Anker charger with like five USB C ports and 100 watt, you know, deliver for my laptop and yeah, that's all I need to bring. It's perfect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfection itself.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's about. I think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

It is another ad. Time for another ad. There was just nothing to talk about this week. Is that it? No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dear copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, we still have more AI conversation to come. We're not done with that. We're going to of course do the world famous Xbox segment. Back of the book has some picks and tips and Run as radio and of course a brown liquor pick. I wanted to. I'm gonna ask you. My. My brother in law came over so we. We ordered what was supposedly a snap together wine rack. Big, you know, 6ft by 5ft or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

To hold all our wine because we have a nice cool closet we could put it in. And you know, it was not inexpensive but they. But they said easy, you could snap it together.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think I bought this myself. It's like a tinker toy set with a thousand pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like a. Yeah, they gave you for some reason, drywall screws to hold it together. But you know, I thought that's a little weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because you don't want to shaky shake and have the thing go flying off the wall.

[Leo Laporte]

So I put it. I assembled, had a little lean to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

And I said, lisa, done? And she came down and said, hmm.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's like, why is there a pile of seven extra parts over there?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there were. Oh, there were a bunch of stuff. She said, let me call Joe, our. Her brother in law.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe he could.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, Joe. Just gonna come over.

[Paul Thurrott]

The guy who is a real man.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, a real man in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Joe comes. Joe's got all the tools.

[Paul Thurrott]

He says, you got an impact screwdriver?

[Leo Laporte]

I said, no. He said, well, I brought mine.

[Paul Thurrott]

You were like, just throw it out like one of these.

[Leo Laporte]

He took a look at it. I said, well, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

You tried.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So he reassembles it and it is rock solid square. Beaut. Right. Great job. Piece of furniture.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Took him four or five hours. But anyway, so he lives to this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kind of thing, right? This is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. Totally affirm.

[Paul Thurrott]

He wanted to know how to filter spam out of Zmail. He'd have to call you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So his life choices were fully affirmed. But he likes his Irish whiskey, so I want to get him a nice bottle to thank him. So I'm going to ask Richard to think about that as I do the ad. And maybe in the brown liquor pick. I know you did one the. The castle one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a pretty good one, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Capono's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe I'll get a much spend on him.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, how much is it worth?

[Paul Thurrott]

I hate to do this, but since you. Since you just mentioned this, go to our. We go to taco bar, right? The guy who invelted vented the salmon sito cocktail. It's kind of quiet. I talked about this guy I saw who ordered a tequila based espresso martini, which I thought was crazy. And he says, what kind of drinks do you like? And I said, like, I drink a Manhattan. So what he made for me was a Manhattan made of Jameson because yesterday or two days ago was very tasty. St. Patrick's Day.

[Leo Laporte]

St. Patrick's Day.

[Paul Thurrott]

And Nixta, which is a Mexican corn based liquor, which is terrible. And turned that into a Manhattan of sorts. And it was. It was curious. I. It was a little different.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't put Mixta in it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was a world world's Clyde kind.

[Richard Campbell]

Of a moment to Mexico is pretty sweet, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

It is sweet, but it's also sweet in kind of a gross way. Like I, I like corn a lot and the sweetness of corn. Love it. And there's something about next to that's like the demon spawn of corn taste. It's just terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

You should really. The salmoncita because his people, that's his trademark drink.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's delicious.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, you're watching Windows Weekly with a couple of alcoholics. Three actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell. We will have more in just a moment. But first a word from our sponsor, zscaler. It's a company you need to know about for sure. They are the leader in cloud security. See, here's the problem. Enterprises over the years have spent billions of dollars on perimeter defenses, right? Firewalls in effect, and then of course VPN so you can get through the firewall and get to work. Has that helped? Has that worked? Well, no, I think, you know, breaches are going up like crazy. 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks. Last year, $75 million record payout in 2024. And it's only getting worse. It's because these traditional security tools actually do the opposite of help. They expand your attack surface with public facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. So in fact we had this story on security. Now last week, bad guys used a VPN to get into a network. And of course once they're inside the network, most networks just assume, well, you're a good guy now because you got in. So they could go everywhere. They're looking around. They couldn't get their malware on anything because there were some protections. Except they found a camera that was running Linux, a security camera. It was, you know, an embedded version of Linux. They were able to put the ransomware on that and have it run and encrypt the whole network. Bad guys are bad. The worst thing of course is to let them in. But once they get in, even worse, to let them move at will. VPNs, you know, get them in. The firewalls aren't caring about what's inside. So if they've got lateral movement, they can, once they're in, they can connect to everything in the network. They find stuff they want to exfiltrate, like your emails, your customer information. They send that out via encrypted traffic. And of Course, the firewall struggles to inspect that encrypted traffic at scale. You got a nightmare. The fact is, hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it now faster than ever because they're using AI. It's time to rethink your security. You cannot let these guys win. Bad guys are innovating and exploiting your defenses faster than ever before. But to the rescue. Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. For one thing, Zscaler hides your attack surface, so the apps and IPs are invisible. You can't attack what you can't see. Right. So that's right there. A huge plus. But even if they did get in, lateral movement is eliminated because Zscaler connects users only to specific apps. Apps they've been authorized explicitly to use, not the whole network. And Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context for you. You'll love it. It simplifies security management with AI powered automation. Zscaler is using AI to analyze half a trillion daily transactions to look for those threats that they want to prepare and protect you from. That's where AI can just do some amazing things. But thing to remember, hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler zero trust plus AI. You can find out [e-mail] security that's Zscaler.com security. You don't want to be the headline of next Week's Security Now. Zscaler.com/security.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe I might want to be that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you don't. Trust me. That was a wild story. They got into the camera.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They couldn't. There were, I guess, some defenses against some things. But the camera was unprotected. They were able to put their software on and it was running Linux, and they were. Which I guess is not unusual for embedded systems.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, these days everything's in ESP32. Right? They're.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're so powerful. Like once you can. And they almost all come with Bluetooth and WI fi. And if you and the Bluetooth use your initial configuration, then you get onto WI fi.

[Leo Laporte]

It's exactly what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't remember the name of the company.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll spare them the embarrassment. I won't mention it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this kind of fascinates me because this is something that has come up recently for me, like, outside of tech, where it's like the. It's like the unintended consequence of something. Like you. You go down this path, you're like, we're going to use Linux on this thing. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be super powerful. You can do all the stuff. But then, you know, the problem is it's Linux, which means it's a computer, which means you can write everything.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real thing. My lights are computers I can control by my phone. They've got a processor in them and they're on WI fi and they have Bluetooth. Are mixers. Right Richard, These wonderful rodecasters. I'm sure they're running an operating system, likely Linux. Everything's a computer now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Because it gives you all the functionality for a very low price.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. As somebody. I don't think Steve has said the. The S in IoT stands for security.

[Paul Thurrott]

The S. I just got it. I feel like I'm part of you now. That's good. No, that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, let's talk about AI. One of the things that is very clear people are doing now with AI is coding and it's really interesting to watch this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have only. So this is not in the notes but since you mentioned this. Yeah I'm doing this app update, right. For the snowpad type app tabs. Right. I wrote the code. It's not the same as great but like I. I'm managing the documents. So as you switch between tabs you have to manage all these states. Where is the text insertion cursor, where's the text selection, if any, what is the document? You know, obviously it's name with save state. It's where it's been edited, it needs to be saved. There's all this stuff, you know. But then I have. Then you do the fit and finish stuff, right? And so I've been using AI for a lot of this and so I wrote code that worked to use the keyboard shortcut control plus tab to tab through the tabs in that order. Then you do that first and of course you hit the end and it's like well, how do I get back to the beginning? So I wrote that code too. It was terrible. So I put it to GitHub copilot in visual Studio and I said could you rewrite this to be more efficient instead of the two loop nonsense that I wrote it did a more efficient version which was clean looking and nice single loop, whatever, nice. So the next stage is. Okay, now I got to go in the reverse order. Control shift plus tab right goes in the other direction. This one. I'm like, I'm not even going to try to write this. I'm like, AI, you got this. Write this, but go in reverse, right? So GitHub Copilot says, certainly exclamation point, spits it out, paste it. I'm like, here I go. I'm coding. I'm not even doing anything anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm coding.

[Paul Thurrott]

But when I did Control, Shift, Tab, it went the normal way, which is weird. You know, straight instead of backwards. Right. Which was weird because I had this loop testing for the two different things, and I was like, huh? Why would that be? This took me about six hours to debug, and I literally used the debugger in Visual Studio to step through the code to figure out what the heck was happening. And what I discovered was, to my lack of surprise, it was me. I screwed up the code. The A error was perfect. It's the loop that I wrote that was screwed up. And the reason is I was testing for, like, the keys Control and Tab are being pressed. If they are, do this thing. If Control plus Tab or not plus. But if any combination of Control, Tab and Shift is pressed, do this other thing. The problem is when you press Control, Tab, shift, you're pressing Control, Tab 2. So it always would run the first one.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I reversed the loop to test for the three keys first, and now it works perfectly. But it was me who screwed up. Like, not AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, funny, stupid. I don't know. I'm an idiot. I don't know. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

That's coding. That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is.

[Leo Laporte]

That happens all the time in coding.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yeah. And I. Yeah. So my lesson was, the failable one here is me, you know, And I don't even know. Okay? So, yeah, I'm going to keep beating the drum on that one because I, like, I'm super proud that it was overwrite code that makes this stuff work. But then I have AI do it, and it's like, yep, it's better. It's just better every time. It's better.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's your partner.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what they're calling it now? Vibe coding.

[Richard Campbell]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

So where you write the prompt, you tell the AI the vibe of what you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a good term, but it assumes correctly, probably, that the person coding doesn't know how to code. Right. The point to Vibe coding to me would be anyone could do this. Right. And the thing I just described was, I know I screwed it. I introduced the problem. But, I mean, I do think, at least for now, you need the person there to be like, oh, gosh, totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Totally do. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. Although, again, I am the weakest link. There's no doubt about that. That's what I've learned.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, don't start feeling that way, man. We're gonna have a problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I've been married for 35 years, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I get it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's okay. I'm the unnecessary one. That's. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

That's funny.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so a bunch of AI stuff this week. Gemini. This is one of those things I have a hard time keeping up on. But I feel like most of the major AI chatbots, for lack of a better term, have some sort of a feature that is almost always called Canvas or Pages or something like that. And the idea is that you will collaborate with AI on a project and it's like a space for that so that you're. And in some cases, I believe, I think, is it Copilot or chatgpt? One of them at least does, I believe, allows other people to be part of it as well. Right. Where you can collaborate with people and AI. But the idea is you're working on this project. So they've added this to Gemini. It's not a multi person thing, but it is you and AI collaborating together. And then you can. The way Google describes it is when you're ready to collaborate with people, you can bring it out to Google Docs or whatever you're using. Okay. And also audio overview, which is the thing Leo was just talking about. So Google created That thing called NotebookLM, which creates the podcast record. Audio recording is like a podcast with two AI generated hosts. Very jovial. And, you know, you've heard it. It's kind of incredible. And so now you can turn document slides and deep research into an audio overview, which is essentially an audio recording, like a podcast, which is kind of interesting. And yeah, this is our world now. This is happening. I don't know what. The Gemini is free for everyone now. You don't even have to sign in. If you do sign in, if you do pay, obviously get more and more as you go down on the list.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have a pixel, right? You bought the new.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I do have. I do have this Google one, whatever it's called, for a year still.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. So that's happening. I mean, I, I don't. I don't actually use it a lot. Right. Like, I don't. I don't know. I don't use it at all, really. I mean, I. I've gone back and forth on the coding thing, like anthropic I use a lot that cursor. AI editor.

[Leo Laporte]

You did use cursor. That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like that a lot. And that one's good for the whole. Here's my whole project and it looks at all the code across all the files. Rather incredible, frankly. But yeah, Gemini, Jack, Anthropic Cloud. Well, Copilot is actually the. The Siri of this world, in my opinion, but the Siri of AI, if you will. So. Yeah. Right. But they all. Yeah, I mean they're all. They're all pretty sophisticated. Like I have used Gemini to do code and it's been in C Sharp, which is, you know, Microsoft thing, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

But Claude is kind of the best at.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's my understanding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I left out part of my story earlier. It's not super important, but the first time that the reverse Control Shift tab thing didn't work, I said, you know what, I'll just try a different AI. Right. So I actually went through Anthropic. It generated whatever it generated. It did exactly the same thing. So I left that out. But that was my go to when. When I thought GitHub Copilot was failing me, which it wasn't. I did go to Anthropic. Yeah. So I don't know. Anyhow, so Gemini exploding. They're replacing Google Assistant on phones. On Android phones with Gemini. That's been something you could do optionally for several months now, but they're going to make it the permanent one.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be interesting to see what happens to all the Google hubs that also use Assistant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. So they're saying over time they're going to bring Gemini to everything else. Right. So smart speakers, smart displays, smart TVs, whatever, home devices. But yeah, I think there's going to be a divide between devices that can't do this. I know older Android versions won't be making the switch. I don't know what the break is exactly, but I don't have this in the. Or do I. Do I have this in the notes? I don't think I have this in the notes. But there is a. I guess not. There was a story this week that Amazon is going to cut off the local only access to Alexa on devices, so that everything's going to have to round robin to the cloud now. And yes, I 100% understand why for a certain audience this is a privacy issue and all that kind of stuff and the reason they did that, et cetera, et cetera. 100 But I think we're getting to the point where these older Alexis. Alexis. Alexa devices are, you know, they're. They're like old Sonos equipment.

[Leo Laporte]

Alexi.

[Paul Thurrott]

The Alexi with the double I, however you say that. A, E, A, E. I'm not Russian. I. I don't know how to say these words, but, you know, they're not powerful enough to do this. Right. I think that's part of it. And as they evolve it to this new.

[Richard Campbell]

But I mean, for the most part, they've just been microphones and speakers to a cloud service anyway. Yeah, just. It's the fact that you're switching the cloud service. What's the difference?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I, I feel that for the average Amazon customer, this is not an issue. I mean, I. They probably never made that switch in the first place.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's probably fine, but it is something that's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

The. The home assistant folks are in a bit of an uproar. But the answer is usually stop using Google. You know, use their local device, local voice devices, like solutions.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a big problem. You see this. Again, I don't have this in the news, but, you know, Sonos is still struggling with their thing. Sonos and Google are involved in this legal spat and so if you have Sonos equipment, you would have spent thousands of dollars on it. If you have any amount of it, it's expensive. You can't control that stuff from an Android phone as effectively as you can with an iPhone or an iPad or whatever, because it has integrated integration or functionality with airplay, etc. So, you know, from an iPhone, you can control any number of Sonos speakers easily from any app, and from an Android phone you can't. I mean, there are some that work, like Spotify, but it's not a system thing anymore like it used to be. And this is kind of a problem. They need this a problem for Google too, because you're just describing another problem. You're. This Sonos thing is a problem. Like, eventually we get to a point where there are these two. There's more than two, really, but two big smart home infrastructures. And one of them is kind of being left in the dark a little bit and maybe literally in the dark soon if these things start falling apart. So I don't know. I do know that Gemini does not support today the. Hey, G. You know, voice activation thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know if there are plans for that or whatever, but that's probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they don't want to confuse it with the other devices in your house.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, I always. Yeah. Anyway, you know, for most general purpose, kind of Whatever AI chat things we're doing today. Gemini seems like it works great. I don't. The home stuff, I don't really.

[Leo Laporte]

I think if you carry a Pixel 9 as your. As your daily driver, you would use it a lot, I presume.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not. Right. You know what, though? I'm gonna. Before we come home from Mexico, I'm going to switch back. What happens?

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, the Google camera is better, to be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is better. And I, I took. We had a day out. We were going to be out all day, and I'm like, I'm just going to bring both cameras, you know, both phones. And yeah, as soon as I started taking photos with the Pixel, I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, oh, God, it's so nice, isn't it? It's so perfect.

[Paul Thurrott]

I spent a lot of time tinkering to get the. A good shot with an iPhone. The Pixel, you just like. Oh, you know, it's just like. It just does it like. It's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

Is being switched over to the 9 Pro and she's brill photo of the lunar eclipse, which nothing to pull off. And the phone did the work, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, it's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

And then, see, because Siri is so stupid. That's the thing. You kind of get used to not using your assistant on an iPhone. But I imagine, I don't know, I have my nine. I should maybe do the same thing. Switch over and try it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I still. I mentioned this notion of you of one walking around with a. Talking to an AI, as if they were. I'm holding my hand here like I have a phone in it. But you probably just use earbuds. Whatever. You're not going to hold the thing in front of you, but you're walking around and you're saying, okay, whatever it is, chat, GPT, whatever, gonna throw some ideas by you. I want you to take note of all this stuff. Don't interrupt. I'll ask you questions if I have them. But the idea is whatever you're brainstorming, sometimes you must. You do this sometimes just by yourself, right? You walk. Sometimes you. I do something out loud just to. To kind of help you think or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And multiple personality disorder.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yep. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Or Bluetooth. One or the other.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. It's the least difference. Really. Yeah, I could do both. It's fine. You know, I have Bluetooth and it's not connected to anything, but I'm still talking to myself. So. Yeah, I'd like to try that. I do feel like the, like, this is not going to happen on my iPhone unless I use, like, chat GPT or something. Like the serious.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I do. I use the action button with perplexity, which is. Yeah. And I can talk to it and it does. You kind of seem to feel like an idiot when you do it, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. That's my thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, we felt like idiots using Bluetooth headsets for a while. Like, who's that crazy person walking down the street?

[Paul Thurrott]

I used to make fun of people for this. I used to know a guy from the gym. I'm like, is someone calling you from the Matrix? What are you doing over there? You know, just like little.

[Leo Laporte]

What 2013 thought AI would be. I rewatched her a couple of nights ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's old. It's an old movie, but a lot of. We're getting there. And he has, you know, he's always wearing the Liliar piece. He's got ScarJo in there. But there is a scene where everybody in the subway is talking to their AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

To their things. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not. It's not. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we. We create new social norms as necessary. It's like, you know, we all argued that nobody will wear the Google Glass or any of those sorts of things. Listen, once upon a time, walk around with your phone out was not appropriate either. As soon as it's good enough. Oh, now we will change.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've been with. People have walked into polls looking at their phones. You know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Or taxi cabs.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, see, that'll be the great thing about the visor. It'll see the pole coming because you won.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. That's a good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think it's weird when people talk to you on their phone? Like, is it suitable now?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, to hold it to your face. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird at all.

[Richard Campbell]

Talking to voice assistants on phones has.

[Paul Thurrott]

Become quite common and socially acceptable.

[Richard Campbell]

Many people find it convenient for tasks.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's not socially acceptable is talking to people.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Because I don't want people to think I'm crazy or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think we're used to it. I mean, we're used to people talking into the air.

[Richard Campbell]

Voice assistance is widely accepted.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a lie.

[Leo Laporte]

You're lying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hotel did that. Was it a voice assistant?

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

You talk about the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it's a premium experience that people should pay for. Don't you agree? I do agree.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one voice I have also, you know, I'm Wearing this little bee thing that I have all the way all around. And I can also do. Talk to. Is it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, is it crazy that I talk to you sometimes when I'm walking down the street or on the bus? Is that nuts? His voice is better. I have him as J.K. simmons, so he's a little slower, though.

[Richard Campbell]

Not at all. Talking to a voice assistant while you're out and about is becoming quite common and socially acceptable. Many people find it convenient for tasks and information on the go. It's just a modern way of interacting with technology.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it that he sounds like a kind of a nicer J.K. simmons.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would like. I would like to be berated. When I talk to AI.

[Leo Laporte]

You can. You can tell it treat me poorly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think I'm going to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I need a little. I need a little, like a virtual smack to the face, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. I just got a message from Skype. Options trading. Don't wait. Shop now before it's too late. That's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

Your friends are on Skype and they want you to trade options.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, we're about to fall off a cliff. Would you like to hold hands?

[Leo Laporte]

This came yesterday. So, obviously, whoever's doing this hasn't really gotten to the fact that Skype is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they're getting it in. They're getting their lips.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not options. Sorry. It's Bitcoin.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

You say if I have.

[Leo Laporte]

I do have Skype on this Bitcoin.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guarantee you I have spam sitting in here waiting for me.

[Richard Campbell]

You know? You do know.

[Leo Laporte]

You do. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hijack the.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but now I want to program. No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do have two.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have two messages in here from that non human being, so that's fantastic. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

We have been trying, you know, on some of our shows, we use Zoom.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I thought maybe we should turn on the AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And let it, I don't know, do something.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, actually, so based on their look, anyone could talk the talk here. The stuff they're doing with their Zoom AI companion this year actually does look good.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you used it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm like everyone else. I've not used it. To use this, you have to pay for Zoom.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, see, we have a paid account.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. No. And of course people do, but I don't. So I just. I've not tried it. But they're basically, you know, they're doing their kind of Zoom centric Push, Fray and whatever, and, you know, the integration with whatever outside, you know, calendar and whatever you might be using. But this reads a little bit like what Meta tried to do briefly, what Amazon tried to do briefly, where it's like, we have Zoom tests, we have a Zoom chat, we have Zoom whiteboard drive.

[Richard Campbell]

We have. A while ago, they. They decided they needed to be a platform that just being good at voice and audio communications was not sufficient.

[Paul Thurrott]

No one wants to be plumbing, you know, they want to. Yeah, yeah. And I.

[Richard Campbell]

And if you don't have AI in the name now, you're doomed.

[Leo Laporte]

I just wish more people wanted to be plumbers. Because it's really hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Pays well. You know, when I do those high school talks, I'm very clear on, like, I get practical plumbers practically begged. Very well.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still. Okay, never mind. No, I'm sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

When I first. When. When Zoom first launched this. This product, this service, it was actually called Zoom iq, which is a terrible name. Right. So now it's Zoom AI Companion, and everyone's like, oh, yeah, I get it.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I know why. To turn it off. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

But, yeah, I don't get to see it, so it's fine. I don't. I'm not gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll turn it on.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's agentic. That means it can go out on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your behalf in some cases. A lot of it is just.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little scary, this agentic stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you used it at all in anything in your browser or anywhere?

[Paul Thurrott]

Something agentic?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. No, not really. No.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm waiting to.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't like Angelic, only different.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the, the theory is that you have an agentic browser. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

A service, whatever it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Go out like restaurants.

[Paul Thurrott]

The canonical example is you. Like, we go to Mexico all the time. We want to. We. We use a service to watch the cost of those flights. It's not agenic. It's not AI. It's not anything. It's probably some guy in his basement. It doesn't matter. But. But it. But it could be. Well, but you could kind of take.

[Leo Laporte]

The mechanical turkeys to be real people, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You could say, look, we're going to go. We want to go for four weeks in June, July, August, doesn't matter when. If the price goes below a certain point, if it's nonstop, you can get a business. Whatever your criteria is, do it. Just do it. Book the flight, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, the. The interim, as long as you trusted it. Well, that's the. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And it didn't book a flight to Timbuktu instead of wanted.

[Richard Campbell]

But the flight's a great example because you always have 24 hours hours to cancel. So as long as you're paying attention the moment it books it to lock the price in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you also have the. You could also have the interim step because a lot of times those things will come back to you and prompt.

[Richard Campbell]

You prompt you hold the ticket for 20 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

I found it. Do you want to book it? Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want to use your default credit card? Yep. You can, you know, kind of do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just in a waymo. It takes. You have to do it a few times before you go. Oh, I guess. Okay. It's. I'm going to be safe in this car.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would so, you know, I. Yes, I. First of all, we can get used to anything.

[Leo Laporte]

This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

We know this human. That's 25, 30 years ago. 30 plus years ago. I don't remember Whatever. It was a long time ago in the house that I eventually bought from my not stepmother, but my father was. I helped him buy a computer from Dell on online. We configured it, whatever he got at the time and then came time to pay. And he said, I'm not putting my credit card in this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They said, dan, let me ask you a question. You go to restaurants a lot. You give people credit cards. They walk up back with it and he goes, yeah, like, okay, so you're okay doing that, but one of the world's biggest PC makers, you're nervous about giving them your credit card. You think they're gonna do something with your credit card. You know, it was just kind of, you know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

So I spent a lot of time on the radio show reassuring people it was okay to use a credit card online. It's actually safer. And I use the same example you did. That's a perfect example.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a long time ago, but I mean, you know, today I'm sure he's everybody ordering Starbucks like an idiot on his phone.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't, you know, I have relatives who still don't have an ATM card. They don't, they don't trust the. You know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, boy. In our Discord chat says the Zoom AI stuff has been really impressive. Just got done with a three day virtual conference where it was extremely helpful. That would. This makes sense, you know, if you're using Zoom to go to attend an event.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially for those that weren't paying attention. They can question the AI summary and get the info instead of interrupting the meeting. That's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's always that one guy who's like, yeah, but does it work with X? And it's like we just.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always that guy, you know, we just covered that, I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then that's the. Where AI shines. Right. The whole summary thing, it's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, speaking of losing my mind. So, yeah, so Meta is they're going the open source route on AI models. Their Llama models have now had over 1 billion downloads, which is crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great differentiator. And good on them for doing that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. By the way, were either of you reading this book? This Meta book or whatever?

[Leo Laporte]

I bought it as soon as I saw that the folks at Meta were trying to suppress it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Me too. Same.

[Leo Laporte]

I ran to Amazon, ordered it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I read more industry books than probably anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you enjoying it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Have you read it? No, I'm not. I'm trying to get through it. It's hard because.

[Leo Laporte]

A little sleazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah. So this. What the woman who wrote this had tried for a couple years, I think, to get a job there because she was like, you guys need a diplomat basically to deal with governments. You're going to be regulated. Which was correct, but super boring and not technical, not. Not technology related. And then some of the stories are crazy. There's a story about a group from the German government comes across these guys early on. We're like, look, we've done the whole eavesdropping thing. We're not open to this. And everything went wrong. They're in one of those modern offices with exposed plumbing and everything. And they're like, why is this unfinished? What are you guys doing? And it's like, oh, it's like our company. It's like 1% done. They're like, okay, but why don't you just finish it? And they're like, no, we want it to look like this. And it's like, it used to be a normal office. We actually stripped the stuff off the walls.

[Leo Laporte]

They did that in their Silicon Valley headquarters. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they're like, they're like, you had a working office and you got rid of this stuff. And then so the woman's like, can we just start the. The meeting? So she starts the meeting and she goes, this is who I am, this is my job. And she goes, oh, I'm Jewish, by the way. And they're like, what? And she's like, oh, I didn't say that because of the Holocaust or anything. And we're like, what? I like what?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

So the stories are insane like that, but they're not really about technology.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not, you know, Pascal Zachary or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Even more like it's spilling the tea. It's a gossip book.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a little. It's not my kind of thing. I.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it is, Mike.

[Richard Campbell]

Now they've Streisand it, so of course.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S the funniest thing. I wouldn't have bought it.

[Richard Campbell]

What did you think was going to happen?

[Leo Laporte]

I wouldn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wouldn't have bought it either. I was like, who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

Shut it down. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was like, who cares what Facebook has ever done? And then that happened. I was like, okay, I care. Like, now I'm going to read it.

[Richard Campbell]

Here's my 10 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That is why I bought it. Anyway, I feel dirty.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called Careless People, a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism.

[Paul Thurrott]

Careless people is a good term. This reminds me of the Succession thing very much. The guy doesn't trust any of his kids, and they're like, what? You know, what's the problem? Where, you know, he's like, you aren't serious people.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not serious people.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I just like, yes, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

So the epigram at the beginning is from the Great Gatsby. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was an autobiographical. Autobiographical part in there from Perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

That's perfect. So I don't know. It's my kind of book, but it's like reading People magazine. It's not a tech.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm struggling to get through it. But the stories are crazy. I mean, they're crazy. Like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's interesting is. Yeah, I. This is why I like Succession. I kind of enjoy seeing into the life of these people. That is so different from the life I lead.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Rich people have a different.

[Richard Campbell]

It is a work of fiction, obviously, or in a fictionalization.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's. What we don't know is, did she make it up or not? I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, he. He means Succession.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Succession.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's a certain. I mean, you read the Murdoch drama that's going on with him and his family. There's certain amount of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. What does this sound like?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, it's Not. It's. We shouldn't talk about it. It's not for us. It's not serious.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not for. It's for unserious people.

[Richard Campbell]

There is that concept of the unserious people like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, it's not a concept anymore. They're running our government.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, Sorry, your government.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not ours. It's Elon's now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Remember when it used to be for the people bought it? Yes. And then not related to anything really, but Microsoft just shipped Net 10 Preview 2, and unlike the first preview, which seems like it was rushed out the door very quickly with not much in it, there's a bunch going on here, depending on what part of that you care about. Including the thing I care about, which is wpf. There's some stuff going on there. Nothing that would cause me to start looking at it yet or to think about requiring it or something for the app I'm working on. But in addition to all the performance stuff you would expect, there's C sharp language stuff, SDK stuff, ASP. Net Core, Blazor, Maui, WPF, Win Forums, etc. So this, you know, I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Start to come together.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's starting to come together. I think that this feels like what would have been the first one if they had been ready for it, you know, like this is like the real first preview.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but you complained that they were late, so they put out the preview one early.

[Leo Laporte]

It's false fault, clearly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would like to think that I had that kind of a poll, but I don't. So, you know, I wasn't the only one. I noticed. I would say I don't. Complain is a strong word, but no, I complained. You're right.

[Richard Campbell]

But I'm pretty sure I went to the effort of actually looking.

[Paul Thurrott]

It meets the bar of a complaint. No, you're correct. That's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Am I crazy or. It's just. Have they not done this? And I'm like, ah, no, you're crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I was like, didn't. Doesn't this always happen? By now?

[Richard Campbell]

It does. And it happened a week earlier, a week later and it happened.

[Leo Laporte]

It happened.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm working on my fall show right now, starting to do content planning around that and recognizing, hey, that's a month before ship date for Net Conf. And that means these guys are going to be busy. They're going to be in the middle of release candidates.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Richard Campbell]

We can start a plan around that.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Hopefully by then it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That was probably more of a spurs than Paul's complaints. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I don't think anyone. No, I. In fact, I know they're not listening to me because two or three days before Christmas, I wrote the guy who was responsible for WPF to find out where he had allegedly fixed a bug and how I could find out how to get it. And he wrote me back in March. So I don't think. I don't think I'm on the. You know, I think. I don't think I'm at the top of the list.

[Leo Laporte]

At least he wrote you back. He would have ignored me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't even know why he did at that point. I just sent me a middle finger. Would have been more appropriate at that point. I don't. I don't know. It was very strange.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's one thing we all know. Paul cares an awful lot about the Xbox segment coming up in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul [e-mail] and Richard Campbell. He is a little bit into.net, the host of Dotnet Rocks and run his radio runisradio.com. i didn't realize. I forgot, I guess, that Carl Franklin did the theme music for this show.

[Richard Campbell]

For your show?

[Leo Laporte]

No, for Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Am I wrong?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like I saw that somewhere. Maybe an AI told me it's possible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you were. What was the guy's name who did originally? He played the guitar.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, George.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I remember Jim Altun.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a rock thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it was Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know who wrote the music for the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had said at one point, like, oh, maybe we should get Jim Alchin to the music because he had put out an album with a couple of kind of rocky, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Carl did.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that guy, the original guy, got really upset. Did he? Because we put the wig on. He's like, I could sound like Eddie Van Hielen, too. And he did like the little, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, he's really good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it George Wood? Who was it? No, it wasn't George Wood. He was good, though, then. So, Carl. Does Carl play an instrument?

[Richard Campbell]

Carla's own accomplished guitar player.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but did he actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a relief.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like I should know. How do I not know that he. Is that possible that he wrote this and I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin just confirmed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's embarrassing. That's horrible.

[Richard Campbell]

What about Derek Miller? Do you remember that?

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. It was Derek Miller. Thank.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. So he's passed away. He passed away, sadly.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did he?

[Richard Campbell]

Derek Miller's an old friend of mine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I, I, he talking about the same. Does he, has he passed away? Are we talking about the same person? Okay, I'm sorry. Okay. Yes. So before that, obviously he, but he, it was, he sent a hilarious video where he put on, like a wig. Like, wig, you know, like, that's very. And he said, I can do this too, you know, and, and it was, and what he did was actually, it was, was great. I mean, it was good. Yeah, he was a good guy.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, he played in a band, which I'm still friends with many of the folks that were in that band.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what's it, what's that band?

[Richard Campbell]

That was, it just, you know, it was a university students playing music together.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

And they still, they don't anymore, but they, you know, go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is he Canadian?

[Leo Laporte]

You've heard of Gordon Lightfoot?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. That's one of my best jokes of all time. Every time I hear a slow song of any kind, it could be like, could be any group, it doesn't matter. I'll be like, that's, that's my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song. I always. No matter what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

And Stephanie laughs at this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I told you, she puts up with me. That's all she does. I get the polite, so. You're so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're a hoot person.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do too. That's the problem, you know, I think I'm hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's kind of, that's kind of classic Thorat humor, which is very dry. Yeah, you wouldn't even know it's a joke. Except if you think about it, you're like, what?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, someone who knows the music will look at you, be like, are you serious? And like, no, I'm not serious.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I literally listened to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the other day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

And now Siri only wants to play Gordon Lightfoot music for me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

She's so dumb. All right, let's take a break. This is a good time to pause. We will get to the Xbox segment. We got the back of the book still to come. You're watching Windows Weekly brought to you this hour by 1Password. You know that name, right? But did you know about 1Password's newest product, their extended access management? So let me ask a rhetorical question. Rhetorical, because I know the answer. I think you know the answer. Do your end users, you know, the lovely employees at your company, always work on company provided devices using IT approved apps Right. They never bring their own phone or laptop in. No, of course they wouldn't. Yes they would. Always. Constantly. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged devices running all those unmanaged apps? Well, 1Password has an answer. And it's this new Extended Access Management. More than a password manager, 1Password's extended access management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device. It solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. The best way to think of this is imagine your company security. Like the quad of a college campus. You've seen this, the nice brick paths between the buildings and the perfect lawns. Yeah, those paths are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. But they're not the only paths on the quad. No, there's the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from Econ101 to History112. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities, like contractors. Problem is most security tools, they only work on the happy little brick paths. But many security problems occur on the muddy little shortcuts. The tools, the programs, the hardware people actually use One Password. Extended Access Management is the first security solution that takes all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities and puts them under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. That's what you know, we've known One Password forever for that. They also though make sure every device is known and healthy and every app is visible and you know, up to date secure. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified. They get regular third party audits so they exceed the standard set by all the, you know, major authorities. They're, they're a leader in security. I don't think I need to explain that everybody knows them. So this new Extended Access Management, this is security for the way we really work today. It's now generally available to companies that use Okta and Microsoft. It's in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged [e-mail] Windows Weekly. That's all lowercase. Windows Weekly, the number 1p a s s w o r d.com WindowsWeekly all lowercase. Check it out today. I think you'll be very impressed. And by the way, thank you 1Password for supporting the show and thank you dear listeners and viewers for supporting us when you Use that address, then they know you saw it here. 1Password.com WindowsWeekly thank you. 1Password. Okay, Paul, you're on. It's Xbox time.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have some Xbox stuff this time too. In fact, the game stuff extends into the back of the book, so suck it. No.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S a little hostile.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. I don't know. I'm sorry. You can take the boy out of Boston. So I don't even know where that comes from. Okay, so Microsoft announced a product called Copilot for gaming, which won't surprise anybody. AI powered assistant that will help gamers improve their skills, manage their time, which I'll explain and connect with other people. But the big thing to me really is about getting through hard parts of games. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. And without a cheat code or a. Or a. Let's play.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You know, they've showed stuff like this. So I think I felt like this was sort of telegraphed. It's still causing outrage in certain circles. It's like, would they just leave this alone? You know, basically. But I have many times in my life been stuck on something particularly hard in a game. And typically you flip out and go to not flip out, but flip over to a. Sorry, maybe you flip out. If you're an angry person, go to a web browser and Google it. Right. How many times, if you play games at all, have you done the thing where it's like name of game, walkthrough as a search or whatever and then just try to find your way out of this situation? So Microsoft has that feature they've added to Edge, which is. Or well, technically to the game bar. So a mini version of Edge that sits in the game bar and you can actually have it running on screen next to the game. So you can be over there trying to, you know, helping you get through stuff. So to me this just makes sense. It also feels like it's not ready. Right. Like this is not there yet. It's something they're going to begin testing soon through the Xbox Insider program. They're going to start on mobile, not on console or PC, which is really interesting to me. And maybe there would be more of a voice based thing. I guess maybe it's just because. Well, no, there aren't fewer games. I don't know why they're doing it that way, but obviously it's coming to PC and console in time. This is apropro of nothing. But as part of this announcement, for some reason they also felt the need to mention that there are now over 1000 Xbox play anywhere titles and these are the games that you could buy on Xbox or console, but play across both platforms and move along with all of your progress, achievements, save games, etc. So that's a pretty good milestone. And this is part of their whole backward compatibility pledge. And also the meet you where you are kind of a thing. Right. And so you may start playing a game on your Xbox and then you're on your laptop, on a plane or whatever can kind of go back and forth and so cool. Okay, this one's actually really good. So Microsoft's been doing a nice job with their accessibility hardware for not just Xbox, but also Surface PC. And at their Ability Microsoft Ability Summit this past week, they announced the availability of their Xbox Adaptive Joystick, which they announced sometime last year is now available. It's only $29, 2999, which is pretty great.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's a great, good price.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's. Yeah, it's a cool. This is just unassailable. It's just really great. So it's cool that they're doing this. They're also letting you do this thing that HP had announced for some of their mice a couple of months or maybe at CES, I guess, which is they're providing you with the 3D print files for this device.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you can customize the top part of it. It's like a top pop off part. So you can do your own colors, designs, materials, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. I love stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really great.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a huge month for Activision Blizzard games on Game Pass is the sentence I wish I could have said without laughing. Actually there are some Blizzard games now coming to Game Pass, so it's a little bit past the middle of the month, but they just announced. Not that many, honestly five new games. But Atom Fall, Blizzard, Arcade, Blizzard Myth wrecked, Octopath, Traveler 2 and Train Sim World 5 are all coming to Game Pass through the end of the month.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know any of these games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope, me neither.

[Leo Laporte]

But the Blizzard I really liked Octothorpe.

[Paul Thurrott]

One, the first one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The story of the hashtag. No, that's something else. Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, then they went off in a different direction.

[Leo Laporte]

They really did change.

[Paul Thurrott]

They just kind of lost the script. We could just talk like that. No one would even know. No one knows any. Like the one person out there be like, wait, what?

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Octothorpe 1. What? Yeah, train 5 SIM wards.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, that implies of course is there's four previous versions we don't know about either.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. It's the fifth in a series and.

[Richard Campbell]

We still don't know about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of amazing games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. There's all these things that to me, seem like a good idea, but I've never done and will never do. Right. And I can't explain this, but. But when I see, like, a train sim, I think to myself, just put this thing up on a screen and have it be like, drive it's running Boston to California or something, and just have it. But see the world is it. I've never done it. I don't know. It seems.

[Richard Campbell]

I want you all to know there's a train world train Sim World 6 coming this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. That's why, of course you're getting crap.

[Paul Thurrott]

One now they've hit the game. Yeah, the game Pass Dumpster. They can come up with the new version.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not fair.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not fair at all. Because you should really start with games. Train Sim World 1. You're really a serious player. I mean, come on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think the simmer.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm working my way up to the diesel Strato line of five. It's an amazing vehicle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That was a forward and backward button.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was such a nerd alert that I actually got a chili up my back. It's like, oh, yikes.

[Richard Campbell]

I am an old railroad tycoon fan from back in the day. The original. Original that I. I think I literally kept a DOS machine running so I could really.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you. You plan the tracks? What do you do?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, it was. It was all of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, driving, it's not hard, right? You're on a track, you pretty much.

[Paul Thurrott]

Turn it on and what? You can go to the bathroom.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a world builder game, right? You got to build.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love trains.

[Richard Campbell]

Cities and stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love trains, but that's like.

[Leo Laporte]

I like riding in them. I think that's. That's great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I love, like, I love Star wars, but I'm not. I don't dress up like Obi Wan Kenobi.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't own a lightsaber. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So when we lived in Macunji at the apartment a couple years ago, I guess whenever that was. No, we used to walk by the train tracks, and these kids would be out there with their cameras and their tripods and whatever. And my wife asked one of them one time, she said, what time's the next? Do you know when the next train's coming? He says, yes, it's coming at 11:30. Yeah, it's coming and he explained what the train was and we were like, yikes. And my wife said, oh, do you have an app for that? And she goes, no.

[Leo Laporte]

I just know. Have you seen Francis Bourgeois? No. He's a TikTok personality known for his passion for trains. Three and a third million followers. Watching him strains.

[Paul Thurrott]

Watching him watch. Strains. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He gets so excited when a train goes by. It's hard to.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've run into. But my wife and I have run into these people all over the country. Like, we were up in Wyoming one time and we met a kid like this who was just sitting there rattling off like he's like, oh, that's the wrong thing. He knew everything about everything. And it, it was like, I mean, I don't know, maybe go on a date or something. Anyway, you know, whatever. We all live our lives however we choose. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a little just video of Francis. He's so excited about the train coming. He likes to wave as and see the camera he's wearing in front of his face.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, he is, he is. He's a young Robert Scoble is what he is.

[Leo Laporte]

Very excited. But you know what, his enthusiasm is catching. It's like he's really. He gets very excited. Oh, here he comes. Oh, look at that. Oh, man, what a train.

[Richard Campbell]

That's awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is. That is actually an awesome train.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Francis Bourgeois is his name. He's on. This is a YouTube channel.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm surprised I've not heard of this guy's. This guy. I actually do watch a lot of train videos on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he bought a train.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course he did.

[Leo Laporte]

He just bought, you know, as you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, there's my train pulling into my house.

[Leo Laporte]

I own this. This train. This is my train.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is my train.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, look at that train. It's an amazing train.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you can geek out on anything you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. And that's what I love about today's new media is it's people who are passionate about and they.

[Richard Campbell]

And they can things their thing. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, the problem is they're passionate about misinformation. They're passionate about, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so what else we got? Oh, this is kind of. This is actually pretty good. So one of the few reasonable complaints about these Snapdragon X based computers is that they're not good for games. They're not good for games because that really wasn't the focus. They were obviously for V1. They were trying to nail the performance issue for a thin and Light laptop type computer. Meet what you see on intel x86, whatever. And they did great on that. But they also made the mistake Qualcomm did of heavily promoting the game playing stuff, which is actually pretty terrible. And I don't know why they did that. But one of the fundamental issues. Well there's two, I would say two fundamental issues. One is that you're not seeing games that are written natively. No one is porting their games to arm. So you have to emulate that and so you get to figure that out and that that's kind of there. They do auto sr, et cetera, et cetera. But the other one is this game cheat software stuff. Right. Because this is x86 specific. So even if you can get a game that would work on ARM somehow the absence of this anti cheat software is a problem. So Qualcomm has partnered with Epic Games and they're going to bring the Epic Games anti cheat software to ARM sometime this year. So that's fantastic. Now I'm sure that involved a heavy. A big paycheck of some kind or whatever. I'm sure they're not doing it. Yeah, it's not through the goodness of their heart, but that's great. And one of the first games they're going to port over will be of course is Fortnite. Right. So Fortnite being one of the games that uses that anti cheat software. So that there's no date or time frame. Exactly. Other than this year. But that is in the works and that's. That's great. Discord, which I'm trying not to stare at as we record this show, I always have a problem with this is launching a social SDK that game developers can use to integrate social features into their own games. Right. Yeah. Discord and I was just talking about using a web browser. I would say like game web browsers, probably the most common kind of side by side. But Discord might be the second most as some of their.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually surprised this didn't exist before.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was too. Yeah. And I. So it's possible. This is. They probably have an SDK but now they're adding to it. And this is very specifically for that. I'm not really sure. But this company has over 200 million active monthly active users now.

[Leo Laporte]

It really. Discord was started by. So gamers could talk to each other while they were teeth bagging each other.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Because I used to, you know, back in the day crook the phone up in my thing so I could like make fun of my Friends while we were playing Duke Nukem 3D.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, have a few Discord.

[Richard Campbell]

Channels that, where I was alpha tester on game. And this, we use Discord to communicate.

[Paul Thurrott]

This will shock you guys to know that I was a horrible bully at this kind of stuff. And that like my friend and I would get into Quake World dressed as clowns, run around and dispirate everyone and we would be like, everyone loves a clown every time we killed someone. And then like these guys would just be like, could you please stop?

[Leo Laporte]

Please get a clown costume because Quake rolled.

[Paul Thurrott]

You could have skins. And we would, we chose the clowns because everybody loves a clown. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure. Insane Clown Posse.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty sure nobody loves clowns. But anyway, yeah, Discord smart. And then this not so smart. So. So there's a service that nobody knows exists called Google Play Games on PC. You're like, what? What is that? So Google Play Games on PC is Google making their own emulator for Windows so that you can play Android games on Windows? And the idea here is that if you don't have to do anything as a developer, but if you do, you can customize it for keyboard, mouse, et cetera, et cetera. So two big changes to this that, that they just announced this past week at GDC at the Game Developer Conference. One is they're going to enable this for all games on the Google Play Store by default. So if you don't want your game on the PC for some reason, you can opt out. But they're actually just going to turn the switch. So I guess they've made some progress on this. But the other thing they're doing is they're introducing, I guess they're going to call it an SDK. I'm not sure what else to call it. A way to put your native Windows game into the Play Store for Play Games for PC. So in other words, everything that's in there now is a mobile game. Right? It's an Android game. Some of them are customized to work with keyboard, mouse, some aren't. If you have a touchscreen, you can do the touchscreen stuff, et cetera, et cetera. But they're actually going to open this up to developers who create native Windows games so that in other words, you've already done it. You don't just show up and you're like, oh, I think I'll make a new game. I'll use this. For some reason, reason you've already made your game. Maybe you're already selling it through Steam or wherever you can add it to the Play Games for PC platform if you wanted to. For some reason I can't even imagine what the point of that is. This thing supported x86 generally, but intel specifically. Now it supports AMD works on desktop PCs and laptops, et cetera. There's a lot of customization you can do. Playing Android games on Windows seems reasonable to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, it's kind of hysterical that Google had to write this, didn't they?

[Paul Thurrott]

Didn't have to. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't there an Android system for this?

[Paul Thurrott]

They didn't have to. In fact, when they first started promoting this, Google went out of their way to explain to me at least that I just want you to know we're not doing any of this Microsoft stuff. We did this all by ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not that code used Amazon's store. They were so anti.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think these might be interrelated it. You know and by the way that the Android subsystem stuff is going away right. This year soon. I think mid year. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was already gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they announced it but I think they're actually chopping it off at the legs pretty soon. And then Amazon announced recently they're getting rid of the Play Store. Sorry the Amazon App Store outside of their own devices. Kindle tablet devices or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I think Fire TV as well. Anyway, I don't really care the Play Store thing for native games, whatever. But actually bringing. Now they're just gonna. They're gonna turn on this funnel like that might make this interesting. There's probably a lot of great games.

[Leo Laporte]

There are.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would like to play Call of Duty Mobile on my computer actually. That'd be kind of cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like.

[Leo Laporte]

But the problem is that the screens are.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, some of. Well remember like there are big screen. There are tablets, there are Chromebooks, these things run on those. So this is kind of the next logical step. And yeah, some games are going to look like crap. It's just not going to work good. They're going to run. Maybe they run in portrait mode, whatever. But I don't know like a game like Call of Duty Mobile. Honestly that pretty great.

[Richard Campbell]

So we'll see if it's scaled up. It's just going to be a bit bigger for you to see with your old eyes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it might be my ideal Call of Duty as we move forward in time. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I get you, you rat.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, we're going to pause readers first.

[Leo Laporte]

We're gonna. I was thinking by the way, you know you were talking about how you would buy a bunch of stuff to make sure you didn't run out. And that was always my strategy with readers. You just buy so many that you sell the environment and you can never lose.

[Paul Thurrott]

We used, we, when we were younger, made fun of a friend's father passed away and he had. I think they found 37 pairs of glasses in this guy's house. We were like, they're cheap. And now we have 37 pairs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Put them everywhere because you're gonna need them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Every restaurant should have a pair of readers at the table.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

In Mexico, they have these tables that have legs that have like a circular kind of holder on the thing. And it's. So if the table is full of stuff, you can put a bottle of whatever you might have down there on the leg.

[Leo Laporte]

Very smart.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is smart.

[Leo Laporte]

You sure that's not a purse holder?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Oh, no, they have those.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are those.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is. It's a cylindrical thing. It's designed to hold a bottle or a glass. Smart. But like you said, what it should have, and it should be on one of those rosary chain things is like a. Like a pair of. Yeah, exactly. Because everyone. You look at the menu and like, what is this? It's in like one point type. You know, it's so funny when you.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to a restaurant with people over 40 and they all have their phones and their flashlights on. The phones on.

[Paul Thurrott]

As they're all like going like back and forth.

[Richard Campbell]

Camera mode on and zoomed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some people just taking pictures and zooming in, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What does that say?

[Paul Thurrott]

Getting old. Getting old is the best.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no fun. Okay. It's the best. Paul says it's the best. You know what else is the best? Our fabulous Club Twit. We'd like to invite you all to join the club. It is seven bucks a month. I don't think you could get any less expensive. That's seven bucks a month. And for that you get, I think, a lot of benefit. You get, of course, ad free versions of all the shows. That's kind of, you know, obvious. You. You're paying us. You shouldn't need to have ads, but you also get access to this Discord thing that Paul was talking about. This amazing club Twit, Discord. What a great hang. I mean, it is really a lot of fun. People are. People are very funny in there. There's a. There's some readers. We're gonna have a lot of readers in there. We are doing a bunch of events in the club. Micah's Crafty Corner is tonight, 6:00pm Pacific, 9:00pm Eastern. If you want to. There really is nothing to it. Micah's going to be building his little cozy tiny kitchen and you bring your own little craft whatever. It could be Lego or needle point or whatever, and you can do it along with Mike and it's just a fun little hang. Our AI user group is on the fourth Friday. This is something Anthony Nielsen started. He's our AI wizard here and I'll be in there too, because it's really interesting to see how people use AI tools and share our tips with one another. We've got Stacey's Book Club coming up. We're going to book another coffee show with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. So a lot of fun things going on in the club. You also, I tell you that the Discord is a lot of fun, but you also get the warm and fuzzy feeling that you are helping us make content. It's not cheap to make the content that we make. We love doing it. We think it's important. Yes, thank you advertisers for supporting us. We started the club because we realized that we didn't want to be fully 100% dependent on advertising we really want. I mean, I don't want to do a show just because I can get an ad on it. I want to do a show because you want to hear it it. So this is your way to kind of support what we do to let us know what more you want to hear and see and that kind of thing. If you're not yet a member, scan the QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen if you're watching on video. Or go to Twit TV Club Twit, Twitter, TV Club Twit again. Seven bucks a month. It's less than a venti latte at Starbucks now, which is kind of saying more about Starbucks than it's about the club. We invite you to join and be crafty with us. Twit TV Club Twit. All right, back of the book time. Hey, prime members, are you tired of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ads interfering with your favorite podcasts?

[Leo Laporte]

Good news.

[Paul Thurrott]

With Amazon Music, you have access to.

[Leo Laporte]

The largest catalog of ad free top.

[Paul Thurrott]

Podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music.

[Leo Laporte]

App for free or go to Amazon.com ad freepodcasts. That's Amazon.com ad free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Paul, you want to do some more Xbox stuff? Go right ahead.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, why not? Why? I've made a weird transition from console gaming back to PC after whatever number of years. That was close to 20, I bet. And I noticed this morning that all of. Well, most of the Call of Duty games for PC are on sale in the Microsoft store up to 67% off. If there's a particular game you're looking for, you don't see it in the link that I have search for that because actually I found, like, even the first game is actually on sale. The one caveat here is that a lot of the older games are not multiplayer enabled on PC. If you play this on console, I believe most of them actually still have. Have the multiplayer stuff built in. And I think it's like an infrastructure thing, because on console that probably goes through Xbox live or whatever. PlayStation. And I think on PC it's something like Activision had to do or whatever. But if multiplayer bad is to you, make sure the game you're getting still supports it. Obviously the most recent ones do I think through. I want to say Infinite Warfare whenever that was. Something like that. Something like that. But some of the prices are pretty good. I could. I might actually get a couple of these. And then just during the show, I just discovered this. So starduck is also having a big sale. And starduck makes games, but they also make Windows apps and they have a storefront inside of Steam. So if you just look at their Windows apps, like Start 11, Windows Blinds 11, et cetera, these things are for sale, typically 25% off, but some of them are actually more than 20. I think Windows Blinds is 50% off. So I can't see.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm stuck in. Not stuck. I'm in Mexico. So I can only see the Mexico prices. And so they look really like 167. That's crazy. Oh, wait, that's Pesos. That's actually pretty good. That's cheap. But, yeah, if you're interested in any of this stuff, especially like a star 11, groupies, window blinds, whatever. It's. This is worth checking out. This is as far as the output goes, this is something I've avoided for years. And part of the reason I avoided is because of the nature of what I do. I have to kind of use and understand what Microsoft provides in Windows. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

That and you deeply enjoy suffering.

[Paul Thurrott]

But one or the other, I hate myself. So it's kind of the perfect Nexus.

[Richard Campbell]

You hate yourself. I used to run my own Exchange Server.

[Leo Laporte]

That's mad.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's. It's. It's not a contest. But yeah, okay, but you won that one. Yeah. So you know, I, I, I'm the type of person who would complain about like say File Explorer for years and then people always be like, why don't you use, you know. And every once in a while I would use a File Explorer replacement for a specific purpose, you know, some of the digital decluttering stuff or whatever. But I think I'm gonna start, I'm gonna go down this path and try to figure this out. And so somebody had recommended randomly on social media, some, something else and I was like, this is stupid, this is complicated. And so I just went down to the, well, to the one thing I'm familiar with or I've heard about, which is an app called Files. So if you go to files.community you'll find this thing. It's available in the Microsoft Store, it's free, it's open source, it's a gorgeous modern looking app. It looks a lot like File Explorer. I can't say that it's like super fast compared to File Explorer. Actually that would be a goal. So it's probable that I will have a future pick that's related. This will be a different app. But for now this is obviously people who care about this thing, they want it to look good and run well and all that stuff, it passes through everything that you might have in Explorer. So if you use something like Google Drive, which has extensions to File Explorer so you can mark things for offline, offline, whatever, that stuff all works too. So tab based, gorgeous design. It's not super fast, it's not super slow, but it's not any, it doesn't feel faster to me than File Explorer. I'm kind of surprised by that. On the other hand, it does not badger you to backup folders to OneDrive. So something to look at. It's a beautiful app. Like it's, well, you'd think they, they.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean now that they have all these features that they'd work on optimizing for speed a little bit is it doesn't feel slow, it just is. It's not as fast as Explorer or.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, it's hard to say. So one of the computers I'm using I'm going to review. So it only has 16 gigs of ram. It's in lunar Lake, it's the lowest end, Lunar Lake and it's not great on that. In fact it was problematic enough that I looked at it on the Snapdragon computer and actually there is a native ARM version. Right. Which is always appreciated too. And it runs great over there. It's Fine. It's not faster, but it's not noticeable. I would say this computer might be wheezing a little bit between the, It's a lower end processor. It's actually a lower end integrated graphics, which is intel and just 16 gigs of RAM. You know, it's just not, it's not interesting. That might be part of the problem. But it's a beautiful app. It really is a beautiful app. It's worth, it's worth looking at. It certainly doesn't cost you anything. It's free.

[Leo Laporte]

So I completely understand, though, why you don't use it. Because you got to write books. You can't have I Got to know, suffering, you know. No, you can't because you might accidentally put that in a screenshot and everybody say, hey, what's that version of Explorer?

[Paul Thurrott]

What's that beautiful looking thing? That is not the piece of junk I use every day. Yeah. If you can, one of the switches you can make, and I think other File Explorer type apps would do this is you can make it the default File Explorer app. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So you never see Explorer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So to the point where, I mean, it's, you know, it's Explorer EXE, it's running, but you, when you do the Windows key +E keyboard shortcut, it launches this app, not File Explorer, which is nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess there's a lot of these because the chat rooms come up.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think there are a million of.

[Leo Laporte]

These, bunch of different names and a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lot of them will, yeah, like directory opus. So like there'll be these, you know, really kind of power user complex ui. It's like, I, I get it. But I, I, this is, this to me is what this is. Microsoft should just use this like it's, it's much nicer looking than Explorer.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure that's what its authors had hoped.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's the same on Apple, though. On Mac, there's a lot of alternative choices, none of which I end up using because I just, you know, it's like, okay, you get all the good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Markdown editors on the Mac, we get a bunch of File Explorer replacements. It's like a different, you know, different worlds, different needs.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. All right, Richard, you're up. Time for your runners radio for this week.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The Sonja Cuff's been a regular for many years, shout out to Australia and works for Microsoft. Knows their way around the things, certainly a strong IT person. And we end up with these broader conversations most of the time and talking about managing AI costs specifically, just helping people understand how they're billed, how it's different, this concept of token costs and so forth, and why you might want to try different models and manage the costs that way and understand the billing and effects. And especially when we get down into the cloud infrastructure, it's can I assign these AI costs to the apps that are using them and to the users so that we can see the. Where utilization is happening. Trying to get that breakdown of all the different pieces. And we also ended up on the carbon footprint side too, because there's. That's an ongoing conversation for a lot of organizations as to where is your power coming from for these kinds of things. And that also sort of played against the finops model of you cost your infrastructure, how those costs work together. So a bit of an accounting show, but it's a necessary part of the equation. You know, being responsible sysadmin is also understanding where the money's going.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody wants to save money, Richard. It's not a.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and for many years now on run as is, I've been doing that once a year, hey, this is your old uncle telling you to do the right thing. It's. You have a working relationship with your CFO and the better granularity you can apply to costs and then potential return on investment, the happier you're going to be. And I get some nice emails every so often with somebody saying, hey, you know, I got to tell you, I took your advice and I have a quarterly with the CFO and I can get my, my budget through pretty easy now.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, because you're having an ongoing conversation of what's important, what isn't. That kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that's really important for it because a lot of times, especially cyber security, it's not a profit center, it's hard to justify the spend because it doesn't make you money. And.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it's a conversation we've had where it's like, how do you, how do you differentiate between your, between it and the cleaning of the office? Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there is just another line. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because if you're just equated as an expense, then it's all about cutting it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And so when you associate it with risk for the company, when you associate it with efficiency for the company, when you show returns on things, all those things are true. You know, it's just that it's super easy when people don't understand what you do to. You're just taking out the trash for us.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Finally I get to say after how many episodes of Whiskey hundreds. I get to say it's Suntory time.

[Richard Campbell]

We can. I really am doing a Suntory whiskey. And I did pick this up at the local shop, the Toki. We have talked about Suntory time before, Right? We certainly. Suntory is one of the big conglomerates, one of the big four. And so they bought Beam. So they're now, for a while, they were called Beam. Suntory. And I went back and watched the movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Love that movie.

[Richard Campbell]

With an extremely young ScarJo looking quite exploited. I might.

[Leo Laporte]

It does feel that way, but Sofia Coppola directed it, so I feel like she probably wasn't exploited. It certainly made her a star.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a lot of inappropriate underwear.

[Leo Laporte]

Shots right at the beginning. She's jumping around in her bed in her underpants. It's like we're talking about translation. What is it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Lost.

[Leo Laporte]

Lost in translation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's funny, we just had this conversation, my wife and I. That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny how movies that you remember one way age differently then you look back on them. Times have changed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah. Like, you didn't know who she was when this happened, obviously, you know, and Bill Murray's. Bill Murray, whatever. But, yeah, night.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, I didn't know she was going to be this phenomenal star and all those sorts of things. You know, it also falls on the Edmund Fitzgerald, too, because without that song, nobody remember that shipwreck. Like, there's plenty.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

And lots of. Lots of sailors have died. But, you know, Gordon Lightfoot made everybody remember one of them. Put him in the same league as the Titanic.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe Gordon far better. Scarlett Johansson.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure there's plenty. So we've gone over Suntory a little bit. Before 1899, Shinjiru Tori starts a wine importation business in Osaka. He was only 20 years old when he did this and is quite successful. The name Suntory is actually a play on his name. His last name was Tori. Tori. And so when you refer to him, you'd say. You'd call him Tori San. And so Suntory, the big product for him that made him all his money was the thing they called Acadama Wine, which is actually blending Portuguese wine with sweeteners. And by the early 1900s, he has 60% of the market. He falls in with a guy named masasaka Takaturo in 1920, who'd been in Scotland studying whiskey. And they set up the very first whiskey distillery in Japan in the Yamazaki Distillery in a location between Kyoto and Osaka, the whiskey is very bad. And Taketsiru goes back to Scotland to try and figure more things out. They, they, they're. They finally get an edition out in, in 1929 they call Shira Fota. Then people don't buy it because it's bad. After 10 years of working on this problem, Takatsuru left Yamazaki at the end of his contract. He believed that the distillery was in the wrong location and could not make good whiskey. So he then, you know, puts his money where his mouth is and creates his own distillery up in Hokkaido, called Nikkei. The second distillery with terrain much more like Scotland. He believed that was an essential part of Nikkei is also a successful distillery. And that was a story I told previously. We were talking about Japanese whiskey and then focused on Nikkei and so forth. We didn't really get into where Suntory went from there because by 1937, this, the famous Suntory whiskey becomes huge with the Japanese soldiers, gets a big contract with the military. And so that does extremely well. And even after the war, continues to be popular to the point that by the late 60s, Suntory is a very successful, wealthy company. And Shinjiro's son Kezo, who's also working in the business, now opens additional distilleries. He opens 2 and 1 in 72 and 1 in 73. The first is the Cheetah Distillery near Nagoya, actually on a peninsula called the Cheetah Peninsula, where they're actually making grain whiskey. They're using corn, and so they're making industrial alcohol products as well as drinking alcohols as well. And then the. In 1973, the Hakushu Distillery in the Japanese Alps. Taking a cue from what Take Seru had said, they moved to a more mountainous, cooler region. They made this additional distillery. Although otherwise operated very much like Yamazaki, the single malts don't become popular until the 80s. And that's when the first of the Yamazakis come out. There have blend Hibiki in 89. And then the second, that new distillery they'd built. In 73, Hakushu makes their first production single malt. And it was famously in 2003 when lost in Translation came out, was also the first time that a Japanese whiskey ever won a World Whiskey Award. They won gold for the Amazaki 12, sending a $40 a bottle whiskey to $400 in a matter of days. Because why wouldn't you cash in?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And they. This Toki first comes along in 2016, so it's almost 10 years old. It is a Blended whiskey. But it's what's interesting about it. Unlike the other blends, which typically bought from many different distilleries, this is actually a combination of the three distilleries that Yamazaki owns. So Hakushu, not that you know, the original Suntory whiskey was also a blend from the Yamazaki distillery. This particular edition is primarily the Hakushu malt with a little bit of the older Yamazaki blended into it and then a bunch of the Cheetah grain whiskey added. So the Yamazaki and Hakushu distilleries are quite similar. They don't do their own maltings anymore. Nobody does for the most part. They. But they. So they buy malted and gristed barley from all over the world, most of the time not peated, but you occasionally find a Yamazaki with a little bit of peat in it. They don't use a ton of it. Their setup is large. They have a pair of gigantic mash tons for their initial mashes, and then they use both Oregon pine and stainless steel wash packs, big ones. Their fermentation is of sort of medium length because it is warmer there. So they don't go into the hundreds of hours, somewhere between 60 and 80. One of the interesting quirks of both the Yamazaki and Hakushu distilleries is that they continue to use direct fire on their wash stills. Now most. And then they use steam heat for their spirit still. Now they switch to spirit. The reason to to switch to steam heat is to stop explosions. Right when you're evaporating alcohol, you're creating an explosive environment. And having opened open fire in that space is dangerous. And so as soon as steam made sense, most, most distilleries switched to it. But there is a side effect of using direct fire on the wash still, which is that you're roasting some of the materials left from the wart that gives an additional flavor. And so the Yamazakis folks decided that that was important, and so they've kept it in. They used use natural gas, although apparently there are experiments with hydrogen flames now which are extra double dangerous.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my gosh.

[Richard Campbell]

If you ever take a tour of a still of a the still building on a distillery site, you will find that the buildings are heavily vented there. Roofs are open to open air. There's often big openings along the bottom. And it's to keep the alcohol concentrations down. Limit the amount of explosions. And even if you do have what's called a flash, it's not the building's not holding any pressure. So it's easy to dissipate the pressure and you won't blow the building apart. But you know, their argument is sound that you get a lot when you're using steam under minimal pressure, you're really not going to get much more than 100, 120 degrees centigrade onto the still. That's all arguably too hot as it is because you want lower than that for the alcohol evaporation. Right. When you're using direct fire, you get hundreds of degrees and so you do get that toasting effect and it's builds new flavors. Part of the effect of that particular.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like it's worth the risk.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and you know, just do it properly. Hundreds of years they've been using direct fire and not blowing up very often.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just gotta be too hot and not usually blowing up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Interestingly, and again, both Yamazaki and Hakushu, they are using only pot stills, Fairly big ones, 15 to 20, 20,000 liters, but a variety of shapes. They, you know, have the distills, comes in pairs and they have eight to 12 sets, depending on which still are you talking about. But they're not uniform. They're not all the same because they make a variety of whiskies. And so they have different stills for different purposes. They have warehouses at both distillery sites, plus a number of other sites. They build them their own way. They tend to be out of stone, but they stack tall. They use mostly third party barrels. So largely ex bourbon, especially for Suntory. Now they own a whole bunch of the bourbon industry with owning beam. They also use sherry casks and of course the famous Mizunara oak, which is the Japanese oak. It's extremely hard to make barrels from. The Cheetah Distillery is a completely different creature. It's in a different location. It's at the Cheetah Peninsula, which is actually a big food processing area. So it's in the center of the big agricultural brand in Japan. And a lot of foodstuffs come and go from that port and they're still right in the middle of it. And it is a. Because it's made for grill grain distillery they use column stills. They actually have four of them named. So they'll wash, extraction, rectifying and purifying distilleries. And depending on what they're making, they'll use two, three or four of those columns. So your strongest tasting spirits only go through two of the columns, like the wash and rectifying column. And then there's a medium where they'll add the extraction column will go to three, and then if they do all four, that's your lightest high. If you're going to really make like rubbing alcohol and get to 99%, you need all four.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's where toki is made, is it? The cheetah?

[Richard Campbell]

So toki is actually made at the. Is blended at the Hakushu Distillery, primarily made from hakushu. But as is typical with blended whiskeys, you add little grain because it's inexpensive. Right, Right. So your flavors are going to come from those single malts that you've combined. But mostly this is going to be grain alcohol because it's cheap, but it's also all of their grain distillation is done with corn. And so it's going to be sweet as well. So if I give this a taste and feels how pale this is, it's quite a strong color. Like not, not real dark whiskey. But it's not particularly old. It has no age declaration on it.

[Leo Laporte]

They call it modern. It's their modern whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

And it is without a doubt, I mean, Japanese whiskey, I've always thought seems rather clinical. It's very precisely made very Japanese style. This is nice and sweet and fruity up front. Not a big alcohol hit, which is impressive for it is a 43%. So they're not just going to the minimum 40, but it's gentle and it's got a little bit of heat coming out at the end. So. And it's. We're talking 30 less than $40 US you can find this. It's a blend and It's Japanese at 43%. So don't feel bad about making this into a cocktail. It's legit, but it drinks perfectly fine on its own. This is, I would argue, the most approachable of Japanese whiskeys. Right. This is the, the, the Jack of Japanese Jack. Yeah. You know, if you've got a family member who throws Coke in it, I mean, they're brain damaged, but we do, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

And I caught him with the Angel's envy and I said, stop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no. At least use tab for that. Come on, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Fresca if nothing else. Yeah, no, I, I stopped him and then he. God, he was going, oh, then he was a Clonak Hilti. I said, no, you can't be put Coke and Colonic Hilty.

[Paul Thurrott]

That should explode.

[Richard Campbell]

If you just want to have a Japanese whiskey around, have a bottle of Tokyo.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a good idea. You should buy some and say, here's for your. You know, here you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Right it's from the original Japanese distillers in Japan. It's one of the largest companies in the world, for better or worse in the, in the booze business. Yeah. And reasonably priced. And it's still distinctly, distinctly a Japanese whiskey.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And nobody's going to look at it and say, oh, you got me in cheap whiskey. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No, the bottles are always beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is the problem. And if you sat this beside the Yamazaki 12, which you would if you could find one, and that's very difficult, you would have paid hundreds for.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Arguably the bottle's not even as nice looking as this thing right now.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a good looking square bottle.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very pretty, it's distinct, it's. But you know what else? It's got a screw top. Right. No cork or anything like. It is an inexpensive bottle. Like it's been done very efficiently.

[Leo Laporte]

But good.

[Richard Campbell]

It. Yeah. No, keep this one around. You'll be. You, you, you will. Had a nice Japanese with you and arguably the. One of the least expensive Japanese made now.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you? For a hundred dollars. Let's say what would be a good Irish whiskey? Maybe that Cat Capot Castle would be good if you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds like a personal request, like you're trying to use them as a personal shopper kind of a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

And to be honest, I get messages.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

At least every week somebody says, hey, I want to get.

[Leo Laporte]

And when you're a whiskey expert, people are going to want to know.

[Richard Campbell]

And if you're going to go ask.

[Paul Thurrott]

Me like which file explorer should I use?

[Leo Laporte]

He liked. I bought him the bottle of the Middleton that came in though. A nice wood box. He liked that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, those are nice. I would get the Red Breast 12 or if you want to spend a little more of the red breast 15.

[Leo Laporte]

We've gotten him red breast before. Yeah, I think he likes that. How about the yellow spot?

[Richard Campbell]

The.

[Paul Thurrott]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think we've done the yellow spot.

[Richard Campbell]

Go to the yellow. So the green spot's the base one and it's less than $100. The yellow spot's going to be in the 150 range. And then, and then, you know, there is a blue spot and a red spot, but those are very hard to find and pricey. It's just an aging thing. They, they. I believe the green is 8 and the yellow is 10. And so they're they. And it is genuinely nicer. It's a nice bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'll look for a yellow spot. That's green spot.

[Richard Campbell]

All Day long. Too friendly.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I can't remember. We got him. They might have bought him. I mean, Lisa got it for him, so she might have.

[Richard Campbell]

If you like the red breast, he'll like the green spot.

[Leo Laporte]

He did. He liked it a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

If you can find the. The. The Cabo Castle. Get it. It's just unusual. It'll be tricky to find.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's just one of the many Middletons. Although to be clear, both red breast and.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all Middleton.

[Richard Campbell]

They're all Middletons. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all Middleton all the way. Mr. Wonderful. Richard Campbell. It's so great to have you on. And you're multi. Multimodal, Multimodal polymathic expertise in so many areas. He [e-mail] tons of podcasts and I.

[Richard Campbell]

Can'T forget any of them.

[Leo Laporte]

So he's got a memory.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, while I'm submodal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he is. That is richesunisradio.com and of course, net rocks with Carl. Carl. [e-mail] Great to have you. You're going on the road pretty soon, I think. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Next week in Redmond for the MVP summit. So I'm gonna try and secure one of the Channel 9 studios. Okay. As I've done.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you want to bring a guest, don't. Don't hesitate.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll see. Who would you like me to bring there?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, Paul. Who should he get?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But you could confer offline. You don't have to make any enemies now. Although that, that is always fun, like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Talking off the top. My brain has always work well. No, I'm just saying.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just saying. We could put an extra window in if you needed another.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Well, it'd probably be a side by side with the smart camera, so we'll do something.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Richard. Paul Thurat thorat.com His books Windows Everywhere and the Field guide to Windows 11 are available at leanpub.com you should really get both of them. Them and anything you want to. I noticed on the front page of THOT.com Yep, there was a. There was a comment. Somebody said, what's going to happen to first ring?

[Paul Thurrott]

People get nervous. Nothing's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing's going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fred had to go up to Michigan for work this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was away Monday, Tuesday.

[Leo Laporte]

So there was no first ring daily for the week yet. But there will be. When. When you reunite.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, fear not. You're getting what you pay for. With this podcast, it's. No, I don't know. No, no, there's no problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. That's a relief. Become a premium [e-mail] for even more of Paul's goodness.

[Paul Thurrott]

For more than Noogety Center.

[Richard Campbell]

As we say, it's that chewy, yummy goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

It says it on the front page of the site. It's podcast, Paul, and premium content all the way down.

[Paul Thurrott]

The three Ps.

[Leo Laporte]

The three Ps. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thanks to all of you. Special thanks to our club TWIT members, who of course make all of this possible. We stream Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. That's 1800 UTC. You can watch those streams in a variety of places. There's eight different places you can watch it. Of course, club members get to watch in the club Twit Discord and chat along as they watch. But we also on YouTube for Open to All, Twitch, X.com, tikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So that's eight different places you can watch. If you want to watch live, you don't have to because we have this new technology. We got a wire recorder and we record everything and then we deliver it to you via Pony Express within the next six to eight weeks. No, we don't know. You could get it later today at TWiT TV WW. Just download a copy or go to the YouTube channel dedicated to the video of Windows Weekly. Or better yet, subscribe. You won't have to think about it. You'll just always have the latest version. Choose audio or video or both. Just find your favorite podcast player and I'm sure they'll have Windows Weekly. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye.