Windows Weekly 940: The Donkey Always Wins

Summary

Windows Weekly 940: The Donkey Always Wins – Detailed Summary

Released on July 9, 2025 by TWiT

Hosts:

• Leo Laporte
• Paul Thurot
• Richard Campbell

---

1. Introduction

Leo Laporte kicks off the episode by welcoming listeners to "Windows Weekly" alongside Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell. The hosts tease a discussion about significant updates for Windows 11, milestone achievements in its installation numbers surpassing Windows 10, and various topics related to Xbox gaming, including a cautionary note about a flawed Call of Duty download from the Microsoft Store.

---

2. Windows 11 Updates and Patch Tuesday

The primary focus shifts to the latest Patch Tuesday updates released for Windows 11. Paul Thurot elaborates on the complexity of managing updates across different Windows versions:

• Windows Versions Covered:
  • 24H2
  • 23H2
  • Copilot Plus PCs
  • Windows 10

Paul highlights the introduction of the "Ask Copilot Edition," which he dismissively describes as "borderline useless" ([03:31]). The discussion delves into the challenges of the new PC migration feature, noting that while the first half involving the Windows Backup app is implemented, the second half integrated into Windows Setup is pending future updates ([06:45]).

Richard Campbell expresses optimism about the forthcoming features, anticipating easier PC migrations similar to seamless experiences in the mobile sector ([08:17]).

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [03:31]: "Ask Copilot Edition to click to do, which I can categorically state as borderline useless."
• Paul Thurot [06:45]: "But instead of doing it from the cloud, it will do it over the network from the other PC."

---

3. Microsoft Edge Performance Enhancements

Transitioning to Microsoft Edge, the hosts discuss substantial improvements aimed at enhancing user experience:

• Performance Boosts:
  • Reduction in load times by an average of 40% across 13 browser features.
  • Achieving a First Contentful Paint (FCP) score below 300 milliseconds, making it the first browser to attain such a benchmark ([50:47]).

While acknowledging the enhancements, Paul advises users to configure Edge properly to avoid privacy pitfalls. He recommends using extensions like Privacy Badger and utilities like Wintoys to block unwanted tracking and reset attempts by Edge ([137:03]).

Notable Quotes:

• Richard Campbell [53:08]: "It's their rendering engine."
• Paul Thurot [50:47]: "There are good reasons to like Edge... if you overlook the crap, it's a really good browser."

---

4. AI Integration and the Future of Browsing

The conversation shifts to the burgeoning role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within web browsers:

• AI-Driven Features:
  • Introduction of AI models like Gemini in Google’s Pixel devices and Microsoft’s Copilot.
  • Speculation on browsers evolving from traditional tools to AI-centric platforms that handle tasks autonomously ([63:08]).

The hosts express concerns about AI's potential to erode traditional browsing habits and the implications for privacy and user autonomy.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [63:08]: "Browsers are about to change dramatically... AI is going to be everywhere."
• Leo Laporte [77:30]: "We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile."

---

5. Compliance with the EU Digital Markets Act

Microsoft's alignment with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) is scrutinized:

• Key Changes:
  • Ability to uninstall Microsoft Edge in the EU.
  • Modification of default app settings to comply with DMA requirements.
  • Introduction of tools like PowerToys to manage these settings ([11:52]).

Paul emphasizes the necessity of these compliance measures, comparing Microsoft's approach to that of Apple in addressing regulatory demands.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [11:58]: "This is about accessing default apps and making sure you're DMA compliant."
• Paul Thurot [05:41]: "So enjoy that."

---

6. Personal Anecdote: Noisy Parade Experience

Paul shares a personal story about being awakened at 4 a.m. by a cacophonous parade in his neighborhood:

• Event Details:
  • Continuous explosions resembling a war zone.
  • Interaction with a neighbor who is accustomed to the annual event.
  • Impact on personal life, including disrupting sleep and causing household frustrations ([29:50]).

This segment adds a personal touch, highlighting the hosts' real-life experiences outside of technology discussions.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [29:50]: "I could hear it. It was gonna come down the street... I started recording on my phone."

---

7. Whiskey Segment: JP Trodden's Maple Rye Whiskey

A delightful diversion takes the form of an in-depth discussion on a niche whiskey product:

• Product Spotlight:

  • JP Trodden's Maple Rye Whiskey: A unique bourbon aged in maple syrup barrels, imparting a distinct sweetness.
  • Production Insights:
    • Utilizes a 70/30 corn and winter wheat mash bill.
    • Employs lambic-style stills for distillation.
    • Barrel-aging in specially treated maple syrup barrels to infuse flavors.

• Business Growth:

  • Started as a single-still operation, winning awards like double gold at the San Francisco World Spirits.
  • Expanded to a larger facility in Snohomish, Washington, enhancing production capacity and introducing a tasting room.

The hosts commend the craftsmanship and innovative approach of JP Trodden, appreciating the blend of traditional techniques with modern flavor infusions.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [134:07]: "JP Trodden's Maple Rye Whiskey is different because it is only 50% of the small batch, the black label and 50% of a rye whiskey made for the purpose."
• Richard Campbell [157:15]: "They do making bourbon, maple syrup now we're talking."

---

8. Xbox and the Gaming Industry

A critical examination of Microsoft's gaming division unfolds, focusing on recent layoffs and strategic missteps:

• Recent Developments:

  • Significant layoffs within Microsoft’s gaming studios despite substantial acquisitions.
  • Challenges in integrating acquired studios and delivering successful game titles.
  • Specific issues with the Call of Duty download from the Microsoft Store, which contained vulnerabilities that hackers exploited ([116:56]).

• Game Pass and Market Strategy:

  • Discussion on the sustainability of the Xbox Game Pass model.
  • Comparison with competitors like Sony and Nintendo, highlighting Microsoft's struggles to match their first-party game success.
  • Speculation on the future direction of Xbox hardware and potential shifts away from traditional consoles to partnerships with PC makers ([85:07], [90:07]).

The hosts express frustration over Microsoft's inability to effectively manage its gaming acquisitions and maintain consistency in game quality, leading to financial and reputational setbacks.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [116:56]: "It's a good game. I don't know. I'm really... to experience what real people experience."
• Richard Campbell [90:07]: "They rolled up the industry."

---

9. Addressing Privacy and Configuration in Microsoft Edge

Paul offers actionable advice for users to secure their Microsoft Edge browser:

• Recommendations:

  • Install privacy-focused extensions like Privacy Badger and Adblock Plus.
  • Utilize utilities such as Wintoys to enforce DMA compliance and prevent Edge from resetting user configurations.
  • Disable Edge from running at startup to enhance privacy and control ([137:03], [141:43]).

• Challenges:

  • Users must manually adjust settings to maintain privacy.
  • Synchronization issues across multiple devices prevent seamless configuration replication.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [137:03]: "With the right configuration is not problematic. Without the right configuration. Extremely problematic."
• Leo Laporte [135:52]: "It's a nexus of the insertification that occurs in Windows 11."

---

10. Conclusion and Recommendations

In wrapping up, the hosts encourage listeners to:

• Engage with Community:

  • Join the "Club Twit" Discord for exclusive content and discussions.
  • Support the show through memberships for additional benefits like ad-free episodes and access to special events.

• Stay Informed and Protected:

  • Regularly update and configure Windows and Edge to ensure security and compliance.
  • Explore niche interests, such as boutique whiskeys, as part of a balanced lifestyle outside of technology.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [141:53]: "If you like this kind of stuff, definitively take a look at these things."
• Paul Thurot [137:18]: "It's a problem for me, especially because I use so many different computers."

---

Notable Ads Skipped:

• 1Password: Promoted Trelica by 1Password for SaaS app security.
• ThreatLocker: Highlighted for Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Advocated for online privacy and rights.
• Progressive Insurance & PayPal: Standard sponsorship segments promoting their services.

---

Closing Remarks: Leo Laporte and the hosts thank listeners for tuning in, encouraging them to subscribe, leave reviews, and participate in the community. They tease upcoming segments, including discussions on gaming and more personal anecdotes in future episodes.

---

This comprehensive summary encapsulates the multifaceted discussions of "Windows Weekly 940," providing insights into Windows 11's evolution, the complexities of Microsoft's gaming strategies, the integration of AI in everyday tools, and a delightful foray into the world of specialty whiskey. Notable quotes underscore key sentiments and opinions expressed by the hosts, offering listeners a distilled version of the episode's rich content.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about a big year for Windows 11 updates. And boy, there's a whole lot of new features we'll talk about. Plus, Windows 11 finally has more installs than Windows 10. Took it almost the entire lifespan of Windows 10 to do it. And a little Xbox gaming. A lot of Xbox gaming. Including a warning about a version of Call of Duty from the store that you probably shouldn't download. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 940 recorded on Wednesday, July 9, 2020 25. The Donkey Always wins. Hello, you winners. And you dozers. It's. I didn't want to wake the dozers up. It's time for Windows Weekly. Mr. Paul Th is in Dir house. Actually, he's in his house in Mexico.

[Paul Thurot]

Apartment in durapartment. Now I'm all screwed up again. What's going on with me?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you look beautiful. What are you talking about?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I guess I shrunk the window like a doofus.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the giant hand reaching in. Also with us, ladies and gentlemen, Richard Campbell, who is in the beautiful Madeira Park, British Columbia.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not that nice. It's kind of wintery today.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's pretty. Now, see, that looks pretty, you know, showing there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, look at that. It's been a few squalls through and there's a bit of cloud layer on.

[Leo Laporte]

Texada, but that's why everything's so green.

[Richard Campbell]

It's. Everything's very green right now. It's been. Been a good 24 hour driz in this in California.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in the. At the point where things start to turn brown and dry out. Just, you know, getting ready for the wildfire season, if, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's perfect timing. Do you know we were just getting to brown grass because we do not sprinkle our grass here. And then the rain came.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a song. Sounds like a rhythmic song. All right. Okay, you win. Let's talk about Windows. In fact, let's talk about Patch Tuesday.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Which actually happened on schedule this week, unlike our week D update from two weeks ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Freaking me out. That's weird.

[Paul Thurot]

What's wrong?

[Richard Campbell]

That's freaking me out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too weird to be on time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, the truth is we've. We've talked about all this, but keeping track of this stuff is really difficult because when will then be now kind of a problem. So for 24 and 23 H2 there are a set of updates. Some are for both, some are only for 24H2. One of them is only for copilot plus PCs. Hilarious. Windows 10 also got a patch Tuesday update. I don't usually mention that, but this one has a semi important change which we'll get to. So the single Copilot plus PC feature is that Ask Copilot Edition to click to do, which I can categorically state as borderline useless. So enjoy that.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just the beginning.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Like my optimism. I'm going to do optimism.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, I appreciate it. I think we've both been around long enough to know it's not going to get better. But it's a. It's a glorified version of copy and paste. So, you know, you engage with click to do. You get the shimmery color thing going on. It highlights all the text and graphics you can see on screen. You can select one and then ask to Copilot. Ask Copilot will be one of the choices. And then it will just paste that thing into Copilot. So then you're going to run Copilot. I don't know. I'm not a big fan of this.

[Richard Campbell]

So there's all about running Copilot. That's what it's about.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Actually, I'm going to step through what I hate about every one of these new features. This might be the easiest way to go through this. So there's that show smaller taskbar taskbar icons option 24H2 only. I think I made this comment last week, but it does make the icon smaller, but it keeps the taskbar the same size. Part of the point of that would be to have a smaller taskbar.

[Richard Campbell]

But look, we're still working on Windows 10 taskbar features, aren't we?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. I don't have any complaints about this one, but. Narrator. Narrator, as I called it. My article for some reason has a new feature called Screen Curtain, which is basically one of those deals where it will black out the screen while it reads content a lot. So the point of this is you're probably using it because you have a vision impairment and thus you have no idea perhaps that someone is just staring at your screen and maybe taking, you know, getting vital corporate information from you or something. So this will black out the screen for you, which makes tons of sense. On the other end of the spectrum, if you use Windows 11 as an individual, you know that the Settings app has like a home screen now, like so it's not the system view. By default you have this home view with which I don't ever find useful for anything. But there it is. And now if you sign in with a commercial account, so an entry id, like a Microsoft work or school account, you can have that screen too, you lucky dog. So enjoy that.

[Richard Campbell]

I assume your administrator gets to decide. You can.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. And they can customize it. Right. So you can have company specific information, which. That's fine. I mean, that's fine. Window Share keeps getting updated every three days, it seems. This is the update where you will see a preview of the web content that you're trying to share, if that's what you're sharing. They already do that for images and there's a bunch of other stuff for images, but including that three compression level thing I was talking about recently, which is actually super useful. So that's good. This one is. We'll put this one in the half assed category. When Microsoft introduced Windows backup to Windows 11, I sort of recognized how terrible it was in pointless. But I also saw the potential for the future where maybe, maybe they would turn this thing into something useful. And they are in fact doing that. And so one of the major changes coming in the Future is a PC migration feature for Windows 10 users coming to Windows 11. Or in the future, you just buy a new PC. Right. You want to migrate from one to the other.

[Richard Campbell]

There's something that the phones have had nailed for years.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And actually I think Apple's got this nailed too. If you buy a new Mac, it is just trivial to be back to your config.

[Paul Thurot]

I couldn't do this off the top of my head, but Microsoft added this type of capability in Windows 8 and then scaled it back in Windows 10 and then scaled it back further in Windows 11 and then added Windows Backup and started rebuilding it. So much like the taskbar, we're kind of getting back to where we were sort of how many years later. Yeah. So there are two halves to the PC migration story. The half that has shipped in this update is in the Windows Backup app. And so you will see a landing page and a pairing page and it will preview what's coming. You can't do anything with it because the second half is not there yet. And that will be added to Windows Setup. So at some point in the future, 25H2, probably you could bring up your computer, you go through that wizard where the different steps you sign in with your Microsoft account, probably you do whatever you do. And it will ask you, finds a.

[Richard Campbell]

Backup you made an hour ago and goes, would you like this? And off you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And. But instead of doing it from the cloud, it will do it over the network from the other PC. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

And it will probably be more involved.

[Richard Campbell]

Than what we have now because the tiny bit faster.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I'm willing to give this one a shot. I don't. I haven't seen the other half of it, so I can't really say I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

I have now ordered the parts for replacing both my workstations. One intel, one amd.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I am going to do bear Paves.

[Paul Thurot]

For both because these are going to be desktop computer. Well, obviously. I'm sorry. And what are the. What did you get for chips?

[Richard Campbell]

An Ultra 9 and a Ryzen 9. I just went top for both.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I only do this every few years. Right. And the main thing that got me moving was I met a couple of young kids at a July 1 barbecue who want to build their own gaming machines out of my old parts. So as soon as I my old parts, I'm like, all right, it's going to be a build party. I'll build the new ones, get the old parts, we'll build machines together.

[Paul Thurot]

It sounds like you're describing organ harvesting, but I assume that's not what you're saying. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

When you do the build party, let us know. We'll stream it. It'd be fun.

[Paul Thurot]

The Ultra 9, is that. Do you know if it's Arrow Lake or Lunar Lake or. What is that?

[Richard Campbell]

It's Arrow Lake.

[Paul Thurot]

It's Arrow Lake. Okay. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which I figured was the more mature of the chips.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, there's going to be an update to that probably this year. Well, actually, depending on the schedule. I don't know if they screw around.

[Richard Campbell]

Turns out that is always true.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. But that will add the one thing that's missing, not that it's super important, is the Copilot plus PC capable NPU. It's not a narrow lake, but I.

[Richard Campbell]

Think that's 5080 in it. So there you go. I got your tops right here.

[Paul Thurot]

You'll be good. It'll probably play a solitaire pretty well. Yeah. Yes, it will be. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

High frame rates, all Minesweeper all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

And then the last one, this is actually really cool. So we talked about this maybe two, three weeks ago. Microsoft conforms to the legal requirements of the Digital Markets App act in Europe. It has published a website publicly where they show what it's doing to each of the products. It only has to do things to Windows and LinkedIn for some reason. But. And I, you know, I sort of appreciate A, the openness of this, but also B, they're just, they're not really quibbling about it. They're like, yep, now we get it. We're just doing it, you know. You know, just like Apple's doing. They're very similar. So I don't know, two, three weeks ago, a month ago, maybe they announced some further changes because there were some things they were doing that were still not compliant with the dma. Most of them related to the web browser. And what it basically amounts to is you'll be able to, I think u today can already do this, maybe uninstall Edge if you're in the EU or European economic area. But also changes how default apps work. So default browser in particular, it actually gives you everything, not just part of it and you know, things like that. So this is, this is actually pretty useful. And last week I had an app pick or somewhere in there, something about windtoys, which is a free utility. You can get the Microsoft Store different from. Yeah, it's. Well, yes, yeah, yes. But there's probably some overlap. But it's, this is a lot about. It's basically like just surfacing things that are registry changes or policy changes.

[Richard Campbell]

PowerToys is more utilities is just settings in Windows that. Because we don't have enough setting screens in Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean we, we do have a lot of setting screens, but we also don't have a setting for every setting, if that makes sense. You know, not every setting is promoted to a UI for some reason, probably purposely in many cases. So this, you know, a lot of. It's kind of superfluous, but there are some really neat things about wintoys and one of them is you can just check a box and say I want to, I want to be DMA compliant. And you reboot and you can uninstall Edge, you can do all that stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

So nice.

[Paul Thurot]

It's actually kind of cool. I'm going to talk about more about Edge.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also like non, non hostile way to do this. Although I guess, I mean, Microsoft saying yes, we're going to be compliant and then they're deciding what compliance looks like and then making it very easy for users to say, okay, I'm now compliant, whether or not that's actually what the EU wants. But then when does the EU ever make it clear what they want?

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Well, they'll complain if it's not what they want, but they won't tell you.

[Richard Campbell]

They'll tell you what they want. Yeah, okay.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, I think I like my wife.

[Richard Campbell]

That girl wants so.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. Tell me what you want.

[Leo Laporte]

But you really, really want.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. So this is a cool update. This is also going out to Windows 10. So if you're using Windows 10 in the EU, if you're using Windows 11 by the time October rolls around and then for the next three years you'll still be able to have that capability regardless of the os. So I should have been a little clearer about some of these things. So the Windows share improvements, the PC migration bit, the EU changes for the DMA compliance are across 24, 23H2 and Windows. Sorry those two versions and then the EU DMA compliance changes for Windows 10 as well. So across the board. And I would imagine Windows Backup will also have to be updated for Windows 10 for it to support the.

[Richard Campbell]

Otherwise how do you migrate? Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, there you go. So honestly, in terms of patches, there.

[Richard Campbell]

Weren'T going to be any more new versions of Windows. They told us that once.

[Paul Thurot]

This is how I know you're actually like a part of the Microsoft community because you never forget any promise that was made by any random individual from the company and you like just hold it over them for the rest of their life.

[Richard Campbell]

Random, an individual. All right. I'm pretty sure that was Gabe old.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's Jerry. Jerry Nixon. And I'm no offense to Jerry, but he's kind of a random like he's not a like a C level decision maker. It's a good guy. I mean I'm not dumb like on him, I mean but yeah, I sure. I mean Mac OS or what it was. Yeah. Mac OS 10 was the last gonna be the last version of Mac os. Right. But now that Apple's not doing it neither away. So that's what, that's how our world works. We are bitter, bitter people. That's going to come up later too actually. There's a lot of recurring themes here now that I think of it. So anyway, yeah. In terms of like patch Tuesday updates, it's been a big year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

This is actually one of the smaller ones.

[Richard Campbell]

It's.

[Paul Thurot]

Catch your breath.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I hope they're taking. I hope everything slows down July. You know they actually do take some holidays and things.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean I, I still, I'm still amused. Like for example, this computer is 24H2. Obviously it's not on like the Insider preview or anything. It's up to date. I do have preview updates installing, but Patch Tuesday just occurred. So that is the latest update and it has that new start menu right. With the grouping at the bottom where you can kind of looks like that Apple iPhone screen or whatever by default with the category view, but it doesn't have the thing on the side like that weird little cancerous phone link growth thing on the side. Mostly because I just brought it up and I'll probably add it later, but when I came here, I have three computers here and I brought, I don't even want to say this out loud, brought 4ish computers here as you do. Well, you know, I'm reviewing laptops and stuff and yeah, it's always a question.

[Richard Campbell]

Of what you leave behind, not what you bring.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So the three that I left behind have been sitting here in a crate for two months and it is kind of amazing to me, you know, you can kind of rail against Microsoft for all the updates they're giving to Windows 11, which I do. And for good reason. The counterpoint to that would be, well, yeah, but you know, they've really streamlined it so we have cumulative updates now. We also have, mostly for, I think only for businesses now, cumulative Updates where only 4 times a year do you actually have to reboot after that. Right, that's good. You know, and. Yeah, good point. Let me tell you something. You leave a computer for a month or two.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You're looking at two hours to update this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

And those four machines, you got to pull them all out, power them all up and then go for lunch.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, no, actually. So you're, you actually have to babysit them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And this is part of the problem. So I just, I mean, this is, this is how I spend my time. So I'm ridiculous. But I, I lay them out of the bed.

[Richard Campbell]

I finally know where the rage comes from. It all makes sense now.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I have the, I have four screens. There's one I what I can work on and then the other three I'm going to update. They have been sitting in a crate. Like I said, they're all x64 computers. So they're not going to be, they're not going to be happy about being woken up. So yeah, they have, their batteries have either completely or partially drained in that time, depending on the computer. When you plug in the. Typically like with the laptop I'm using now, if you plug in power to it, there'll be a little light on the side that goes orange to indicate that it's charging right. These computers, the light goes white and white is a bad color. White means we're not ready, sadly. And if you. We are not turning on. So even though you are powering the device, you have to wait. And if you try not to wait, it will complain. It will do little blinky lights on the keyboard. It will do everything but power on the computer.

[Richard Campbell]

Actually do what you want to do.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So you give it a minute, it's fine. You boot up. Takes a while. It's a boot. It's not. We're not coming back from sleep here. These things come back from the dead. Yeah, every single one of them was configured with Windows. Hello, Facial recognition. Every single one of them failed to do that. And I had to type in my pen. Okay, fine. Two of them, OneDrive has a problem. OneDrive is out of date or something. I have to sign into that again. Whatever. Okay, so I go to Windows Update 2 of the 3. There were so many updates that went off the bottom of the page like past the bottom of the screen. Right. There's a lot of driver updates too, right? Yeah, and firmware updates and all that kind of stuff. And look, if you do this all the time, like I do, you know, you have to from Windows Update go into like, I think it's advanced settings, optional updates. And optional updates are also driver updates and firmware updates and some other things. But those are the typical updates you see in there.

[Richard Campbell]

And do you uncheck all the software related stuff and let the hardware run first?

[Paul Thurot]

No, I just, you know what, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Just let it figure it out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's okay. You can do this. You'll reboot and do things. I don't care. So I check all those. The one of the laptops, there was only one update. The other two had seven or eight. Like, it's like, seriously. And because these are Windows laptops, you'll see redundant recurrences of the same things in there too, with drivers. I don't know why it does that. Whatever. All right, so they're all going, they're all downloading the cumulative update. The most recent cumulative update takes forever. I have no idea why, but they all take a long time because they have all these other updates, right? And then the firmware ones, which of course they want to reboot and install that. And you have to look, it will do it while it's asleep. I don't have to have the screens on, but I leave this, you know, I'm sitting there doing, you know, like I'm moving the track pads around like I want to keep them alive so I can see where they are. So I'm writing, I'm working on this other laptop, but I'm looking at these screens that took an hour. Took an hour. And they reboot and turn, you know, about the same time they all do this offline thing they're installing. Not just those offline parts of the cumulative updates, but also firmware updates. Every single one of them, or all three of them, you know, had a firmware update. And then you go back and you do it again because you never. You're not done. You know, you're not done. There's more. So actually, in one case, there was no more in Windows Update, but the other ones, there was more. Got those done, whatever. But now you go to the store, same thing. Go down to Library, I think it are downloads, whatever it's called, and check for updates, check for updates, you know, and then it's like, takes a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

It just sits there.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like it doesn't do anything. And then all of a sudden, it's like. It's like, I didn't even know I had that many apps. That takes a long time. Takes a long time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

The store app itself has to re, you know, restart, because it's updating. Right. So, all right, that takes whatever, half an hour, 40 minutes, whatever it takes. And then you're done, right? No, you're not done. The next thing you have to do is open the terminal window and with administrative privileges and use winget to check for upgrades because there are more updates. And there are a lot more updates, man. There's like nine to 12 more updates. And I always do that. It's like dash, dash, all dash, dash, silent. Because I don't want to be. I want it just to happen. I don't want to do UAC prompts and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I guess the point of this story is I go away for two months, and it takes me about two and a half, maybe two hours and 45 minutes to just take computers that are just sitting there and make them usable again. You know what I mean? But these are so.

[Richard Campbell]

This is Paul space. Only. Only the Pauls have this issue.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, I'm gonna go on a limb and suggest a lot of people listening to some nodding their heads and are like, yeah, no, I do exactly that same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It happens.

[Paul Thurot]

It may not be gone for two months. Yeah, it's how I spend time.

[Richard Campbell]

But you also have another machine with you that is up to date so that you could just stare at those ones and be amused by them while still doing something.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, yes. No, I got. I got writing done during this. I didn't. This. This was. Wasn't what I did. It was what I, you know, did on the side or whatever, however you want to describe that. But. Yeah. Yep. So I feel like this should be a little more seamless, but I don't know, I guess if we just left it alone, you know, it would do it eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

But, I mean, you. You definitely have the seams cubed there. Right. Like, you're. You see a lot more seams than most.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. But this also helps me see that thing that I described up front, which is that I updated these three machines. They all came back. They all eventually were updated. And I open the start. You know, I'm doing whatever I'm doing on each of them, but only one of them has the new Start menu.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And then when you're done, turns out you're not done.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Like, I'm not going to look. There are ways to get everything immediately, you know, vive tool or whatever, but I'm not. I'm not going to do that. But it's. It just blows my mind, like, how. How much this is and how little attention this gets that, you know, they're so proud of all this technology and their ability to update this thing. It's. They never asked why they should or whatever. The phrase, you know, dude, you got.

[Richard Campbell]

To talk to sysadmins where they're like, Well, I got 600 workstations to update.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah, there's a part of me that understands the user point of view where it's like, you know, it is the block or they say no to everything. But then I see stuff like this and I'm like, yeah, there's a reason they're saying no.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy in our YouTube chat once says, most of this can occur in the background. Right. I mean, can you use the computer?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Just kind of trickles in and maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Well, it will. Yeah. But, you know, the. The part of what I do is I'm working on the book. I'm working on stuff like the Hands on Windows videos, whatever. Keeping these machines up to date is actually important for what I do. But it's also kind of a known quantity when it comes to it rebooting or changing things or whatever. Like, it's in a. Like, I want these things in the same state. And the problem with Windows is that two Windows computers will never be in the same state, even if they are on the same version and updated equivalently. Which is I guess, half the point here. Which is why when I, you know, in the. In the old days, I could write a book or an article and say, if you click this, this will happen. And now I have to say things like this. If you click this, you may see this or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just put in weasel words. Could happen. Maybe not someday. Is this because they're doing kind of a B testing or.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, AB testing. It sounds like it's some kind of a scientific or mathematical process, but what they're doing is controlled feature release, which is random.

[Leo Laporte]

And see who hollers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's all it is. And there's no switch. You can't as a power user say, just give it to me now.

[Richard Campbell]

All of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Just give me what you said is in the future releases.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you should get a T shirt that says give it to me now and see.

[Paul Thurot]

Give it to me. That also sounds like a song. Give it to me. Yes, it is. It's an Offspring song. Anyway, here it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Come and get it.

[Paul Thurot]

I guess that long description was simply how I. I just. Just try to describe how I spent my. Was it Tuesday afternoon? I guess, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's good we've got through the first line of the rundown and I think that's. That's pretty good for the first 20 minutes. At this rate, we'll be here till tomorrow.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's not true.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Let's take a little break those. Before we get to the rest of.

[Paul Thurot]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine new features. All are coming your way on a big Windows update.

[Paul Thurot]

Eventually.

[Leo Laporte]

Someday, maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Depending which group you're.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

The weasel words are always good. You might have this, you might not.

[Richard Campbell]

This could happen.

[Leo Laporte]

This could happen.

[Paul Thurot]

Is it blue? No. Then you don't have it. Yeah, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they should do that.

[Paul Thurot]

Diagnosing yourself with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

A little bug lower right hand part of the screen that shows you which a B comparison you're in or something.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody at Microsoft wants you to know what particular ring of hell you're in version. You're just, you know, you're in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Seventh circle of hell.

[Paul Thurot]

My friend knew was a guy with a goat bottom. That tipped me off. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

There was nobody. Nobody asked the guinea pigs their opinion.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. You wouldn't otherwise you wouldn't be a guinea pig.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right, right, right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a funny meme I saw, which is. It wasn't fair. I'll show you. It had Richard Stallman with His head, you know, the, the open source guy buried in his hands. It says the feels when you find out that the start menu in Windows 11 is literally a react native application that causes a spike in CPU usage every time you press the start button.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, except it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not really true. There's a react native component apparently. Yeah, the recommendation thing which every sensible person turns off.

[Paul Thurot]

It's definitely way better performance to load a comport a component like an auto and out of, what do you call it? An out of process, you know, extension or whatever. Like. Yeah, no, that sounds great. They fire that thing up, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, we're waiting till Bing response. Hold on, hold on.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like, why am I seeing that Mac beach ball in Windows? It's like, hold on, it's loading a web component.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be there in a moment. Yeah, all your files are right where you left them. Don't worry. Our show today. Anyway, you're listening to Windows and weekly. We're so glad you're here with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Our show today brought to you by 1Password. I know you know the name. Over half of IT professionals say their biggest challenge in it securing SaaS apps. See, there's a growing problem with SaaS sprawl. I think a lot of this is contributed by AI. Right. And then there's this shadow IT issue because users, you know, like to do their own thing and it's, you know, it's not hard to see why this is a problem for IT pros. But there's some good news. Trellica by 1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps whether they're managed or not. This is a new thing. It's really cool. Trelica T R E L I c a by 1Password it inventories every app and use at your company just goes out, looks at them all and then pre populated app profiles which of course you can modify if you want, but they're ready to go. Assess the SaaS risks of each and every app letting you manage access, optimize, spend, enforce security best practices across every app your employees use. Even the Shadow IT apps. Yeah, with Trelica by 1Password you can manage Shadow IT and there's some nice side effects. You can makes it very easy to securely onboard and off board employees and of course meet your compliance goals, which is probably job two. After securing the SaaS apps, Trelica by1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended access Management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager. I know you know about that. It's trusted by millions of users, over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now 1Password is securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management. And of course 1Password is ISO 27001 certified. They have regular third party audits and industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities. It's a leader in security. So take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn [e-mail] WindowsWeekly that's 1Password.com WindowsWeekly all lowercase. We thank them so much for their support of the show. So let's talk about what after all of this churning and burning you have accomplished.

[Paul Thurot]

I wish, you know, I didn't put. I haven't posted this anywhere yet, so I can't show this to you. But you may recall two or three years ago, we were here in July and we were awoken at 2 o' clock in the morning by what sounded like an invasion force.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember the band.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The parade.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So, so I made a video of that and then we had neighbors move in across the way and they, those guys were here last July and we were not. And they, we. I told him the story and he texted us, you're not gonna believe it's 3 o' clock in the morning. It's exactly. And he had a video just like I did. And I'm like, yep. And every year. So this morning I woke up at originally at like 3:30. But I, I tried, I held out until like, I don't know, four 15s.

[Leo Laporte]

I went, that's the worst. You'll either staring at the ceiling going worst.

[Paul Thurot]

So I finally just, I like screw it. I have so much stuff. I gotta unpack and get ready. Whatever. So I, I'm sitting here and I heard what sounded like one of those, like those kind of like Dukes of Hazard style comical car horns. Yep. And I'm like, it's 4 o' clock in the freaking morning. Are you kidding me? But then I was like, wait a minute. I was like, that's the parade. It's coming. So I ran out on my.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it comes.

[Paul Thurot]

I ran out my balcony and I could hear it. It was gonna come down the street the way it had come before. I couldn't see it, but I just started recording on my phone and I got. So I Got the beginning of it. And as I'm recording it, my neighbor comes out all like, Like. Like a silhouette because it's still, like dark. Awoken by this cacophony.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Paul Thurot]

And he's like standing there and you can see he's regarding this with the same mix of confusion and yet familiarity. And then he turns around and we're like. I'm like, good morning. He's like, what's going on? Welcome. Every year, I guess, they do this. I guess it gets a little later every year.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, it's the new cadets marching down the street.

[Paul Thurot]

Clearly. Yes, it is some kind of cadet thing. And it's the supposition before it was police related and that it could be. It could be police cadets or something. Yeah, it looks like a military kind of a parade, but it's like a grassroots. Same thing again. Like it. Yeah, it's stretched from either end of the horizon. You know, my wife, of course, was woken up by this and I'm like, I'm so sorry. I. I knew there was nothing I could do to prevent her from hearing. Like, there's no amount of things to close. Like she was gonna hear it. It's like, it's like the loudest. You'll put the video up later, but it's. It was insane.

[Leo Laporte]

And the trumpets always sound like they're a little bit cracked, like a little slack.

[Paul Thurot]

Everything here is a little out of tune. Like they have those organ grinder guys. Yeah, this was. These were a gift from Germany in the 1930s or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

They've never been tuned ever since they got them, so they're. I'm not joking. No one knows how to fix these. And then they're like, could you give me some money? We're like, yeah, fix the freaking organ.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like, it's charming, myself, but you do. Because in the middle of the night it might.

[Paul Thurot]

When they're out in front of my apartment, I can tell you they're not charming. But yeah, it's. Oh, God, it's the worst. Anyway, I love this place and I have no idea what we're talking about. Okay. So I just said I'm exhausted. Yeah. So what did I accomplish? Was the question. And the answer is literally nothing. But the. Well, but the computers are up to date, so I. I do move between them and. And work on them and I'll be using them to. For book and article stuff, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

And then, you know, it's important for me to know which one of them has the new start menu, actually, because that's something I need, you know, for pictures and whatever. So I only have that on, I think I. If I have seven or eight, I bet that might be the only one that has that star menu right now. It's crazy. It's certainly only the only one of those three. Okay. Apparently me owning a lot of computers has helped Windows 11 because one thing changed this past month was pretty important, which is that usage of Windows 11 according to stat Conner surpassed that of Windows 10.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're number one.

[Paul Thurot]

I guess I'll do it for your direction. Windows 10 usage, right? It's going like this. Windows 11 usage is going like this. And they finally did the little cross thing there. So I would say uptick or whatever growth, I guess in Windows 11 usage has actually gone pretty steadily this year. Like, it's gone up a lot. Before it was kind of like not really. And then this year, you know, suddenly it's finally happening. You know, someone. I. I'm probably more cynical than most, but I can be surprised by some people and someone somewhere and social media thing was like, well, that only happened because Windows 10 end of life, you know, and it's like, yeah, Every version of Windows, it's end of life. Like, yeah. At some point you have to just Admit they're shipping 300 million computers with this thing on it every year or whatever the number is. And it's gonna be used by 270. But yeah, okay. Yeah. So whatever the number is, it's still hundreds of millions and it's. It's gonna happen eventually. So I don't think this is a 100 million here.

[Richard Campbell]

100 million you there.

[Paul Thurot]

It adds up. Yeah. Yeah. After a while, I know that there are still people that like Windows 10 or even prefer it or whatever. I. To me, it looks so antiquated. I.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, right in front.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? It looks antiquated.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

Right now it's. It's that square, flat Windows Phone style UI that I just don't think has aged well.

[Richard Campbell]

Just, I don't know, making me feel like I'm cleaning the past. I get it now.

[Paul Thurot]

You are. But it's. Nope. In a way, we all are. Right? I mean, that's kind of. I mean, we all are. Right. It's to some degree in some area. I mean, it's. It's fine. I mean, I just for me, I. I don't know. I actually. And maybe I'm rare, I don't know. But I do like Windows 11. I I do prefer it to Windows 10, but I don't know. Nobody's perfect, Richard, is my point. So, yeah, I mean, I, whatever this was going to happen, so it happened. There you go. And it's not even, you know, not even four years. I mean, I didn't look this up. I don't know how long it took previous versions to do this kind of thing. But the Windows 10 numbers were skewed by the fact that Windows 8 was such a steaming pile of whatever that nobody wanted it and everyone was ready to embrace something that would give them that kind of Windows 7 experience and be relatively clean and just work and actually work like a computer and not like a tablet. So you know that one, I bet the uptick on that one was very fast, but that was, that's an outlier.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is something that's, I think, fairly confined, fairly uniquely to Microsoft. Right. I mean Apple, almost everybody gets the new operating system, Chrome forced.

[Paul Thurot]

This is a problem with Android too, right? Like, so it's true. Android, part of the Android. Yeah. And it's, it's just because of the way it's distributed. You know, the device makers don't like to think about a thing they sold last year or two years ago. They don't, you know, they just want to move on to the next one. And like to them, it's like you get this thing, maybe you get a version upgrade, but you, and you get the feature around, what do you call it, Security updates, obviously app updates, but like that, that's what goes with that, don't worry about it, you know, that kind of mentality. But I don't know, I. Look, Windows 11 was, despite the artificial limitations, was broadly compatible with PCs that were for the most part able to run it well. And then by the time you get to 2025, it's like you'd have, I don't, I, I don't even understand the argument of I have a 6th gen Intel Core processor with 4 gigabytes of RAM or whatever it is, and I should be able to run Windows 11. It's like, I don't know. Yeah, no, maybe, maybe move on. So anyway, we're moving on.

[Richard Campbell]

It's happening.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's finally happening. I bet the big hold up here was actually the Enterprise. Honestly, I'm sure they viewed this with suspicion, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they still do. Yeah, they should, they're not wrong. But they also, you know, can't buy 10 on machines anymore, so they buy it with 11. So a lot of migrations, just new hardware yeah. And the rest are now.

[Paul Thurot]

That's fine. This happens on its own schedule and it's fine. You know, look, the compatibility thing is pretty much the same across the board. Obviously anyone who is watching the show has some pet peeve feature in Windows 10 that they don't get in 11. Like, especially like the taskbar at the top. Apparently all three people that do that are watching the show and are really upset about Windows 11. But, you know, this is the old, you know, you don't upgrade until it's SP1 back in the day or whatever. Right. This OS came in hot and fast and unready.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And it wasn't until I would argue, maybe even a year ago that I would say, okay, like, across the board, it's kind of where it needs to be. And it's kind of cheap to say years later, like, this is what they should have shipped in the beginning. It's like, yeah, but.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, first version of XP wasn't great either, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, that's right. Yep. I always tell a story like XP became so beloved, no one wanted to give it up when that thing launched. Nobody wanted it. Nobody. No.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, it was Windows 22,000 with the Fisher Price interface.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, exactly. And I. That's exactly the way I described it. I later met the person responsible that it was very upset with me. I also called it a sea of blues and greens, you know, but by.

[Richard Campbell]

Service Pack 4 and, you know, they'd gotten over the. The SP2 stuff. And so, like, that's the thing everybody remembers. It had USB support.

[Paul Thurot]

Everything worked. Yeah, exactly. They had good security, especially on WI fi, firewall enabled all the time. They had all the protections for web browsing, etc. Like. Yeah, I mean, when, you know, they ship that thing. Jim also went on vacation, got a phone call, you know, you might want to come back. We have a small problem. Turns out UPNP is super buggy and is being exploited right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I put it in every Xbox. So just, you know, I had a.

[Paul Thurot]

Preview of that when at the launch event, I was in New York, you know, when they launched Windows xp and you bring up a laptop, this is the first one that had integrated WI FI capabilities. And with the story about, you know, two profiles, you know, if you have two, why can't you have three, five, whatever. And he goes, no, that's impossible. You know, I open a laptop at the event, look for all the WI FI networks, and there were a hundred of them because Microsoft had WI FI networks everywhere for the stuff they were doing, but because it was wi fi, like 1.0 or whatever it was called. There were no passwords for anything. It was all open. See, I could get on any WI FI network I want. Wanted Brow and I, I did, I took a picture of it. I, I browsed through the Microsoft machines that were on the network and you could browse through the parts of their file systems they were sharing, which they didn't know they were sharing because Windows, again, not always in the most secure default configuration and you could copy files from their computers to yours.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And yeah, I mean I noticed that at the launch. I was like, this doesn't seem safe, you know, but anyway, we got it there.

[Richard Campbell]

I remember when, when Cable Motives first came in at my neighborhood and it was basically an open network across the board.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. I had that exact experience. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Made a text file explaining how to secure your machine. Just dropped it on people's desktops.

[Paul Thurot]

What you just said is, was exactly my experience. It was like my network neighborhood or whatever at the time. It was, this was in Phoenix in 19 probably 95. 94 somewhere there. Well, 95 gets to 95 probably. And my friend Brian and I would, we would, we could print to each other's printers because they were shared on the network. So I would wake up in the morning to some like bitmapped porn photo, you know, like in. On my printer and it's like, thanks, man. That's, that's exactly what I wanted to waste my ink on. But yeah, that was. Yeah, I mean it took us, you know, it took us a while to solve these problems. But yeah, they were also self inflicted.

[Richard Campbell]

And they shipped. That's the amazing part. They shipped.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I remember the big shift in XP2 was that they turned on that firewall.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a big deal, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that was the trustworthy computing thing. It was literally because of what had happened with xp, they halted development of new features and new, you know, os's, whatever. Put a bunch of Longhorn guys back on XP and we're like, fix this. You know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And arguably part of Longhorn's problem was that most of the senior guys were buried in SP2 for two years.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Look, they did right by it in the sense that they gave it away as a service pack. Right. They really did significantly improve the security of the system. They learned a lot from Windows Server 2003. They had done this work before for that. And this was the thing that led to the first 64 bit edition, remember, of Windows, which was XP like XP, they called it. 64 bit sp.

[Richard Campbell]

XP. 64, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Essentially server, you know, with the desktop stuff turned on.

[Richard Campbell]

I ran it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was that guy.

[Paul Thurot]

Why not?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

It got a delicious 15 minutes of battery life. It was great.

[Leo Laporte]

We've come a long way. It's so easy to forget how really bad it was not so long ago.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, yeah. It's so easy to be kind of cynical about it. But it's like, I don't, you know, we don't. I think we actively try to block it out a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, blue screen all the time. I mean, you don't get many blue screen hardly. I haven't seen a blue screen in ages.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Blue screens these days are hardware failures, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Almost. Yeah. Universally, I mean. Yeah. 100%. I. The greatest when I was. We sometimes reference that deli book, but when I was doing deli stuff in the mid-90s or whatever, that was the greatest thing I ever did was get NT four going because my. The apps I would write could easily blue screen, whatever 9x I was running at the time, they. I could not crash NT with that thing. And I. That was like, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And you really tried.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, yeah. I was like, this is good. This is good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, that was a big step. That was a big part of it, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's simple. They had memory protection. All of a sudden you couldn't.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't access ring zero.

[Paul Thurot]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

You had to work in the user space. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Ask Crowdspace about accessing Ring zero. But. But yeah. No, for the most. Yeah, for the most part there is. I couldn't. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the pushes on for Vista was trying to drive the video drivers to ring three and ultimately had to back off on it because it just was crippling everything. And then they had driver quality problems in Ring 0 with all new driver model and gee, another thing that went wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we were talking about this yesterday on Security. Now Steve Gibson was reminiscing about when Microsoft, for performance reasons decided to put GDI into.

[Paul Thurot]

I was just going to say that. So the dual edge sword of NT was it ran so slow on existing hardware compared to 9x or whatever or 3x that they had to do that. And then the second little, not fatal blow, but the second big problem they did was the. When they did IIS and they had like something called the NT option pack.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

They put Internet Explorer in there and they made it the shell. And this is unfair, but it's also fair. The children who are working on IE were In no way. The seasoned engineers who were working on NT and allowing that nonsense into the server, the file system, into the deepest parts of the kernel, etc. Was a huge mistake and it took them a long time to dig out from that one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah, I. Look, they got it right eventually, but just getting NT into shape for consumers and individuals was honestly, huge job. 1. It was a big deal. Yeah, big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

And in hindsight, somewhat understandable that the first versions of XP would be a little raggedy. But eventually it got good and then Windows 7 came out and it was.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, No, I mean, walked right by Vista there, just like that.

[Paul Thurot]

Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what was that again? Vista.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I like T 3.5. I understand why you started using that. That was.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, yeah, yeah, that was nice.

[Richard Campbell]

The most solid, solid Windows machine ever ran was a 3.5-1 machine running Cybase.

[Paul Thurot]

Daytona, I think was that day. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No GUI on it at all. And that thing was bomb proof, which just went day after day.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Nostalgia.

[Paul Thurot]

But now we have a one start menu on one computer and we have other nonsense on this other guy. Kind of drum up excitement here. But it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in a way that's. It makes sense. It's all now about the presentation layer. Right. That's where all the stuff's changing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we got the, we got the, the guts pretty well down. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Or no. Well, I. Maybe. No. Right. I mean, honestly, there have been important security improvements. I mean, I can't say in every Windows version, per se, but honestly, probably. I mean. Okay. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess it's. You know, when's the driver.

[Leo Laporte]

Has driver model changed?

[Richard Campbell]

Not.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, many times. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But not for a while, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, no, see, there are actually big changes coming to drivers over the past year or so and then into the future. Right. So Microsoft is taking over the print driver stuff. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're kind of things happening.

[Paul Thurot]

Good. That's the big one. But there's so, you know, there's always another threat. That's the thing. So you can. I always think, I always think of this as like the TSA mentality. Like, oh, they did something bad. Let's really. Let's like overdo it and protect against that. It's like, yeah, the guys doing that have moved on to the next thing, you know, and they're. They're insecurity is always the next thing. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of which, TSA has announced that you no longer have to take off your shoes. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Take that shoe bomber, Rich. What was that guy's name? Richard. That guy trying to light his shoe? Yeah, yeah. He looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Later.

[Paul Thurot]

He looks like a real Mensa kind of rocket scientist type, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, a smart guy. We use electric igniter. Why do you have a. Why you have a shoe lighter?

[Paul Thurot]

He's like, I picked the one that had nothing. No fluid in it, and now it won't start. You know, Guy next to him is like, what.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you doing, dude?

[Paul Thurot]

Can you read a magazine or something?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, Stuart, this. This guy's trying to light his shoes on fire.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So because of this imbecile, we've been taking off our shoes, like, years for the past. What, 15 years or something? Yeah. It's unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have to have a real id, though, because.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have a. Which is hysterical. No, I have a fake id. Okay, well, you better take off your shoes.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, you better have two of them then. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Two fake IDs is okay? Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, our world is insane. What can I say? Oddly, there's not a lot going on. In the insider thing, there was a single Canary build. Unless something's happening as we speak, by the way, that could be happening, actually. No new features, just some bug fixes. I gotta show you this.

[Leo Laporte]

On the FBI website, there's a historical picture of Richard Reed's shoes.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, is one of them slightly. Is that what that is on the right side? Is there, like a hole in it? Because.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Where the. Where the actually melted part of it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, brother.

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to detonate.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, I blame this guy for every sockless, sandalwearing idiot putting. Taking their sandals off and putting their feet up on the wall of the plane. It's their fault.

[Leo Laporte]

It's his fault.

[Paul Thurot]

You gotta wear shoes and socks. Just do it. Oh, it's not good. God. He's wearing a moomoo. He's got nothing on his feet. What's happening, Richard. What was his last name?

[Leo Laporte]

Reed.

[Paul Thurot]

Richard Reed. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been 23 life terms. 410 years.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. 24 years. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We've been taking off our shoes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now, 24 years later, the FBI.

[Paul Thurot]

Is like, okay, so many people, like, probably like Velcro just, like, slip on shoes now. They couldn't, like, tie their shoe just like they couldn't tie a tie, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

I see. They don't rest up anymore for shoes, for going on a plane, so you could slip them on and off easy.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah. I always go wear slip ons for flying. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Not anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you don't have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Now our long national nightmare is over to hiking boots.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm delighted we have other problems. Lay some up, flying or otherwise. Okay, so blah, blah, blah. See Canarya, Nothing there. And then. So this one was actually interesting to me. This is one of those recurring theme things. Microsoft Edge, a controversial browser.

[Richard Campbell]

Come on.

[Paul Thurot]

There's been some good work going on there and a big chunk of it has been a series of improvements to the user interface of the application. Not necessarily like the rendering or any of the other things you might associate with performance, although there has been some of that too, to get these components all to run faster. So they've come up with this new way of creating a responsive user interface. It's not like, I think in the past it was basically web technology like React or whatever, which is. Can be slow obviously, and every, you know, three, four months they come up with a little update. And right now what they're saying is that they've reduced load times by an average of 40% against across 13 browser features. It's something you can see if you click on a UI element and it just kind of pops on like it's, it's real. Like it's actually pretty good. And that kind of a, an improvement is really huge for users because even if you don't explicitly acknowledge it, it's happening and you do know it's happening and it just feels, it feels fast. Right. It's good. Like it's real. And apparently there's a way to measure this. This is unbelievable. But it's called First Contentful Paint, meaning you bring up the browser, it's going to draw whatever the thing is in the, the tab that's open. If you can get that thing to happen below 300 milliseconds, the user is happy. Like they actually recognize the magic numbers. Yeah. And they. The latest version of Microsoft Edge is the first browser to achieve that score. They have a, an FCP score below 300 milliseconds. So we're going to talk more about Edge later, but I will say it doesn't completely obviate the problems with the browser, but as it turns out, you can almost completely obviate the problems of the browser. And there are good reasons to use Edge and we'll talk about that later. One of them is like your mental. No, I'm kidding. That's good. And that's Windows specific. Obviously Edge is cross platform and I'm sure there are or improvements elsewhere as well. But you're going to see the best results on Windows because, you know, Microsoft Yeah. So there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

It's their rendering engine.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Chromium.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Microsoft Teams everyone's favorite app until they use Slack and that they realize the grass is really greener.

[Richard Campbell]

He loves Teams. Nobody loves Teams.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody loves. Nobody loves Slack either. It's okay. It's fine. They're both terrible. I like apps where you get notifications and they don't clear in other instances of the app. Maybe on mobile or another PC. I love that. I love it so much. I love having to manually open an app on my phone to get rid of the little dot. Even though I've already handled the conversation in question on some other device. I love it. And I would say Teams and Slack are equally awesome in that regard. Teams is inarguably one of the most full featured apps Microsoft has ever made. It matured at such an incredible rate. Plus or minus a year or two of the pandemic. It was the singular focus of Microsoft 365. Really good job. So good they got in antitrust trouble but somehow they didn't do threaded like a threaded view in the channel about this for forever. I know this has to have been on the original list of features we need. It has to.

[Richard Campbell]

On the first bit and out of the first build. It's like we'll get to threading.

[Paul Thurot]

They consolidated the consumer and work clients of this app before they did this. That's incredible. But they just did it. So there's one less thing to complain about I guess. Unless you don't like threaded viewers.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they're going to be very angry with threading. Inevitable. You can never do threading.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's impossible.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. It's not multi threading. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

So I said I wanted threading this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. There was a big Samsung event today. So they have those unpacked events I think twice a year. This was the one for the folding device thing and things. There are multiple versions. I sort of drifted off when the price tag of 2,000 plus dollars for the folding phones. I know for a phone, for a phone that folds came up. But there was. There are a bunch of Google AI features. This is something they've been doing over the past couple of years with Samsung. So a year ago January, this past January, a year ago August. And then now there's been these features that because Samsung always has the highest end processors, et cetera, et cetera and they have this big partnership a lot of on device AI stuff. It's maybe semi worth looking at. But tied to this Google announced a like a surprise Pixel Drop. So if you're a Pixel user, you may know that you get Pixel Drop. Yeah. Every quarter, right. And there's usually like dozens of new features across, you know, phones, tablets, watches, Android, auto, whatever it is like. Well, Pixel, I guess, Pixel features. And in addition to Android features, right, which also. Android also gets new features, I think on a quarterly basis. The last one of those was in June, but they had a surprise one today and the reason they did that was because these things were also coming to Samsung devices, right. And they didn't want, you know, their fans to be like, what about us? You know, so they just released an extra Pixel Drop. Used to be called a Pixel Feature Drop. They're all AI related and they're all actually really useful. So only for Pro xl. What's that?

[Richard Campbell]

It's only for Pro and Pro xl.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, each of the features is. It depends on the feature, right. So the, the first feature which is via Veo, whatever three the video generation model used to be something that was tied to their high end 200amonth, you know, researcher type skew. But about a week ago they made it available to anyone who's paying the 20amonth, whatever. They keep changing the name, but I think it's just Google AI Pro. I think it's, you know, you get two terabytes of storage and you get all the Gemini stuff. Right? What's happening? Oh, this is the vs. This is. It is video. Yeah, it is amazing. Like it is amazing. And this is all AI generated. Yeah, no, it's really good. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is honestly not really tied specifically to Pixel, but. And you do need that subscription. But if you did buy a nine, you got this subscription for free for a year. So you can, you can play with this. So that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that monkey's good.

[Paul Thurot]

He's better than the organ grinder guys here.

[Richard Campbell]

Ironically.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe they should get a Pixel. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I love. They put Gemini Gemini in to every. It is really good now in India announcement.

[Paul Thurot]

Huh. So there's also, you know, Google has the. What's called not click, not click to do. It's called circle to search. Right. And this was like a night. Like one of those ideas is like, okay, so we have a phone, it's a touch device, could be a tablet too. But we want to be able to search that thing that's on screen. So this is basic image recognition and then you go from there and text recognition to AI. And so they came up with this thing called Circle search, which I remember correctly, might have actually Debuted first on a Samsung device, but it doesn't matter. It's across the board now in Android and Pixel, et cetera. So that's been, you know, updated here and there over time. If you live in the US or India and you have a Pixel device, you actually get AI mode integration now with Circle to search. So the idea is you circle something it tells you. Gemini will tell you what it thinks it is. Right. It can often be very accurate. But now you can do. The point of AI mode is now you're in that conversation mode. So you can ask it, follow up questions and keep going, learn more about that topic, whatever it might be if you're playing a game. This one, okay, this is actually pretty useful too. On Windows they have a feature that's part of Game bar now that is a mini version of the Microsoft Edge browser that will, depending on the game, recognize the game you're playing. And then when you bring up the game bar, you get this list of hints for the game and if it's really well supported, it will know where you are in the game and say for this part, the way you get by that thing you're having trouble with is this. And then eventually they're going to do the thing where it's kind of talking to you as you go and it will help you as you play. And that's how it's evolving there. The way that Google is addressing this sort of need on Android is you're playing a game on your phone and you know, same thing will happen. You're like, oh, I'm really stuck here. I gotta, you know, pause, go over to the browser, Google it. How do I get by this? Oh yeah, okay, then go back. You go back and forth. But the way that Circle to search works is that it happens on whatever screen you're looking at. So now it works in games and it will see that you're playing a game and see where you are in the game and it's just a slide up view from the bottom that gives you that experience. Like instead of having to switch apps, you never leave the game. I mean it is over the game, but you don't have to do that. Context, which is an overlay actually sounds like a good idea. Now I couldn't see a game on a phone if my life depended on it, but I appreciate that other people can.

[Richard Campbell]

Not for us.

[Paul Thurot]

Not for us. Yeah. And the third one I have some questions about, but they brought Gemini to Pixel Watch was the Pixel announcement, but actually they brought it to all wear OS watches Which is why they announced it today because it's part of the Samsung watch. Samsung probably is the best selling.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

Wear OS type watch. But if you have a Wear OS 4 Plus watch, it could be made by OnePlus, Oppo, Samsung, Xiaomi. You will get Gemini. And that means when you say, hey, gee, I won't say that because I don't want to freak everyone's phone out or whatever, but it will come up on your watch. You could press the side, you know, I think press and hold on the side button. Obviously there's an app in there as well and it lets you interact with, with Gemini through the watch. And of course it interacts on the back end with gmail, google calendar, etc. All the google services. Okay, is it running on your watch? I mean just two seconds ago we were talking about on I, on AI, on AI, on device AI and how kind of primitive it is relatively speaking and that, you know, I think Google or Samsung, it doesn't really matter, but was the first to do this on a phone. Well, in the Android space, Apple has been doing this with the Gemini Nano models. Microsoft's doing it with Copilot plus PC. Obviously they were doing it before with things like Windows Studio Effects MPU feature in Windows which only ran on a few different computers but now runs on a bunch. But Gemini on a Pixel Watch, what chip could this be running?

[Richard Campbell]

It's not running on there.

[Paul Thurot]

It is. No way. So yeah, the assumption, my assumption, they didn't explain this. I looked for this information. I didn't see it. It's going to be out there somewhere. But you must assume you have your phone in your pocket too, right? Like not always, but most times or I guess it could. I suppose if you have an LTE watch, it could just be on the cloud, right? Like it must. Maybe that is the point. It's. I guess it's cloud based but it can't be running on the watch is my point. But there is an app on your watch. So anyway, it's happening. Yeah, there's something, there's something on the watch. Yeah. Which is like there's some. Yeah, that's just like Tracy, now you're.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to talk to your wrist, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Hey, I. This is a topic that's come up before but like as soon as people started talking into those Bluetooth headset things. Yeah, I just, I don't even with rare exceptions, like I don't immediately go to this person as crazy anymore. Like I used to, like people are always out there talking to Themselves anyway. Or it seems like they are, but they're talking to something. Something else. I don't know. Yeah, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

On the. On the toilet. In the public washroom.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. I've had some interesting interactions with people talking to someone on the phone in the bathroom. But we'll save that for some other day.

[Richard Campbell]

Good for another.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. One theme that's been pretty regular for me at least this year has been this concept of how web browsers are about to change dramatically. Yeah. And ARC was a big part of it, obviously, and a big part of that discussion. A big part of the reason for that.

[Richard Campbell]

The first time you show me a new browser, we're like, this is different.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And then if you look at dia, you're like, oh, this is different too. Opera is doing this with their Neon browser. Google, Microsoft are taking more of a kind of a conservative approach. But we're going to, you know, AI is going to be everywhere. We all know this. But it's going to fundamentally change the way we use these products. I mean, browsers are, I think, inarguably the most important app that we use, regardless of the device. I mean, it's. A lot of people can do everything in the browser, really, which was the inspiration for the ARC stuff. But what that's going to look like is, you know, still up in the air. It's still debatable perplexity today. And I haven't had a chance to look at this a lot because it just had two seconds before I started to, you know, sign in for the show. I saw this. You can now try their browser called Comet. This is an AI browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you can if you're a 200amonth persplex.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, sorry. Okay. That's. Like I said, I have not missed that little detail. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I will do it as soon as they give it to the regular IP subscriber.

[Paul Thurot]

They'll do over time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you. Okay. So, yeah, all of these AI, AI chatbot models, whatever, have this 200amonth tier now for some reason, I guess it's like people will spend that and people do it too. Yeah. This could be very interesting for a lot of reasons, but if you look at the, the little video they made, it looks a lot like the things that the browser company which makes Arc, India and Opera and others have been talking about, which is. It's kind of. It's a little hokey at first because it's kind of working with the UI as it is today, but you're basically seeing it run the websites to do the thing you wanted to do and then coming back with whatever it is you asked for. Right. And so that could be like filling out forms and like searching for different things or looking for the best price on a thing or whatever it might be. But it's doing it in the, like in the window or whatever. And then it. And it's over on the side, it's like, okay, here you go. And it's, it's almost like a reasoning model the way it will kind of sit there and churn text, but it's doing it with the content in the browser across services that it does not own or control. And like I said, I think this is going to change things a lot. Some of it will be that copilot experience which is such a great, you know, side by side experience where maybe there's a long video and you just want to be like, okay, what's the point? Or what, what are the 10 most important points from this that he makes in this, you know, demonstration or whatever. And okay, fine. But a lot of it is this kind of, I guess we call it agenic capability where it goes out and does these things for you. And I think I said this maybe a week or two ago, but browser, the very name. Browsing, literally browsing. You know, we were just nostalgic for whatever NTXP, whatever it was and GeoCities and all the things that were common back then. You would browse through the limited selection of websites and you would literally browse, you would just, you would read and, and whatever. And I think we've all lost our attention spans. But AI is also teaching us not to do any work at all. And now you could just be like, look, I don't have time for this 6000 word the rod article to stop. What is he saying? And it's like, as it turns out, you can condense it down to a single sentence. What a jerk. Here's the.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, I got your rage right here.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there's a lot of complaining. And then he just says this. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, but, but. Or a video or whatever it is, right? I mean, and I think the fundamental change is going to be. Well, there's a couple. But browsing as we think of it is I think is going to kind of go away by. As the primary activity in a browser. Right. Makes the name a little strange. But also maybe the browser itself eventually goes away because these things will essentially happen in the background. You might have a natural language conversation with whatever bots or agents or whatever you want to call them and they just kind of do it for you and they contact you later to let you know. And maybe in the beginning it's running a website, but maybe those websites evolve to address the back end service based model that this is. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Heading towards the AR world. Right. This is the interface for the visor.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Just show me what I want to look at. Like I just. Cat videos at all times.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not sure I really want that much AI in my browser.

[Paul Thurot]

I know it's, it's a tough one, it's. But this is like I, I have to remind myself of this, this is the, the argument that one would make against. This is the same argument that someone would have made when they owned one of the first vehicles and they knew how to fix it. And then cars got good enough, you didn't have to be a mechanic and they were like, oh, you know, I, I still want to do it that way. Or we've moved from stick shifts to automatics. No, I want to control the, you know, like there's always that resistance because you have built up incredible skills for the thing that it was, you know, and I, I, I do this all, we all do it. It's not, this is not a criticism of anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree and I think that that's a real, very real thing. But I think there is also a very real and shit ification of everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I am not sure whether it's the former what you just described or the latter what I just, well, it's.

[Paul Thurot]

Technology, so it's both. So I feel like literally, it's literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Crap in my browser for no good reason.

[Richard Campbell]

The first versions will be nice and then they'll get, I look worse.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm a lifetime reader. I have a hard time reading long things now. Yeah, I read every day. Yeah, every day. I read in the morning, I read during the day, I read before I go to bed every night. And I struggle with it. And a lot of it is just this kind of implicit training of content consumption that occurs when you have the entire world at your fingertips and get an answer in two seconds. And you. So my fear is the Isaac Asimov foundation trilogy. It's the future social. We have all this incredible technology. There is no one who knows how it works, how to fix it. And if those things break, we are devolving and back to cavemen. And that's, that's the fear. It's the, like, I already am part of the problem. Like if society devolved, you know, the apocalypse happened, whatever it was, you'd have to eat me because I don't have a skill. That would be anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Grow your own food, Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I can't hammer two pieces of wood together. I can't fix a vehicle. I can't, yeah. Grow food. I can't, I can be food. But that's like literally the only benefit I would bring to this story. Right. And I think we're all going to be like that eventually. Like, we're just going to be like the, like the Wally guys. Like. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Floating around, you know, Floating around, you.

[Paul Thurot]

Know, like, like, here's the turkey dinner. No, that's the guy, that's the guy running the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Well then the survivalists are probably right. They're out there chopping wood and.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Storing water and building their own, you know, beehives.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure. I mean, I, I, look, I don't have an answer. I don't, I just, I, I think like everyone, I, I, I have worries and I have my, I don't want biases. I don't know what to call them, this habits, you know, the way I do things, whatever, it gets in the way. But I do look at things like this and I think, okay, this is pretty good. It's like I, it, why wouldn't you want to use something that could give you the best price on a flight or, you know, or whatever? Like you could really jump into it.

[Leo Laporte]

And if it's not influenced by the airlines, you know, they, they just nominated the CEO of an airline to be the chief of the faa. Conflict of interest much?

[Paul Thurot]

No. Well, that's like the problem. And I think we talked about locking the keys in the vault.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And the thing we're worried about with AI is it is so expensive. It's inevitable.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That these results are going to start to be advertising driven and then they.

[Richard Campbell]

Will counter to the FAA argument is you need an expert in that role and somebody who's run an airline is an expert. The question is, where are the conflicts of interest?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm also going to get listening to a wonderful book that I highly recommend. Robert Caro, the guy who wrote the Power Broker and is writing the multi volume history of lbj, wrote a short book about his working style, his working habits, working. And one of the things he told about one of the very first experiences he had as an investigative reporter. He was like an intern working the city desk on the weekend and nobody was there. And an FAA representative called and said, you better send somebody down here. There's nobody here right now. But I have Some stuff I want you to look at. And he called her. He couldn't get anybody, so he went down himself.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And he went through all the papers and he realized that the FAA was, was lobbying to take a large parcel of property in Long island and make it an airport, not use it for what the locals wanted to do, which is to, to expand public education and to build a campus for the state for the local university.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And the.

[Paul Thurot]

Was this like a whistleblower type? He was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, it was whistling because.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The smoking gun was in there was that all the executives of the big companies that were headquartered in Long island wanted to land their executive jets close to the company.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So they were lobbying, I don't know, they were influencing the FAA's decision. And that's just a small example.

[Paul Thurot]

This happens. Yeah, this happens everywhere and in big and small ways.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're really putting this. The fox in charge of the henhouse.

[Paul Thurot]

I literally was looking to see what direction it was from where I'm sitting, but I'm not in Pennsylvania, so what I did didn't make sense. But from my.

[Richard Campbell]

Up north.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. From my, from my seat like this in Pennsylvania, right over there is a field surrounded by trees that's unused, but it's perfectly manicured. And I've asked about this a bunch and I finally found out it was because the executive of a nearby hospital lived in a mansion behind there and he wanted helicopter pads so he could fly back and forth to work. Yeah. Any traffic in an area that has no traffic because he. Yeah. So this guy would just fly a helicopter to work because he's rich and.

[Leo Laporte]

Because he's rich and he doesn't screw.

[Paul Thurot]

All the rest of you who don't want to hear that. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So, but I'm. My point being, we're in late stage capitalism and unfortunately. Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Like stage four cancer. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is like, I mean, curable metastasizing. But it's why you could have these great technological innovations.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But they getified very quickly. And, and, but this is a genuine concern now in AI is that soon the results will be tainted by ad results. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, it is a fact that AI is evolving at a rate that we've never seen with technology. So it is reasonable to assume that the insidification of AI will also occur at a rate.

[Richard Campbell]

You built it off data on the Internet and the Internet was built off the. Off the back of ads, so it's already in there.

[Leo Laporte]

That by itself at least it would be an equal opportunity offender. But right then.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, they stumbled into that. Right. That wasn't, it wasn't like someone had a plan. This is how we're going to monetize.

[Leo Laporte]

Perplexity said exactly that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I mean with the Internet, like in other words, oh, I happened and then we're here and now he's like, yeah, that's what we're going to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, I just think that the influence of money and greed has, has, is pervasive at this point. Yeah, it's very. And these have great technological innovations, but they get tainted very quickly by greed.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and trying to make right now, they're none of those companies making money. Right, Right. Like they are on a short, they're on a, on a burn rate here that's going to take them out if they don't find their way.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It might not be great, might just be survival.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, I really do. Pretty hand in hand too.

[Paul Thurot]

Like they, this has triggered some insanity though, right? I mean, well, look, the world's biggest.

[Leo Laporte]

Companies are throwing away this week tens.

[Paul Thurot]

Of billions of dollars a quarter to build infrastructure. Like what are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

Like, because they believe this is a disrupting moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's enough.

[Richard Campbell]

They want to be in front of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's same reason. But this is Uber for a decade.

[Paul Thurot]

Without any dog stuff. Right. They're making it a disruptive moment. Right. Because now they're laying everybody off, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, some people, but not, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Not all of them.

[Richard Campbell]

We only get so many chances to build a sovereign app, like the first app that people touch. You know, maybe it was Outlook, maybe it's Slack. It's always a browser. It has been for a long time. Most people's first touch of a machine is to open a browser and, and.

[Paul Thurot]

Then use that to.

[Richard Campbell]

They want, they want their product to be your sovereign app. So you make a, you make a browser.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And then that this is just basic antitrust that has dated back to the beginning of two people bartering for something where someone finally has enough power that they move from these win win relationships where they're doing, providing a service to just protectionism and protecting what they have and then looking for other things they can dominate because now they have so much money they can afford just to buy their way into new markets.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the new metam scenario is pretty cool. To temper what you're saying about this, I just want to point out that the Perplexity CEO says its browser, this one they announced today, will track everything users do online to sell hyper personalized ads.

[Paul Thurot]

This is from TechCrunch, so I feel like this is not the way they would market it.

[Leo Laporte]

He's the CEO.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I know, but I mean, but this is also TechCrunch taking that and making it the headline. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like he says, that's. This is the quote. That's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because some of the prompts of people doing these AIs is purely work related. It's not like that's personal.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

On the other hand, what are the things you're buying? Which hotels are you going to? Which restaurants are you going to? What are you spending time browsing? Tells us so much more about you. We plan to. This is the. This is the smoking gun.

[Paul Thurot]

You're too smart for this.

[Leo Laporte]

We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile. And maybe, you know, through our Discover feed, we could show some ads there, maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

So here's the thing. You're right, this is terrible. We just talked about why no one cares about what you just said, and it's because we don't read anymore. We don't think we've all given away everything so we can get to a location in the fastest way possible. Google Maps or whatever it is. Like when you tell people you shouldn't use Chrome because they're like. And then they just use Chrome, they don't care. We've already made this kind of implicit deal with the devil. So I have had people literally tell me when I've said to them, disable the feature in whatever the product is, Windows 11, Edge, Chrome, whatever that is. Personalized advertising. And they said, well, if I'm going to see advertising, I'd rather see something that's relevant to me. Which is dumb on two levels because honestly, personalized advertising is ridiculous. It's actually not any better than actually regular advertising. It's still advertising. How about we don't see advertising? Would that be an acceptable outcome? But we're all just like, whatever, I don't care, I don't have to pay for it. Everyone gives up their soul.

[Leo Laporte]

It's as if though your GPS said, you know, the best route would be the one that goes by Arby's.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. If you would like. So we will order you food with.

[Leo Laporte]

Your credit card, the meat.

[Paul Thurot]

And it will be there waiting for you when you get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

This will add three minutes to your trip, you know. Yeah, yeah. I feel like we're not too far from that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly my point.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but listen, what you just said to any thinking person is ludicrous. Should never happen. But someone out there is like, oh, good idea. Yeah, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't we do that?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing is with AI, it's easy to kind of hide it. And we are getting more and more reliant on those little bullet points that the AI gives you.

[Paul Thurot]

And so, no, we've lost the ability to read, we've lost the ability to think, and now we're not going to know when it's wrong, and we're just. Whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Who do you think Arand was talking to when he said that? Like, who was his intended?

[Leo Laporte]

It was actually an. This new daily news podcast. TBPN was an interview.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, and so. And that's focused on the Valley. So arguably, he was really talking to Google. We're coming for your maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, also, he was at this time.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably negotiating with Apple.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, exactly. Like, there's. What he's showing is business model and why this is a viable.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm coming for Google's lunch.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't mean he's not telling the truth.

[Paul Thurot]

No. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

He's saying what he needs. CEOs say what they need to keep the stock price where it is and make as many opportunities for the company as possible.

[Paul Thurot]

The truth is another thing no one cares about anymore, apparently. Right. Like, I mean, this is. The whole world is nuts. This is the ideal time for AI.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Couldn't have happened at a better time to a less educated populace. You know, it's. It's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break, come back and talk more about all this good stuff. We've got the Xbox segment just around the corner. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, Our show today, brought to you by, I'm happy to say, Threat Locker. Love these guys. They do. Zero trust right? Now, why would you want to look at something like Threat Locker? Well, I don't need to tell you ransomware is. Is burning a fire through businesses worldwide. Phishing emails, infected downloads, even RDP exploits. Is there somehow, some way you could stop this? I don't want to be the next victim, you say. Well, Threat Locker, Zero Trust platform is the answer. It takes a. And this is the key, proactive, deny by default approach. We're not talking like an antivirus, where it's looking for virus signatures. No, it just says unless you have explicitly authorized this person using this app, we're blocking it. ThreatLocker's platform takes a proactive deny by default approach that blocks every unauthorized action. Which means it protects you from both known and completely unknown zero day threats. And zero days are the real threat. Nowadays the Threat Locker is really important for companies that are mission critical that can't afford to be hit by ransomware. I would submit that's everybody but global enterprises like JetBlue, they use threat Locker infrastructures like the Port of Vancouver. They use Threat Locker because Threat Locker shields them from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks. And by the way, providing complete audit trails for compliance but also to know what's happening, who was using that app at that time. Threat Locker's innovative ring fencing technology, that's what they call it, isolates critical applications from weaponization. It literally stops ransomware cold. It also, and this is really important too, limits lateral movement within your network. People just can't wander in and wander around. Threat Locker works in every industry. It supports Mac environments, it provides 24.7us based support and it enables comprehensive visibility and control. Just ask Mark Tolson. He's the speaking of infrastructure, he's the IT director for the city of Champaign, Illinois. And you know that city governments are one of the prime targets of ransomware these days. So Mark, Mark's on the front line. He says, and this is a direct quote, Threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do if bad actors got in and tried to execute something. I take comfort knowing Threat Locker will stop that. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with Threat Locker. Visit threatlocker.com twit to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's ThreatLocker. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly with Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell. That's all right. This is time to cheer up because there's no inshitification happening in gaming.

[Richard Campbell]

Gaming's going very well.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe we should just go right to the back of the book.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. You want the whiskey too soon. You have to earn your whiskey.

[Paul Thurot]

Now look, look guys, come on. It's been a tough year, I get it, but honestly it's. I don't think it's as bad as it seems, but we'll get to that. So we talked about the layoffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Famous last words, Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I said the same thing on the Titanic. That worked out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not as bad as it seems.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean we just scraped the thing. What could happen?

[Leo Laporte]

That's just a little Hole. It's a little hole.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying to be cognizant of the past here but. Well, but I'm also trying to look at this like clear headedly in a clear headed fashion or whatever. So there's still questions about the layoffs. I mean frankly there's been some contention over how many of them are industry gaming, industry related, etc. I think one of the most compelling things I've seen is descriptions of studios, games that were cancelled or you know, gotten rid of or whatever where these guys had never delivered on what they were supposed to deliver and were given more time to reach some quality bar and give more time and given more money.

[Richard Campbell]

And then we did it, scheduling game development.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're saying it's Duke Nukem 3D all over.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing is Duke Nukem 3D.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, actually I'm not even sure that's a. I'm not sure that's an extreme example anymore. But it was absolutely was at the time. Yeah, yeah. And listen, completely exceeded all our expectations when it arrived. So it was fine. Game was terrible. So I. Look, there are going to be exceptions what I just said. I could be completely wrong, you know, more generally. But so far what I've seen is a lot of this stuff was there's a kind of a shift that occurs at Xbox when Phil Spencer comes in. They've shifted, screwed up with Xbox One. They were trying to turn it into more of a general entertainment kind of a device and they kind of just lost the thread a little bit. And looking at the market as it was, looking at their position versus Sony especially, but also Nintendo, you know, what do we do, what do we do? What do we do? And so things have obviously changed. But you know, Phil Spencer's been involved in some of the more difficult decisions. Like they wanted Halo Infinite to ship at a certain point so it could be part of the new console generation. That thing was a steaming pile of garbage and they had to be like, no, like you're gonna, you're gonna take more time. And then there are examples of the opposite like that. What was it called? Red. Red. No, it was a terrible game a couple years ago, the vampire game. They just threw that thing out there and it was garbage that could have used another six months or a year. Right. I think a lot of the work that Xbox has been doing over the past decade has been looking at what the other companies in the market, Nintendo and Sony were. Redfall. Thank you, Kevin. Were successful with. And what are we doing wrong. And what they were doing wrong was they didn't have enough first party games. Right. This is the big thing Sony and Nintendo have. They have these franchises and they do really well and they pretty much keep them on their own platforms, you know, so they bought studios and they bought a lot of studios and then they bought really big studios and now they're kind of the biggest game studio in the world. Right. And you know, they wanted quantity and quality and I think they might have given too many of these small teams that are spread out all over the place and got like just Activision Blizzard by itself. It's like this nightmare of whatever studios everywhere, you know, who knows what these people are doing. But they, even before that though, within Microsoft there's so many of these things. I just think they were, there's too much of it, you know, and I, I think this is them. It's bad timing and it's not maybe handled well. They're not being very transparent about it. But I think there's just a lot of like you've been working on this for three years. You were going to be a launch game and now we're going on to the next gen. What are you doing? And you know, it stinks to lose jobs.

[Richard Campbell]

The AI story plays into this too.

[Paul Thurot]

It absolutely does. There is no better example of small.

[Richard Campbell]

Teams starting to build extraordinary games using these new tools. And then you're turning around to your 300 person team that's two years behind and going what is next month's payroll again.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you've. Right, you've taken hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars and you've created nothing. And we could do that for less, you know, basically. I mean, so yes, look, it's hard. I'm not, I am not saying it's okay or anything like that, but. And look, like I said, there will be exceptions. We don't really know the full story here, but that to me this is a big part of it. So there were a lot of, just a couple of quick things that came out of this from last week. I don't think we discussed last week, but there was a guy who was a big Call of Duty leaker who just said full stop, Phil Spencer will retire as soon as they ship the next Xbox. And Frank shot Chief communication officer Microsoft literally like, yep, that's completely made up. That's not true. He's not retiring anytime soon. I mean, I guess of course he would say that, but it's fascinating to me that he said anything, you know, to something like that it was such a random kind of a weird blog thing. But Romero Games, which of course is John Romero and his wife and John Romero being half of the team. Well Pat half of the two John team that was the core of the team for mid. That made Doom and Quake. Right. Was forced to lay off 100 employees when a company they did not name that was sponsoring a first person shooter that was going to run on the Xbox, said there was no more money coming. And I wonder who that company was. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So that's an interesting Survived die Catana. So.

[Paul Thurot]

He. That's interesting because that's not owned by anybody. But that's not part of Microsoft. Right. That's an independent small company. So that's another thing with the industry. Like when you think of like any given Call of Duty game, there's whatever studio really studios doing the different parts of the game, but there's all these outside contractor guys too that you don't really hear about. The Halliburtons, if you will, of the, of the video game world. Right. And, and like Romero games apparently was one of them, at least in this instance. And that's not happening anymore. And, and then this is kind of small, but there's a Warcraft mobile game called Warcraft Rumble Mobile, which they're not killing but they're also not going to provide any more content for. So it's just going to sit there in stasis for the rest of time, apparently. And that is part of Blizzard, which is part of which Microsoft acquired because.

[Richard Campbell]

They wanted to get in the mobile.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And by the way, I listen this. So I wrote on the plane ride here a long article where I looked at Xbox because Microsoft of course is coming under a lot of fire from fans who are the most abused fans I think in tech in some ways, like they've taken over as like the number one. Like nothing is right and we hate everything and why can't it be the way it was? And I look, I've made this case a lot. The console industry has never been the same thing for any amount of time. It's always changed. It's always changed. It's just like the rest of tech and just simple examples. I've talked about this kind of stuff. Xbox, the original Xbox, it was basically a PC. It was one version. We were done. Xbox360, that thing got constant updates. And I don't just mean like red Ring of Death stuff. I mean 720p to 1080i to 1080p, cost reduced, but more powerful versions of the console Xbox One, same thing. Xbox 1s and X4K. You know, Xbox One X S, sorry, was one of the most beautiful hardware devices Microsoft's ever made. You know, didn't sell too well. Whatever. Sony and Microsoft both launched this generation with two consoles side by side. First time that's ever happened. And different tiers of performance or capabilities at least. Right. I think on the Sony side they're actually. It's just probably just.

[Richard Campbell]

That was also a fallout of where our hardware is getting so expensive now and the potential cost of compute is so high and that makes the game more expensive to make. So we'll do two consoles because if the lower one becomes more popular then we can dial this back. And that's not what happened. The high end one did all the sales, relatively speaking.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean and demanding essentially utilize my 4k for 88 inch screen, for crying out loud. And it's part of what makes game development so costly.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, gaming is, is interesting on a lot of levels, but whatever that pie is, whatever the amount is, right. We all know it's like bigger than Hollywood movies, you know, by revenue, et cetera, et cetera. The biggest chunk by far is casual games and it's almost meaningless. It's like these kind of free games that maybe are ad supported or in game purchase supported. And yeah, a lot of people play for three minutes whether you know, waiting in line at shopping or whatever. You know, it's just little throw away.

[Richard Campbell]

Not be alone with your thought game.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. Which by the way I can sort of relate to at this point. But yeah, but as far as like people who I would say are kind of hardcore gamers or like actually really like to game. Like this is the thing, right. Whereas you know, like my dad's generation, there was nothing like this. There was no, there were no adults that were dedicating huge amounts of their weeks of time to playing games of any kind. Like I know they didn't have video games.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you've never been to the United States Open Chess tournament as I have.

[Paul Thurot]

So anyway. No, but not to the degree we see today. Like playing video games has become a, an established. You know, it's a thing, it's. There are esports that make money like professional sports do. Like actual athletes running around doing things. Right. I mean it's a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they used to have bridge columns every day in the paper.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, okay, but, but again like they, but to play a video game you are dedicating a lot of time, you know, and it's, it's just, it kind of boggles my mind. Like consoles are kind of this niche market where they sit between like this truly casual people and then the hardcore PC gamer types who are like, I'm going to keep upgrading this, get the better graphics, you know, I'm going to have the best experience, whatever. It's going to take a lot of work, a lot of money. It's complex, it could be problems, you know, yada yada yada, console. It comes on, it's, you know, it's pretty good. And it's interesting because I feel like it's moving in both of those directions. Console. The consoles are becoming, and this is the, this is part of the problem with Xbox for fans. They're like, what is this thing now? And it's like it's, what's everything? What do you mean, what's the difference? Like if you have a phone that's an Xbox, you can play Xbox games there. If you have an Xbox console, obviously that's an Xbox. But if you have PlayStation, we lose a lot of games over there now too. In fact, some of the best selling PlayStation games this year have been made by Microsoft Studios, which is unbelievable. The next Xbox, if I'm correct, I believe is basically going to be a PC which opens up.

[Richard Campbell]

The last one was also well, but.

[Paul Thurot]

To the point where you could have not just two tiers but any number of tiers. And possibly again I'm just speculating, but this notion of in place upgradability that you have this box where you can pop up the graphics and pop in a new one and have a better experience on that same hardware. So look, that's change and people don't like change. But it's always changed. I just described a very simple version of that. But I mean it's always been changing. So I always, you know, look, Xbox, Microsoft, they're not going to talk now. They're not going to talk. I could not go to them and say, hey, something's going on with Xbox. You want to talk about it? They'd be like, no, no we don't. Because they want to talk about it when they can talk about it when they have something to announce, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

When they have something to sell.

[Paul Thurot]

So I went to the Xbox site and I was like, how did they present this to the world? Like what is it? And they present it to the world as three things. Game pass number one. Games, okay? And hardware. Devices. Right. And devices is not what it used to be. Devices used to be, here's our console now it's all kinds of things. Windows PCs, these handheld gaming things. You know, we're on mobile now. There's all, if you look at that, there's a lot there and there's going to be more, I think, in the future. And like, okay, that's kind of interesting. And I, I went through the entire. I wrote a really long article about this, but I went through the entire history of Microsoft's acquisitions under Phil Spencer. It is astonishing. Like, it's astonishing.

[Richard Campbell]

They rolled up the industry.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh my God. And they really, really, you could say whatever you want about this guy or this organization, you cannot say they didn't try. They really addressed this problem. But the fundamental sell job that Spencer did to get Xbox to stick around, because I think Nadella normally would have looked at this and like, no, get rid of this thing was make it make sense in this cloud computing world. Subscriptions, right. So they did Game Pass. And Game Pass was going to be like Netflix was in the early days. It was this bargain bin of no videos nobody cared about that was an agent to the. The disk rental service. Right. Netflix became interesting when they started doing their own content and it was actually good. Right. House of cards, narcos, etc. Whatever. And so Microsoft was like, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to put all of our games on Xbox Game Pass day one for free. Well, not for free. I mean, you're paying for it, but you don't have to buy the game. We will be the Netflix of video games. And honestly, when it was just Microsoft Studios, like, that was okay, right? There would be the occasional big game like a Halo. They own Gears by this point. Gears of War, Flight Simulator or Forza games, etc. But you know, we're not going to put Call of Duty on there. That's crazy, right? I think the conflicting desire to be a player, which means you need all those studios, which means you do have Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty in the other games. And then this cloud model that Nadella loved, where we have subscriptions and people are paying every month. They don't work together. You can't put Call of Duty on Game Pass and get rid of the billions of dollars you make within two months when that game comes out and you can only buy it at retail. Yeah, like those things don't work.

[Richard Campbell]

The Netflix model works because first the movie goes into theater release for a few years before it gets licensed over to Netflix. And you know, some stuff and some stuff doesn't. It gets made directly, but exactly Right. The, the. Because you've been building games like their blockbuster movies, now that we're trying to go to. I wouldn't compare to Netflix. I'd compare it to Spotify. And you want to pay.

[Paul Thurot]

These are tough, tiny amounts of money for the product. The movie one is correct, is the most correct, if that makes sense. Because most people will watch a movie one time. Most movies make all of their money in the first two seconds. You know, there's not this long tail anymore like it used to be. Star wars would play all summer long. It would come back in the winter, you know, it'd be like this rethink and it'd be amazing. But most movies, they just, whatever they make right up front, that's it, we're done. And then they shovel it everywhere else. Whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Residuals we make from there, close.

[Paul Thurot]

And that's what video games are. So the problem, like Netflix and Spotify music services, video services that are series based are things you can kind of. You pay per month, you binge, you could sit up all night and watch a whole season of a show if you wanted to, if you had the endurance or whatever, if you loved it enough, and then you move on to the next thing. Music is like that, like 100 million songs. There's an infinite number of playlists and combinations and music that sounds like other music that you like, and that's great. But most video game players, as it turns out, just play a couple of games. And even though I love Game Pass.

[Richard Campbell]

Lots of people hang on to music playlists for a long time, too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, yes. But you may like the idea of Game Pass and when it was inexpensive enough and it was like this open opportunity, maybe I'll try some of these games that maybe were big a couple years ago, back catalog games, whatever. Yeah, okay. But now that it's like once they got Activision Blizzard, they were like, all right, we got to scale this back. We can't do day and date. We're going to get rid of the Xbox Game Pass. We're going to have this Game Pass corridor that doesn't offer that thing so we don't screw that up. You know, they basically insertified it. Right? I mean, like it's. They didn't have a choice. And I feel like the price.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I feel like they're doing the cash flow spreadsheets a bit late.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. That's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

These are numbers you could have figured out, guys.

[Paul Thurot]

You had a year and a half of antitrust time to run these numbers again and again and again. And at any point someone could have raised their hand and said, you know, this doesn't add up ever. Right. Like there's no version. That person has to exist.

[Richard Campbell]

But it also speaks to why are you laying off in the gaming industry? Because games need to cost less.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Right. Because as it turns out, it is like movies. There are a couple of blockbusters, they do great, they do cost hundreds of million dollars to make, but they make billions. It's fine. But most of them do not. And once that time comes and goes, no one is going to go pick up. There's no version. I mean, someone will make tell, prove me wrong. But there is no version of a game came out two years ago. It's on game pass now, or Sony's, whatever that's called, PlayStation plus or whatever. And all of a sudden it's the biggest hit in the world. Yeah, like it's just. I'm sorry, but like that game doesn't exist. You know, asterisks. It probably does exist, but yeah, once in a while.

[Richard Campbell]

But the bigger thing here is why we up the price of making games thinking it would guarantee billion dollar winners and it didn't.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like the two don't necessarily correlate. Every year we get an indie billion dollar winner.

[Paul Thurot]

There's got to be a term for this. It's the smart people making stupid decision thing. But when Covid happened, there were certain things that just went gangbusters because of the situation. Video games was one of them. Yeah, it was a lot of over hiring. Yeah. Without any thought of the future, like this will pass and those people will go back to work or whatever. They're not going to have 14 hours to play games every day and they're not going to spend as much on video games. Which by the way, categorically is exactly what happened. And I. But this, it wasn't just games. I mean, tech companies, whatever, all kinds of companies, I'm sure spent like over hired, spent more money than they should have and then scaled back really dramatically and it's just chaos.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So I just, hopefully they're doing some market size analysis and so forth. Just saying like you can't. You're making too many games to make money.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. That's a big chunk of it. And that speaks to the thing I talked about in the beginning, where we have all these studios out there, literally out there, all over the place, spread over the world, working on games. No one is actually releasing any games. You know, not no one literally, but. And at some point someone's like hey, didn't we have this studio in Montreal doing something that we gave them $100 million. Whatever. What are they doing? And you know, they're hanging out playing Call of Duty. I don't know what they're doing because apparently they didn't make the game. So there's that kind of correction occurring. I think Game Pass has literally peaked. I think we might through the combination of like making the right decisions for the business, but they're contrary to each other. We might have gotten to a situation where the price of that thing is too expensive per month. The Pete now at that price, people aren't just buying it. They're like, well, actually I only play two games a year, so yeah, I'll save 120 bucks. Instead of.

[Richard Campbell]

You're quickly getting to the Netflix scenario where it's like, I've list I've watched everything on Netflix. I'm going to, to stick stop this account for the next six months and see if new stuff comes up that makes it worthwhile.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly, exactly. And I, I, it's a problem. You know, it, it's a problem. So I think for, look, there's no doubt that this business can be profitable and successful and Xbox fans do not like to hear this. But there's also no doubt that for that to happen, Microsoft can't make the hardware. They just don't make money on hardware.

[Richard Campbell]

It's no, they never have. And the idea that they could convince third parties to make hardware in this scenario is awesome for them. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

I think it could be, I don't know. Awesome is a strong term. But it could be good for those companies too, because A, they're better at it, B, there will be more choice in competition. It'll be good for consumers. But yeah, there's a strong argument to.

[Richard Campbell]

Say Microsoft has not been able to figure this out. So do something else. Maybe it will figure out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So if you get rid of the Xbox hardware as a, as a, as a cost center or whatever things in Xbox, and now you've got your PC maker partners whoever making devices, portable desktop, you know, like a console type devices, whatever. They're PCs really. Right. You're licensing the OS to them, maybe you're giving it away for free, who cares? But now you have games, you know, implicit to everything as an Xbox is our games run everywhere. Right. Which is the thing that drives Xbox people crazy. The most popular games that Microsoft owns sell on other consoles and devices and they do really well there. Call of Duty is much bigger on PlayStation than it is on Xbox so that they become a game publisher. And honestly, come on, this makes sense. It's Microsoft, they make software, they're good at this. They've proven to be pretty good at the subscription thing too by the way. But we'll see. But I think once you remove that anchor, this business makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

And it's big, like really big.

[Richard Campbell]

I also think, and you know, you're also admitting here and they don't know for sure. So they are trying things because what has been happening isn't working.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. So when I speculate about the future of Xbox as we think of it now as a console, as a PC like device or literally as a PC, part of built into that speculation is the thing you just said. It's the we see, we'll see. Part of the we'll see is originally Microsoft was going to come up with their own Xbox branded handheld gaming device alongside third parties. They still want to do that and still maybe will. But now we're going to go to market first with an Asus device and we're going to see how that does. And if this stuff does well enough where the third party devices are, are good enough and sell well enough that Microsoft doesn't have to make one, their consoles will disappear overnight. I mean they can't do it immediately, but they can do it immediately in the future. They have to see and if it works, you know, maybe the next gen Xbox hardware, there were third parties and first parties. We'll see. You know, I do think we're going to see Xbox branded hardware from Microsoft. Right. You know, as we would call it a console again. But I also think that that might be the end of it. Right. But we'll see. Literally we'll see because it's based, it's going to be based on what happens then.

[Richard Campbell]

They're trying. They're trying.

[Paul Thurot]

They are trying. That's the big thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I would argue against some, the perceived cruelty in how they're doing this. But I also see they need to do make change. In general, this, this year's layoffs have seems especially cruel.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. And the problem is I feel like this, it's bad. But I also feel like we've had this conversation before and that this conversation basically boils down to okay, on some level I agree that this had to happen. Could it happen all at once? Does it have to keep happening every three months? Does it have to happen in such ways that you're, you've got a head of HR telling you to use ChatGPT to get in touch with your feelings because you just got laid up. Is there some version of this where you don't come off looking horrible? And, and this is the thing. I I don't know. It's probably not specific to Microsoft but you know this is the. The market I follow. So I, I don't understand it and I I wish it was handled better.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. But I agree.

[Paul Thurot]

But I also see the. The rationale.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

As far as I understand it. Right. We don't have all the details.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I think it's. You're also seeing this. This is part of what's happened inside of Microsoft as well as in gaming. Is there is a disruption happening in the market. We have gotten fairly inefficient and while there could have been a more elegant way to go about this. They are going about it.

[Paul Thurot]

This is not in this article And I have ideas for what might be the next one that might be like a follow up to this and one of the little germs of an idea. Anyone could go do this. You could just do this right now. Go find the list of 18 or 20 whatever number companies that Microsoft acquired in the gaming industry that are. That make games like because there are other gaming companies they hired that like technology. They made technology like havoc or things that are. They don't make games but they game related. But just if you just look at game publishers there's an interesting list to be made of. Here is why they bought them. This company, this publisher whatever it is this game studio made this game or this couple of games that were awesome and sold awesome and then Microsoft bought them and the next game they made didn't do so good and the next game they made was terrible and or maybe they never even made it. This at least two instances I saw where they. They bought these companies for billions.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And they made nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and very likely the key people to making great games inside of that company got paid heavily in the acquisition.

[Paul Thurot]

Of course they're. Yes. Right. Even if they didn't there's another weird problem there. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You're so successful houses and yeah just you know just like ipoing a company today is really just a cash out.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The you you wreck companies when you acquire them and throw lead that much money into leadership or pull them into Microsoft themselves and put them on different jobs. But either way.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The state that they were in that made those great games no longer exists.

[Paul Thurot]

I to the two biggest takeaways that I got to going and looking at this because I, it, you know, I'm aware of it obviously, but you kind of forget. The extent of it is. It's astonishing how many companies they bought.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So when people tell me like so they don't even try in gaming, it's like, I don't think you understand.

[Richard Campbell]

They tried really hard. There's another element of this. Like I had a buddy who built a company that made a great game who then got acquired by Electronic Arts, did his two year vest and in that two years made nothing meaningful, then left, started another company and then suddenly another great game and got acquired again.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the points he, you know, back then he was talking about I can't make what I want when I work for a big company. I have to be on my own.

[Paul Thurot]

Which. Right. Speaks to. There's a couple of things we talked about that hit on this. This is the. Microsoft can't make money making hardware, but maybe these other companies can.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

And also this notion that maybe Xbox, generally speaking, would be better off as a smaller company, meaning as itself as what I would call Activision Blizzard without the baggage of Microsoft and having to conform to the bigger corporate strategies that Nadella wants or whatever, you know, I don't know. But yes, I'm sorry I said earlier there were two big takeaways. One is how much Microsoft has just spent and how much effort. And you don't see it. It's weird because the narrative is so negative. But my God, have they, they've tried everything. Like it's actually rather incredible. They've given up in the broader consumer market to a much greater degree. They have never stopped trying with games. Like it's kind of, it's kind of, at least under Phil Spencer. It's kind of amazing. And then I forgot the other one. I'm sorry, but I get distracted very easily. But I don't remember. It will come to me at 3 o' clock in the morning anyway, so there's that. I guess I'm just trying to say it's easy to be negative, it's easy to be cynical. A lot of these people are very sensitive as fans. They're just take everything very personally. They're not willing to understand that for the thing they love to succeed and persist, it has to change. You know, there's a lot that goes into that. But I, when I look at Xbox, if you can get past, you know, the terribleness of what's happening at this moment, honestly, I think they've done what they can do. I don't know. I don't Think you can go back and say if they had just done this then, you know, everything would have been okay?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I think you're exactly right. And they are, you know, sure, they've dropped the ball a couple on a couple of places. Like there is also the problem of working at scale. Yeah, but you know, there's a. The other element of this is you don't know what makes a great game because if we didn't know, we'd be more consistent on it.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like in some ways this is the old programming model where we can afford to make a hundred crappy games because then the one winner just makes so much money.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, I mean that could work. But I think the cost of games factors into why that becomes a little more untenable these days. Because now you. The vast sums you have to throw at a problem become a big problem when you don't hit that one game. You know, when all you did was release 100.

[Richard Campbell]

Turns out nobody can make 100 games to get the one winner.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the reality. So you got to share it around. And then, you know, and again I'm not gonna be flipping about these layoffs but it's like any of those people could go and start a studio and may and work at small scale and possibly crank out a hit. And it's not like the Martin, you.

[Paul Thurot]

Know, and it might be the type of thing that would not have ever happened under Microsoft because it is too.

[Richard Campbell]

Big and quite possible.

[Paul Thurot]

Too many layers of management bureaucracy.

[Richard Campbell]

This is how we used to talk about Electronic Arts. They cannot make games. They can only maintain franchises.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, right.

[Richard Campbell]

They buy games. When you make a hit, EA writes you a big check. You come on board, they move your franchise in and make a bunch of versions of it till nobody cares anymore. Then they let it die. I mean, I don't.

[Paul Thurot]

If you go back, aside from Donkey Bass that was co written by bill gates for PC DOS 1.0, there might not be a single major example of an in house created from scratch game from Microsoft ever. Like they distributed the. The game Adventure in the early days for example. They did not create that. They, you know, things like, well, Flight simulator came from another company. Halo was Bungie, obviously Gears of War, they bought from whatever Cliff, it was epic.

[Richard Campbell]

You're coming at this angle now that this is part of the problem, right. Is that the big companies stuck too much money into gaming. If I give you $200 million to build a game, by golly, you're gonna spend it. It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I don't know why anybody need anything more than this.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a perfect game in every room.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Donkey Dot Base.

[Richard Campbell]

There's nothing like 40 by 25 to just soothe.

[Paul Thurot]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

What a game. Is this all that's all that ever happens is?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's the whole game.

[Paul Thurot]

But again, you know, at the time, the fact that you get the PC in that of that era, the initial piece was not. There was nothing going on graphically. The fact that this is even possible is. It's actually for the hardware is actually sort of astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, I can't Basic, by the way, right?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's donkeyed up ass for a reason.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. That's crazy. Okay, okay, couple of more things real quick. So I just talked about this last week too. Now I feel stupid. Back in June, Microsoft announced and then released Call of Duty, World War II, WW2 for Game Pass. They also put it in the Microsoft store. Apparently when they did that, they really screwed it up because there was the version that if you're in Game Pass, I guess you get the latest updates, it's fine, everything's good, you're not gonna have any problems. But if you actually just download it from the store, it's an out of date version that is suffering from amazing vulnerabilities that will be immediately exploited by hackers. And actually Leo, it'd be worth watching the video of this because it's in the article. It's at the top of the article.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's kind of amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

It's astonishing. Like these guys are playing the game. Their computer is taken over by a hacker. They send them harassing messages through Notepad, which is hilarious by the way. And you know, put gay porn on their desktop wallpaper. It's good stuff. Yeah. Click where it says one gamer tweeted right in the middle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he did a screenshot on the, on the tweet.

[Paul Thurot]

He did a video.

[Leo Laporte]

Here we go.

[Paul Thurot]

So you can see the command lines that come up. This is Notepad with the threatening message.

[Richard Campbell]

Will come up right here.

[Paul Thurot]

What? And then he goes to his desktop and fortunately he's clipped it in such a way. It's, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, just like, just all you had to do was play the game and you were immediately exploited. So actually this suggests to me that this game was in the same state as XP was when it was first released. The dumb thing is this problem was patched years ago. Years ago. So it's just that the version they put on the store does not have the patch.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

So they had to pull it, I believe, as recently as a week ago. I was like, hey, this thing just came out. It's actually a really good game. You should try out the multiplayer. It's surprisingly good, which is what you're seeing here.

[Richard Campbell]

Now with free hackers.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a real hack or. I mean.

[Paul Thurot]

No, that happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Is somebody just sitting there waiting for somebody to play this old game?

[Paul Thurot]

They took over his computer. Remote control, right. Yeah, it's an R. What do you call it? Remote Codex.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably just some cron job running in a closet somewhere.

[Paul Thurot]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how often is this game?

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. I literally. I haven't played it yet because I downloaded this game today so I could experience this. I'm really. I'm curious about this. Supposedly, if you don't have Game Pass, you won't see it in the store. So I didn't verify this, but when I see it, I still see it.

[Richard Campbell]

So if I go, so you pay the Xbox unexplodable, play a police game?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, look, it's important that I experience what real people experience.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, I did see this on Game Pass. I'm glad I didn't download it.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a good game. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you get interrupted a lot, so.

[Leo Laporte]

If you get it through Game Pass, you're okay. It's only.

[Paul Thurot]

That's my understanding, because it is still there for me. Or maybe they've already patched it, but my understanding is it was only the standard downloaded version from the store. That was the store.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

The Game Pass version, I believe, is okay. It's still there, so it must be.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody's got some security pipeline problems for their store. How does this ever get pushed?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, and this is like I just spent 18 months bitching about them not putting Call of Duty games on Game Pass. And they finally do one, and then it, you know, it does this and it's like, yeah, you got what you asked for, idiot. You know, like, okay, they should have obviously put the. The right version. But yeah. Okay, you think? Yeah, I don't think this is the start of a trend, but it is notable that the first Sony published game, PlayStation exclusive game, by the way, is now coming to the Xbox. Now, this gets into a kind of a weird area because it was made by a game studio called Arrowhead, published by Sony. So Sony does not own Arrowhead, but they did Commission them to make this game exclusive to PlayStation. I'm sure there was some money that changed hands, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But this will enable gamers who. It's cops are. It's called Helldivers 2. Yeah. It's described as a. It's incredibly pot. It's one of the best reviewed and best selling games last year by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

New games in a while.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Yep. Cooperative third person multiplayer only shooter teams of four. And it will work cross platforms so you can, it's. Sony does put games on PCs. This is one of them. So as of August, when this comes out of the Xbox, you'll be able to play in multiplayer matches like we do in Call of Duty with people on PlayStations, PCs, Xboxes, whatever. Mixed together. Right. And that's good. Like that's. This is the kind of thing Sony is often resist.

[Richard Campbell]

The thing that Sony, you know, wrote a brief on that would never happen.

[Paul Thurot]

This is exactly the thing. Yes, yep. It is exactly that thing. Yeah. Which is why I, I wrote about it and pointed it out because this has never happened and I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, send this to the ftc. Excellent.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, send it to Lisa Khan. I think we should just spam, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Lena Khan.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, sorry, she's not around anymore. I refuse to acknowledge the word Lena as a name. Okay, so. And then this is semi related. So everyone is familiar with Epic baiting Apple and Google by putting their own in app system into Fortnite, both of them shutting Fortnite out of their respective app stores. Epic conveniently having a lawsuit ready to fly as soon as that happened. And then they crossed through each other. Epic got kind of a mixed ruling obviously in Apple, although recently they've kind of rebounded because of Apple's, you know, stupidity. But they defeated Google handily. Like it was brutal. And since then, and I want to say like nine months later, whenever the timeframe was, they actually sued Google and Samsung for colluding to put technology or you know, features into Samsung's phones. Right. Samsung being the biggest OEM or biggest hardware maker for Android to do Google's bidding, but on Samsung's devices. So like in other words, it's like we lost in court, so now we'll get our biggest partner. And by the way, a lot of, a lot of Samsung, Google partnership stuff over the intervening year, hasn't there been. I'm sure that's unrelated but anyway, there were, they were, you know, they sued them for colluding and specifically going against one of the requirements of their, of the ruling. Against them, which is that to for them to be blocked against partnering with another company to do exactly what they are. Well, what they're alleged to be doing today was the Samsung unpacked event for the new folding phones. As they said two days ago, Epic announced very briefly that they've settled with Samsung. Samsung. The quote that came from Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic was we're grateful that Samsung will address Epic's concerns. And I believe there were two. One was this kind of autoblock thing where by default Samsung's devices are configured to block these like third party stores like the, like Epic has. And the other one, I don't remember the other one but that was the big one. So we don't know. I was thinking we were going to hear something about this at this event today. Maybe even Tim Sweeney would come out on stage like he did at the. Hey, almost at Halo at the Hololens event right back in 2019. I think it was for HoloLens 21 of Microsoft Sharpex critics all of a sudden like on stage like oh they're great now, like everything's fine. As long as they do what I want, they're great. So I, I don't believe that happened. I didn't watch the event. Like I said, $2,000. But we'll see what comes out of this. So I'm curious. Did not drop the lawsuit against Google for colluding. However, they still did do that allegedly. Right. So, but interesting that they. Yeah, they settled. So the case has been thrown out. Simple.

[Leo Laporte]

This episode is brought to you by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I love hearing those words. For 35 years the electronic Frontier foundation has been fighting to make sure when you go online, your rights go with you. I'm a proud member. You should too. I also listen to their great podcast how to Fix the Internet. I don't know how I would sum up what the EFF does. It does so much. Their lawyers protect security researchers from companies that don't want them to do the research. EFF's technologists develop open source software to combat surveillance. If you use privacy badger you oughta. And their activists push companies to build tools that work for you, not against you. The EFF's podcast How to Fix the Internet has some of the best guests ever. People from like minded groups including the Digital Defense Fund, the Tor Project, the Freedom of Press foundation, leading thinkers in post quantum crypto, AI neurotechnology. And with every guest they ask the question, what does the world look like if we get this right? Visit eff.org podcast and listen to how to fix the Internet. And by the way, join the eff. I'm a member. You should be too. Thank you eff. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Hey you know, let's take a little break and then I think the back of the book is lurking.

[Richard Campbell]

It approaches standing in the shadows doth approach.

[Leo Laporte]

While we break, I might want to just give a little plug to all the fine folks watching the show and the club today. Hello, club Club Twit. We started this about four years ago during COVID when advertising was scarce, shall we say. And the club has really become a very, I think very big part of our revenue. 25% of our operating costs now are paid by our audience, which is ideal. I mean I think that's what I would love to make it, 100%. But here's the way that we do this. If you are a member of the club, 10 bucks a month, 120 bucks a year, there's a two week free trial. You don't get any ads. You have ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this pitch, right? So that's one benefit. You also get access to the very fun club Twit Discord. It's a great place to chat with our hosts, with other like minded people and a lot of special events that go on in the Burke. You also get access to Burke. A lot of events go on in the club. Coming up Friday, our photo time with Chris Marquardt. We'll be looking at your quirky photos this month. We also have right after our AI user group, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the vibe coding Twit apps people did. And then one of the things I'd like to talk about is local models. But there's lots of things we could talk about. We do home theater geeks for you in the club. That's a club only show. Micah's crafting corner. IOS today is in there hands on tech. Our book club's coming up in August. Really great book. This Is how youw Lose the Time War. All in all, I think the club is an extreme, extremely wonderful value. You, you, you cast your vote for the programming you hear on the network. You support it with. With your vote, your dollars, and you get some, I think, real benefits. If you're interested, and I hope you all are, please do me a favor. Go to Twit TV Club Twit and sign up today. We'd love to have you in the club. I'll see you in the club, Twit Discord. Thank you in advance. Now back to the show and to Paul and the back of the book. Your tip of the week, Mr. Thrott.

[Paul Thurot]

Tony Redmond is the primary author, one of the co authors of Office 365. For IT pros. We keep recommending this book.

[Richard Campbell]

He booked It Never Ends.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And this guy, he's. I love Tony, but he's an inspiration to me on a different level because I also work on these stupid big books and try to make sense of this. And he's so nonchalant about it and the way he does it, it's. You know, I've talked to him at length now a couple times about how I could do this better or whatever, but he has a good model and he. This is the bible for Office slash Microsoft 365 admins. And the new edition is out. He's offering a 10 discount for Windows Weekly fans. The address to get. Well, this is kind of a tough thing to say. Maybe we could throw it on screen somehow, but it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I could put it on screen.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a long URL. We'll also put it in the show notes.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but you look at that list of names, half those folks are run as radio guests. Like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. You know, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's experts.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a who's who of everyone in that community, like, of note, you know, like, that knows what they're talking about. Exactly. So it's neat. Yeah. Unlike me, it's just me, like, with a pole out in the ocean by myself. So. Yeah. Anyway, it's a fantastic book and strongly, strongly recommended.

[Leo Laporte]

I am working at getting it into the captions as quickly as my little fingers can type.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. I do this one with a heavy heart.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Paul Thurot]

My app pick this week is Microsoft Edge. Hold on, hold on.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, what?

[Paul Thurot]

Hold on. This is one of those I'm okay, you're okay kind of moments. So a week or two ago, I. I wrote about how I had come back from Mexico in May, I guess, a bunch of review laptops stacked up, configured them all kind of side by side at the same time. And then I got the. That horrible thing that happens to me where Microsoft Auto Enables Folder backup in OneDrive, even though I tell it no. And then suddenly I'm syncing my desktop and my documents and money and I explained, you know, I'm like, you know what? In my knee jerk brain. I feel like this is bad. I don't like it. I know I have reasons for this, but I don't really remember them because I just don't do it. Maybe I'll just live with this for a little while. So I did and it was terrible and I hated myself for it. And I do not. And I wrote a, we talked about it and I, I wrote an article about it, but there was a little, there's a little asterisk. This because a big part of that default experience in Windows 11 is tied to Microsoft Edge, right? The thing we talked about earlier with the DMA changes where if you live in Europe, you can now or soon will be able to have the web browser experience you expect in Windows, where maybe you do choose Edge, but you don't want to use Bing or you don't want to use whatever, you don't want to always use msn, you know, news thing on your tab or whatever it is and you change that configuration and they never harass you again, right? Or you just don't want to use Edge, you want to use Chrome or something else and you change the browser and you actually, it actually changes everything and you click on a search link in Start or you click on a story in Widgets and it actually opens in your browser like normal. But that's not what Windows does in the rest of the world, right? So I was like, well, okay, is it possible to use Microsoft Edge in such a way that it doesn't violate your privacy all over the place and is a good experience? And the truth is, not just because of the stuff I mentioned earlier with the responsive stuff they're working on, but for all kinds of reasons. Edge is actually, if you overlook the crap, is a really good browser, right? Like it has all kinds of reasons to like it. I will say from my perspective, when people talk about things like the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. You know, the best app is the one you don't have to install. It's already there, right? And like it's, it's there. It's the same engine as Chrome. It should just work everywhere. It should have this, you know, should be the same, right? But, but it is Edge. And so like, how do you fix these problems? And actually you can pretty much fix, I would say almost all the Problems. Obviously you have to install the right extensions to prevent it from tracking you. Privacy Badger Ad block plus solve this problem nicely. The EFF has has a website called cover your tracks. It will tell you whether you are protected from your own browser. Use it strongly recommend that there's a settings that you should change, you know, etc. There are things that Edge does when you first set it up. Like there are three choices you get. If you agree to any of those, they're bad. All of them. You can reverse that. Third party password manager. That's something we've been talking about a lot. Search engine change. You can change it from Bing, which I don't think many people like to whatever you want to use. It will harass you though, right? It will literally at some point you'll reboot or something or run Edge. It will run an update and we'll say hey, you should use their desired configuration. It will make Bing the default search. Everything will be great. And it will never stop doing that. It will never agree to you that you don't want that. It will just keep asking you. So there's a couple of things you can do to fix that. The easiest one is that thing I mentioned earlier. Get wintoys from the store. It's free. Enable the digital markets app. Digital Markets act option reboot and it will stop asking at least for some period of time. There is some I some worry I have that.

[Richard Campbell]

Eventually.

[Paul Thurot]

This is why I keep talking about the need for an app that I may write that monitors those things and says hey, hey, they just changed that. Remember the thing you were looking at? Yeah, they changed it. You know I do want to know that. But whatever, it's something you can just re enable. It will work. I would read the article, I would go through the article for all the stuff if you do not want to use Edge. The browser configuration thing where you set your own default. The DMA thing I just mentioned. If you don't want to have it, launch Edge when you click on a store. In widgets, there's a tool called Ms. Edge Direct that you can get that will prevent that stuff. It will use your browser. You can just use that. There are utilities. You can prevent Edge from running at startup. A lot of people probably don't know this, but Edge runs every time you boot windows unless you tell it not to, right? So you can disable that kind of thing. If you do live in EU or you do this Digital Markets act option, you could uninstall it. Let's get rid of it. So you can do that. But honestly, I think if you take the steps to go through all the configuration changes you have, some of which by the way, do not sync to new computers. Like you have to kind of do it again as you move on to other computers. Yeah, I mean, I think this to me is less dicey than using a local account. And I think for this audience, a lot of people like, I don't see the problem with using a local account. Okay, well, I don't think there's a problem using Edge, but you have to configure it correctly and then you'll be.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay with the defaults.

[Paul Thurot]

Do not. Yeah, do not accept the defaults.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it store its settings in the registry or is it a separate. You're really cool. Well, there were just simply a reg edit kind of thing.

[Paul Thurot]

You could. Yeah. Yes. So most features, probably you could write a script that would just do those things. I guess you could apply them even at every boot. But the problem with Edge, which is the problem with Office, which is the problem with Windows, is that each of them has a setting sync capability that is so woefully underutilized and under documented that I'll just make something up. Like, let's say there are 100 features in Edge, it's probably closer to a million, but whatever it is, and you configure five of them, half of those things will not sync. And there's no way to know. You just have to try it and see what happens. So it will bring forward some of your settings. And this is true of Office and Windows when you go to a different device, but not all of them. And this is the problem. It's a problem for me, especially because I use so many different computers. You know, it's like, you know, you get a. You almost need like a checklist to make sure you get them all because you know, that's how they get you. They'll. You'll miss one and whatever. But like I said, slightly uncomfortable about this. But the truth is I've heard from like, Richard uses reg. Right. Use Edge. So I've heard from enough smart people. I've heard from readers who are like, I use Edge. I mean, it's like I hear you on the complaints, but I mean, Chrome is as bad and way more people use Chrome.

[Richard Campbell]

Just use a lot of different browsers. Depends on.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, and by the way, I do too. I do too. But I have to say, like, I like it when something happens that's so right in Windows that you don't have to install Something else. So, for example, a clip champ is so good for my needs for video editing. I don't have to. I don't even have to think about it. Yeah, yeah. Like, there are some tools in Windows that are actually that good and.

[Richard Campbell]

Or at least good enough.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I would say. All right, there you go. This one is. Yeah. With the right configuration is not problematic. Without the right configuration. Extremely problematic. Like. No, it really is. Like, this is a nexus of the insertification that occurs in Windows 11. Like, it's a big chunk of it, which is why it's part of that DMA thing. Because the regulators in the EU looked at this thing and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Which is. Any reasonable person would say the same thing. You know, Windows 11, especially when they, they got rid of the default web browser interface in the original shipping version of Windows 11. Like, they've since brought it back, but it's, it's still half. Like, if you say, I want this as my default browser, it will change three or four protocols and file types over to that new browser, but it doesn't change everything over and it doesn't do anything about those deep OS links like from search or widgets. So there are tools that help us get around that. And so yeah. Leo asked, well, this is a rich thing. Yeah. Wintoys and the Ms. Edge.

[Richard Campbell]

There'S a bunch of configuration settings in app data that are just. They're hitting the ones that are.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's. That's how they do those things.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

There's also programmatic stuff in Windows 11 that's. Will help with AI later on where you can programmatically change settings for things from an app. And that's actually really cool. Now, I don't know where Edge is in that world. I'm not sure how many or if any features are like that. But you could write a utility just for Edge that, well, people have. Right. That, you know, give you a. I guess a list of, you know, I don't want, you know, like, they could be like a privacy section. Just turn everything off so I don't get tracked and whatever. It's possible. I don't. It's. I feel like I'm qualifying this a little too much. I. Everyone listening to the show is smart enough to do this and do it right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I would be nervous about my wife using Edge without, you know, meaning a normal person. I mean, like my brother or, you know, whoever. Like some person that's just not technical. But it's smart. But maybe doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes here? And they use dark patterns. The language suggests that this is the right thing for you to do, and it is. If you're at Microsoft, if you go.

[Richard Campbell]

To the EFF site for the eval, you'll get there.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Look at what it looks like on, like a default install of Edge. It's ugly. It doesn't quite laugh out loud, but it's like, ooh, oh, this is not good. It's like you were not protected at all. This, this thing is tracking you internally. Like, what, you know, what are you doing? It's wide open. Like if Microsoft is, you know. Well, Google does the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It makes money.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sorry. I have one. I think I had one little addition. Yeah. Just real quick, nostalgia wise. Amiga Forever and C64 Forever, these software packages that have all the emulators for all those devices and built in games and apps and the whole thing, it's frankly, it's kind of amazing. The latest versions have just come out. They're reasonably. If you love this kind of stuff, if you're nostalgic for this, definitely take a look at these things. They're kind of moving it toward, like the mobile world where they're starting to do touch controls and stuff. So if you're using it on a device that has touch, you can interact with these screens and stuff from the 1980s or whatever with your fingers, which is crazy. But I do have a deep, deep affiliation with the Amiga especially. But the Commodore 64 is my first. I'm going to call it Real Computer.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought of you when I saw this story. I thought, oh, yeah, Paul B. I still.

[Paul Thurot]

There's still a part of me, it's like, oh, can I run into Amiga now? You know, or some Linux thing that looked like Amiga. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Like running donkey, Dutch bass.

[Richard Campbell]

Donkey. Who does that?

[Leo Laporte]

Always wins.

[Paul Thurot]

I might go play a little donkey duck ass after the show, but I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, all right. Good job. Paul Thurat. You are in the middle of the back of the book.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And don't let it slam you on the keister on the way out, as they say. But we're. We're going to get to Whiskey and More in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We're so glad you are. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway now through July 15th. Stock up on all your favorite personal care brands and earn four times points to use on later purchases for discounts on groceries or gas. Shop in store or online for items like Pantene Shampoo, Old Spice, Total Body Deodorant, Tampax Pearl Venus Razors, Head and Shoulder Shampoo, Olay Body Wash and Pantene conditioner and earn four times points. Hurry before these deals are gone. Offer ends July 15th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Paul Thurot]

Every business has an ambition. PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with business loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. And your customers can pay all the.

[Leo Laporte]

Ways they want with PayPal, Venmo pay later and all major cards so you.

[Paul Thurot]

Can focus on scaling up when it's time to get growing.

[Leo Laporte]

There's one platform for all business PayPal.

[Paul Thurot]

Open grow today at paypalopen.com loan subject to approval in available locations.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Richard, you're on Run as Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, brought back Louisa Freeze for this week. She writes an epic blog. It's absolutely worth your reading if you care about power apps and that whole space. She's, she's got a little punk streak to her. She's very saucy in her writing and one of the ones posts that she wrote, I just pinged her and said we need to make this a show. And it was about growing power apps up, like making them into real software. Now power apps is this tool inside of the the Azure Wonderland that makes it easy for, for what they call makers or just, you know, not domain experts to do automation and to ultimately can build some pretty cool apps. The problem is that they do. They are a domain experts so they're not programmers, so they focus. This is a very low code or no code situation you're working in. It makes for versatile software. It'll work on a phone, work on a tablet, work on a PC, can tie back to SharePoint data and other state data sources, that kind of thing. And that's fine for you, but as soon as your co workers are using it or as soon as another team wants it to take it on, there's some trouble. And this is where the administrators kind of have to jump in with some governance and so Luisa sort of runs down this okay, what do you got to do to actually turn this into an app that has a proper set of requirements and some documentation and a testing workflow and a, a deployment workflow and the security context that correctly that kind of stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's Just.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, this is the checklist to go down to be. To take a piece of software and take it on. And just to, you know, we also talked about this from a celebratory point of view. It's like, congratulations, you wrote a piece of software with these tools that is now important to the organization and now it needs to be cared for properly. So there you go, the key to the whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Great conversation with Luis as usual. She's.

[Paul Thurot]

She's a ton of fun to chat with.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure, there are other podcasts about Microsoft you could listen to, but ask yourself this, baby. How many have the brown liquor segment presented by Sir Richard Campbell. That's right. There's only one Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

This has become a thing, hasn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. Thank you, Joe.

[Richard Campbell]

I popped down, it was July 4th recently, maybe you noticed. And it's fun for a Canadian to come down and experience the madness. It's July 4th, especially in a rural area, because.

[Leo Laporte]

Where did you go?

[Richard Campbell]

Sounds like I went to Snohomish.

[Leo Laporte]

Snohomish?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Snohomish is the county north of King county where Seattle and Redmond and all those places are and largely a rural area. And I was staying with a friend and who's got. Who's got a property amongst all the hobby, even horse farms. And we're in the kind of area where they make their own fireworks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So the explosions are pretty much continuous for that day. Go till the wee hours of the morning. They literally had to sedate their dog. It was that. That distressing and it was an opportunity to drink some bourbon. And in fact I did. And this is a. I was introduced to the Bolster Road Maple rye whiskey which is made by JP Trodden, which is based in Snohomish. It's one of the new style distilleries. Was using the new tax code. A fellow by the name of Mark Neesham who comes from the restaurant biz decided he was ready for a new career in the early 2000s and set up JP Trodden in Woodinville back in 2010. He named it for his grandfather, JP Trodden, who was in the private mail delivery business back in the day there. And in fact these still exist today. The U.S. postal Service had routes that you could contract out typically these rural postal routes. And JP Trodden had the. What they call the star route. Star route is the general term for these rural postal routes where they have stars instead of the zip code and an area known as Okanagan Hills. Which is actually central northern Washington crossing into British Columbia. And his grandfather worked in the 30s during Prohibition and was known on occasion to be over on the wet side as they said. And then came back with, you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn'T have prohibition in Canada?

[Paul Thurot]

Nope.

[Richard Campbell]

Only the Americans are crazy enough to do that. That's why I, you know, just down the road from me is Smugglers Cove. Right. And all these sorts of things.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a short smuggle.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And so yeah, he's apparently his grandfather. I don't know how much of the story is actually apocryphal. It's a good one. This is a very well branded whiskey if you had a very Washington state vibe to it. Today those star routes are now known as highway contract routes. And interesting enough, very likely the road to J.P. trodden went down was what then now called the 97 Highway. It's called the 97 highway both in Washington state and in British Columbia just to make it contiguous. And it does run through the wine region we call the Okanagan.

[Leo Laporte]

Okanagan.

[Richard Campbell]

Just a few, you know, some evidence of the nature of the JP Trodden Distillery. So Mark sets up this thing in 2010. He does not make any vodka or gin. He decides to only make bourbon. So clearly he had money because it takes a few years before you actually get a bourbon. So he was able, he didn't need. He was basically working by himself for several years. But he did stick strictly with Washington products. So he bought corn and wed winter wheat from a particular farm in Quincy, Washington. And the MASH bill is a 70, 30 split of corn and winter wheat. It is a very slow maturation, so long steeping period before they do the full mash. A seven day long ferment. And he got an American still rather than going to the Scots. He had it built in Oregon. And I met that still because we went to the distillery and it is a lambic still. It is a large lambic still. The lamb is still the sort of traditional like the Greeks had lambic still stills. This is the way stuff like Armagnac and thing is made. So Mark had the able to get a still made that he really liked in the slamic style. And he still runs it and it's the only still he has. So to make a bourbon he has to actually run it through twice which not that unusual just speaks to. They don't make a lot, they're just not that fast in production. And of course because it's bourbon and he ages it in American oak barrels so you know Nobody pays much attention to a one man band trying to make whiskey. But within five years, he wins double gold at the San Francisco World Spirits for a small batch, which is impressive. And at that point of course the sales just hockey stick upwards. He starts positioning his whiskey in a bunch of nice restaurants. Because he used to be in the restaurant business, he knows what he's doing and by 2020 needs a larger facility. So now he moves out of King Cunning county, which has very high taxes, into Snohomish, just to the north there in a little town called Maltby, right by the big flower wholesaler is where it was. It's in a very industrial area. He's still using the same stills, but he's got a lot more processing and storage area and also an awesome tasting room and you can take a tour. And they have a membership program, it's 400 bucks a year. But you get these special events, you get a certain number of free drinks. And my friend was there, was there. So we had, we tried everything. Of course you do. And he's, he's kind of gone. See if you recognize these names. So his base product, the one that won that small batch edition, which is a 45% alcohol, is now called the black label. And then he has a, that's a three year old product and he has a four year old product they now call the red label. And he also makes a four year product at Cast strength called the green label and then a six year called the blue label. And they, I like these bottles, they.

[Leo Laporte]

Look kind of old fashioned, very straightforward.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but the one we tried was the maple rye whiskey and it's different because it is only 50% of the small batch, the black label and 50% of a rye whiskey made for the purpose. And then he combines the two together and it spends a year in a maple syrup barrel. Which is bizarre, right? Because listen, I'm from Canada and Quebec has the maple syrup strategic reserve and they definitely store their, they store several million pounds that.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a strategic.

[Leo Laporte]

Strategic.

[Richard Campbell]

It is very strategic. They also had a huge theft, right. People stole millions of dollars of the maple syrup. But those are metal drums they store it in. So the idea of storing in wood is weird because maple syrup is almost entirely sugar, although admittedly it's like 67% sugar, which is almost completely bacterial hostile. But you have to be careful with syrup. If it can go bad, you can have bacterial growth and stuff on it. But typically, you know, the, the. This is sort of a hip thing with the chef crowd that they started aging bourbon in maple syrup barrels and vice versa. Aging maple syrup in bourbon barrels. And so this is what Mark got into with this bit of cloth flavoring. The real question here is, we know with barrel aging and getting the flavors out of the wood, it's mostly about the alcohol, the solvent aspect. How the heck does this work with syrup? And the answer is that they heat the barrel a bit when they're storing maple syrup in it to get more maple syrup into the wood and to pick up more wood flavors in maple syrup. So he takes these maple syrup barrels and he puts his bourbon in it for a while and they pull up a little bit of the flavors. And it's true. They can absolutely taste it. It's got a unique, slightly sweeter character, which you think you would have gotten from the corn, but it's got a real maple syrup flair to it. So a lovely whiskey. Very drinkable. Definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice color, too. So it's not a bourbon, though, because.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's nominally a bourbon because it's made in the bourbon style.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's not because of the change in aging. It's 70 still. Because the change in aging, it would not normally qualify. So that's why he's calling it a maple rye whiskey.

[Paul Thurot]

Hey, speaking of that, sorry, because this just came up last night. Go figure. I. This is probably shocking. I spend time in bars sometimes. Someone said that to qualify as a bourbon, it had to be made in Kentucky. Now I was like, I don't think that.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, that's the FDA regulations. Is anywhere in America.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You could make a bourbon in France.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but you can make a bourbon.

[Leo Laporte]

Style whiskey, even if it's a French word, you can't make it in France.

[Paul Thurot]

I think that you might. You probably have heard of this. It was called 1792. And it's. Well, the way I mean. Well, I think it was just. It's a bourbon, but it's. It is made in Kentucky, actually. But there's like a. What do you call it, Butter washed version, you know, that is surprisingly awesome. But.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, sometimes they. And sometimes when they play like that, they violate the rules. Right. There's been all kinds of tricks and to avoid violating the rules, but Angels, I mean, blew that up. Because when once, once Lincoln Henderson said, listen, we're going to age in sherry casks and you need to get over it because Lincoln Henderson is like one of the godfathers of American bourbon, they went, okay, we'll change the rules. But, you know, does it really mean, why is Jack Daniels Not a bourbon. It's called Tennessee Whiskey. Not because it's in Tennessee, but because they do a charcoal, a maple charcoal filtration step, which is against the rules. That's the, that's the only.

[Leo Laporte]

Who makes those rules? The Bourbon Associates of America or Big Bourbon Leo. Big Bourbon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, you're not wrong. Typically, you know, you go to the fda. This is true of all kinds of products. You go to the government regulators and say, hey, we want a standard. Because other people are calling their stuff the same name as our stuff and their stuff is awful. So this is, we talked about this when we were talking about Japanese whiskey because it's only been in the past 15 so years that the Japanese have established a standard. And it's because when there was only Nikkei and Yamazaki, everything was fine. But now that there's another 30 something distilleries in Japan, they decided they need a standard and it tends to be written by the incumbents.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because they kind of know what they're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

We know what bourbon is because we make it.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. And so, and, but in the joke, of course, is that even the great bourbon makers are saying our rules are too strict and we should tinker with it. So that's fine. You know, they, the Scots do the same thing with barley only, but any kind of barrel.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They go all over the map with barrels. The Irish go put whatever you want in. Like they're, they're groovy. Just make it in Ireland. And the same thing's happening here with bourbon. So JP Trotten does definitely make a bourbon. They follow the traditional rules for their black label and the other color labels. Very much like Green Spot or very much like Johnny Walker. They use Johnny Walker, which is funny. You know, the most expensive version is called blue, but this maple is off the side of that a little bit. At 45. You know, it's interesting, it couldn't get any details on exactly where he's getting his rye from. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from Alberta. Alberta Distillery. So she talked about last week. Just because they're the guys who make 100 rise. Yeah, 60 bucks a bottle. It is only sold directly. There's relatively few stores carry. Can't find a total wine or anything like that. They will do. Do delivery, but only to certain states that allow it. That includes Arizona and California, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon.

[Paul Thurot]

Does not include Pennsylvania.

[Richard Campbell]

No, not include Pennsylvania. And in Montana, only in Missoula for some reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's Very funny. Yeah. And oddly enough, going to be in Missoula in August. So there you go.

[Paul Thurot]

That's great.

[Richard Campbell]

But the, the other thing is after they make the bourbon with, with those barrel. With those whiskey, those syrup barrels, they refill it with syrup and they sell that syrup.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, bourbon, maple syrup. Now we're talking.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's like back and forth, barrels being used everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Why waste a good.

[Paul Thurot]

Like a low buzz at breakfast?

[Richard Campbell]

They do make a note on the maple syrup to say there is no alcohol in this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen bourbon aged maple syrup. I've seen all kinds of interesting maple syrup.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. People are playing around. Oddly enough, I noticed that the latest whiskey weekly that's gone up on the, on the playlist is the one with the Hellier's Road harmony number three, which was the barrel that was. That made whiskey, then made beer, then went back and made whiskey again like this. Moving barrels around in different markets is becoming a popular thing just to, to experiment, to try different approaches. And it's the same thing happening here and so legit. This was a nice whiskey for a fair price. You know, JD is still 20 bucks and you can't go far wrong. But this is a much more boutique, small production kind of live cool bottle. Yeah, yeah. And you're enjoyable.

[Leo Laporte]

I suppose it's not the case that boutique is always better than big, but I just like supporting the little guys, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well. And again, this is all that new tax rules making it more feasible. Like one of the things that Margaret is going to be up against and his son's work in there now is as demand goes up and they start producing more, they're going to start bumping into excise taxes and things like that. And I think there's going to be a threshold where it's like, it's fine when you're making about 100,000 liters a year, but if you want to go over that, suddenly you need to make a million liters a year. Like you've got to suddenly go big.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, this is a Sam Adams problem.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, he's also big on. He's very particular about his barrel selections for given batches. And most of these are. Batches are like three or four barrels. So he's only making a thousand l at a go.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Tiny little batch.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But you know, he's got. He's made whiskey that you can drink neat. And that's an achievement for something that's only existed for 15 years and nominally in this current location for, for Only five. Like he's pulled it off. Well done. Impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Lovely. Well, I'll tell you what. We've just done the whiskey segment. You know what that means. It's time to go. It's time to go drink some whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the bottle I had did not make it out of July 4th, which happens.

[Leo Laporte]

So do not handle fireworks and whiskey at the same time.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I did not touch any fireworks that whole day. I was not qualified to supervise.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a designated exploder.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's probably the best thing. And it's the. It's the teen. You know that household has teenage or 20 something. They're all very keen and they can. Those fingers will regrow.

[Paul Thurot]

I hope they were. Oh boy. Maybe wear a chain mail glove, blow things up.

[Richard Campbell]

And it was just all mortars all the time. Like it sounded like a war zone. Just boom, boom, boom. And all the neighbors were like just the sheer number of explosions per minute. It was a stock.

[Leo Laporte]

We had a few here in Petaluma where it is illegal. But that doesn't stop anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Still happens.

[Paul Thurot]

Actually.

[Richard Campbell]

I would say it's the most American thing ever. But I've been to an NFL football game and the opening of an NFL football game is the most American jets flying over.

[Paul Thurot]

I can tell you you're very close to what is the most American thing ever, which is the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey where on one side isn't our state liquor store and fireworks and on the other side is their pot store.

[Leo Laporte]

You catch a choice, one trip and you're good.

[Richard Campbell]

You got it all out.

[Paul Thurot]

You're good.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find the Runasradio podcast also.net Rocks with Carl Franklin and he joins us every week to do this and we're so glad he does. Paul Thurot and I have been doing this show for some years now. Paul [e-mail] even when he's in Mexico. He'[e-mail] Become a Premium Member if you want to get that edge. I think that's a really nice piece you wrote about how to make edge be clean. And that's a premium article so make.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure you less terrible public service friend. Surely.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it makes a lot of sense. Same thing on. On the Mac. You might as well use Safari. It's there. It's the. It's the browser you got right.

[Paul Thurot]

Anyway with the army you have.

[Leo Laporte]

His books [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. And both Paul and Richard and I convene every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. That would be 1800 UTC. To do this show, you don't have to watch it live, but I wanted to mention that you can if you are in the club. You can watch in the club, Twit Discord and chat along with us there. But the public can also watch live on seven other channels, including YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick.com.

[Paul Thurot]

I'M gonna go take a look at Kik.com. you've said that enough.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it. Because they sponsor a Formula one team, so I. I'm familiar with Kik.

[Paul Thurot]

In fact, I wasn't convinced until this moment that this was real. But there it is.

[Leo Laporte]

They got a podium last Sunday, so that was pretty exciting. Nico Hulkenberg's first after 230 some races. How horrible is. Would that be to be? You know, admittedly you're one of the best drivers in the world because you're racing in Formula One, but you've never gotten. You've never placed right. Yeah, and it's not his fault. He's never had great cars.

[Richard Campbell]

And so, you know, you need that perfect combination. Right. It's kind of impossible.

[Leo Laporte]

Great driver, great car.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I don't know how I got into that. Oh, that's Kick. Yeah. Yeah, that's why.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to watch us live. Of course, that's only for the hardcore winners and dozers. All the rest of you can download a copy of the show from Twitter TV WW. There's a link there to a YouTube channel dedicated to the video from the show. That's a good way to share a clip with somebody who might be interested and help spread the word about Windows Weekly. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast client. Probably the easiest thing to do. That way you get it automatically the minute it's available. There's an audio version of and a video version. Pick the format you want, or both. And if that client happens to offer reviews, would you please leave us a good review and tell the world about Windows Weekly? Helps us quite a bit. Thank you everybody for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. We appreciate your support and we will see you all right back here next Wednesday for Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye bye, Sam.