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Windows Weekly 989: Deer Hate MSDN
02:41:45
Point-in-Time Restore Arrives for Windows 11
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. So are you. We're glad you're here. There's lots to talk about. It is a weekday or week D. Oh, it's a weekday. I see I got that wrong. With a preview of July's patch Tuesday as well. Cory Doctorow's got a new book out. Paul doesn't like one of the terms he uses, and it is a big Xbox segment, including a look at the cost of the Steam machine. Will you buy it? Find out now next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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B
This is twit.
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A
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode989, recorded Wednesday, June 24, 2026. Dear Hate MSDN, I don't know what's happening exactly. It's time for Windows Weekly. That's what's happening. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell's here. The whole cast has assembled, which means it's time to talk Microsoft. Hello, Paul.
- [01:09]
B
Hello, Leon.
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A
In beautiful Makunjee, Pennsylvania. And it looks like Richard Campbell is, for the moment, back in beautiful Mad Park, British Columbia.
- [01:19]
C
Hello, Richard. Indeed. And there's a slight haze on the sky.
- [01:23]
A
Oh, what a beautiful day.
- [01:24]
C
Bit of a forest fire nearby. Else in Ireland.
- [01:28]
A
So is there excitement over the impending Canada, Switzerland?
- [01:32]
C
Very much so, yes. Because, you know, Canada actually winning their very first World cup game ever. It's kind of a big deal, so.
- [01:40]
B
And if they.
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A
If they even tie, they go on to the knockout.
- [01:43]
C
And they go on to the knockout.
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A
Congratulations.
- [01:45]
C
Everybody's excited.
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A
Yeah. Is that game during our show?
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C
Yes, I'm sorry. 45 minutes. I'm gonna be fine.
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A
Oh, it's 45. Oh, you know what? You could tune it in in a few hours. It'll still be going.
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C
You'll be good because those games never end.
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A
It just feels like that. Actually, they're only 90 minutes. Technically.
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C
Technically,
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A
let's. Let's get into the meat of the matter, as they say. We were talking earlier about strong T. Yorkshire Gold. This is weak D. How about that for a segue there?
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B
It was pretty good. I mean, you had to set it up because most people were not privy to the previous time I missed T comment.
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A
It is week D, though. No, wait a minute. Is it June 24th?
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B
Is this Leo?
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A
I guess it is. So what does that mean, Paulie?
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B
I had to look it up. Yeah, it is. What does it mean?
- [02:40]
C
Yes.
- [02:40]
B
So unless we have scheduling problems, weekday is the Tuesday. Weekday is when we get the preview update. That is a preview of the next month's Patch Tuesday update. Right. And you know, this is. This is a good one in the sense that I wouldn't say there are any major changes, but there are some nice changes or some nice additions, maybe is the way to say it. One is a feature called Point in Time Restore that Microsoft actually has started documenting separately. So this is part of the Windows Resiliency initiative that they announced about a year and a half ago at Ignite. And it is a modern replacement for System Restore, which a lot of people watching and listening probably remember. It's still in Windows actually, if you can go find it. But this is a modern, better version. This is a weird ad for Brad's book in the middle of my article, and I don't know why. Anyhow, Brad, okay, so there's that. So that's cool for individuals. If you're on Home or Pro, Windows 11 Home or Pro, there's not much you can do to configure this thing. It's automatically on by default. You can turn it off. You can control the amount of storage it uses. But honestly, it manages that automatically. There's almost no reason to do. Only holds 72 hours worth of restore points. One of them, some of the. Well, there are a bunch of improvements, like I said, but one of the key ones is that it actually includes your user files now, which was not the case with System Restore. And you think about the way that things are in kind of the modern world. A lot of people are going to be doing Cloud sync, right. With OneDrive or some other service. There are two inconveniences. One is that you cannot launch this from within Windows. You can get into Settings and see the couple of settings. You can turn it on and off and you can change the storage it uses. But, you know, administrators and managed environments have more options, you know, for configuring, but you can only restore as of right now. I think this is going to change eventually. But. Right. You have to boot into the Windows Recovery environment to do or restore. There's a bunch of different ways to do that, but the, you know, in Settings you go, you know, system recovery. I think it's like advanced or something. You know, advanced, whatever. Advanced. Reboot the computer and it gives you a set of options on that blue screen that still has tiles for some reason because some things never get updated.
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C
Windows 8 is still out there and it misses you terribly.
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B
Yeah, exactly. Just in case. Yeah, it's like lurking around the corner like a serial killer.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So anyway, you go into troubleshooting. Yeah, there's a right. We'll be full screen eventually, trust me. There is now a point in re, a point in time restore option. You can choose the option from there. But the trick, the other inconvenience is you have to type in a. I think it's, I guess a 48 digit BitLocker recovery code.
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C
Yikes.
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B
You know, assuming that a recovery key, rather assuming that you've encrypted your disk, which. Chris.
- [05:39]
C
Well, I do, I did and I've got it stored on the drive I can't log into.
- [05:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's not going to help for most consumers. It's going to be up in OneDrive. If you did it yourself as a power user, maybe you did like a local account. You saved it, however you saved it.
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C
So I stashed it in Bitwarden and so I got it pulled up on my phone.
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B
Yeah, but you want to have it on some other device next to you or print it out or however you do it, because you can't copy and paste into the recovery environment.
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C
48 characters is so much fun. Yes.
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B
It's the only thing it's got going for it is it's not alphanumeric, it's just numeric, but still it's like 48 characters, you know, it takes a while anyway, it's pretty quick as a process. Like I said, there's no configuration. It's basically. It's once every 24 hours, only do up to 72 hours of restore point. So three days or whatever that is.
- [06:31]
C
And I mean, I wouldn't mind if his total is 72 hours, but I could space it out. So it's like 20 for those hours are a month ago and 24 of those hours is two weeks ago. And 24 hours is like the past 24 hours.
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B
Right.
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C
That would actually be useful. So if I don't detect something bad for three days.
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B
If you're in a managed environment, you can change all that. You can't as an individual. I feel like this is going to change. I also feel like we're going to see this get into Windows proper, like you do reset, you start it there and then it reboots and does the thing. So.
- [07:05]
C
But who doesn't need to hop back to an older build just because, hey, I missed this bit of corruption and I've been ignoring it for a week and you're telling me you've backed up over everything?
- [07:17]
B
Right, well, this is also one of several recovery tools in Windows 11 now. Right. And two of them and then soon, three of them are actually brand new. Right. For the past year. What's the other one? A Quick Machine Recovery is now part of Windows 11, by the way, that also shipped in a slightly different kind of weird state originally. And now it makes more sense. Meaning in that case, if it was actually triggering a reboot because something was wrong with the driver, it would look for a fix, and then if it didn't find it, it would reboot and look for a fix. It would reboot and look for a fix and it would reboot. It would just keep going. And it's like, what? So not only does it once and then it checks every. Whatever the time frame is. And then of course, the other one is administrative protection, which is not there yet. They've taken that out or had taken it out and it's coming back. But, you know, this is, this is kind of. This is some interesting stuff. There are options to kind of fix problems with Windows that don't require you to reset the PC. You know, I mean, I'm the way I am and it's probably just my age. I mean, I'm just going to reset the PC all the time. I just don't care. But you can try to fix problems using Windows Update. There's a new tool for that. There's this thing, there's the Quick Machine Recovery, which is an automatic recovery feature. So it's got, you know, I mean, honestly, that's, you know, for all the, the kind of Surface level nonsense that's in Windows 11, like, there's some pretty good stuff in here now from this perspective. So that's cool. Tied. The other two big ones are among those things that Microsoft announced as part of that pain points thing they've been working on this year. So the new version of Windows Update, we can now pause updates for 35 days using a calendar control, but then repos them as often as you want, pretty much forever.
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C
It just means every 30 days you gotta reset the counter for another 30 days.
- [08:57]
B
Yeah, I mean, if you're crazy enough to be bothered by this, you're gonna want to do this. So, like, whatever. I mean, this is not something that bothers me, but, you know. Okay. And then the other one, of course, is the widgets thing, which is actually dramatically better, but I'm not sure how dramatic or better it's gonna be. Excuse me. For existing users. Right. So what I mean by that is my advice for widgets has been you install Windows 11, you get in there and the way it's configured by default, is if you mouse over the icon on the taskbar, the widgets thing comes up, which, you know, I'm moving the mouse thing around like a spaz all the time anyway. So like I do that by mistake. I hate it. So I was turning that off and then it displays a weather forecast, but it will display notifications of different kinds. So there are notifications tied to the widgets you have in there. There's also notifications tied to the news. The Microsoft Discovery feed or Microsoft Start, whatever they call that thing, whatever the Microsoft feed is. And I turn those off. Right? But sometime, I don't know, a year, year and a half ago, they also gave you. Actually, I'm sure this is true anymore. I feel like we've gone back and forth on this. But at some point Microsoft has also provided a way to turn off the feed. Right. You could just not have a feed. I don't remember the time frame on that one. But the default configuration for this thing is now going to be what I just described. It's the thing I do on every computer manually, but now will be the default. You won't do it on mouseover, you have to click it. You won't see the feed, you'll just see your widgets. And there aren't any notifications for the most part. Every once in a while it can actually throw up a small notification, but not like it does now. It's not, you know, super like communicative about whatever it's a windy out or whatever, you know, there's some stock price thing going on, whatever it is. The reason I'm not sure if this is going to make a difference for most people is that I don't know that this. I don't think they're going to revert a configuration to this on an existing install. Right. So if you get this update and you get the widget update, I think it's just going to be the way it was for you. Like you still have to go in and change those things if you, if you bought, if they bother you, if you do a new install or do a reset, you'll probably get the, the new widgets experience. So I just, I've been just kind of testing this among other things. It's not really clear, but I just, based on the way things work, I can't imagine they're going to, you know, force that on people. Maybe have configured it however they want it. Right. They're not going to change that. And there's a bunch of other stuff that, you know, this is not the new taskbar, but there are some taskbar fixes around some of the visuals with badges that appear over icons. There's that right click setting we talked about previously on Touchpads because it was in a release preview. Improvements to Bluetooth voice access, voice typing, zoom in, magnifier, etc etc. So there's stuff. But sorry, my. My father is calling me so every device I own is spazzing out. Okay, yeah, so that's that. So this is coming to this update is available if you have 24H2 and 25H2. It's not on 26H1 and I don't think there is a 26H1 preview update yet. So that suggests maybe we'll get one of those soon. We're two weeks away from patch Tuesday, right. So it's probably going to happen some point. It's possible and probable that 26H1 is like a month behind still out in the public release. So we'll see what happens. But that's where that is now. Okay, just. I'm going to mention this here. I don't want to take up back of the book time for this again, but you know, I'm updating the Windows 11 field guide and I want to make this as short as possible because I spent approximately 11 months figuring this out. But I originally wanted to do a different edition of the book for 25H2 and I wanted to make the book shorter. So I spent a lot of time working on formats and layouts to make things shorter and writing parts of it, and it just never came together. So I just started updating the existing book and I've kind of pushed that off to 26H2, the next release. Right. And now I'm like, why didn't I do this last year? Because now this book, I've. I'm consolidating chapters, I'm doing screenshots differently. I'm simplifying the layout. It's not the new layout I want to do, but it's already significantly shorter than it was. Right. It used to be over 12. I think it was like 1200 pages long. It's just under. It's like 990 pages now. It's much smaller on disk. And that will keep happening because I have a set of chapters I'm going to update very soon, including a consolidated chapter, but help in recovery that will include that tool I just talked about, which will be one chapter, not, I don't know, five or six chapters or whatever it was before. So I'm Kind of doing that throughout the book and it's. It's nice. Yeah, it's really nice. It's mostly nice for me because I realize no one's ever going to read any of the things I'm doing. But it's just so, it's just so great to get this done. I, I'm more excited about it than I should be but.
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C
So you might get it down to a page count. They actually fit in a binding.
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B
Yeah, maybe. And then. Well, I mean, you know, like, like send a Kindle. Works like that's there. I can't like host the files on my site for my like for premium guys. This is the one book I have to put somewhere else because this just the files just too big.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And I'm kind of hoping I can get it down for that reason, you know, but just to make it more manageable. It's.
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A
You know, I still have the binders from the MSDN. I think there's 10 or 15.
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B
Yes, that would do it.
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A
I could just put it in there. That would probably.
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B
Yeah, we definitely need like one of those solid three ring binders that has like a, like a spin spine that's like four inches thick. You know, it's big.
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A
A whole seven foot shelf of msdn.
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B
Oh yeah. I used to love that back in the day. All the ADHD going to. Getting those discs every, whatever a month and then replacing them in the sleeves is like the greatest activity from my broken brain that I can possibly imagine.
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C
A month. I just sit down and sort discs. I love.
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A
It has ruined some things.
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C
It's ruined a lot of times worth of expired DVDs. It's like what do I do with these?
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A
Do you shred them? I think you're supposed to shred them.
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B
I would never shred a disc like that. I have shredded. I did get an optical disk shredder for like my, you know, the data disks. Because at one time you were backing up on these things. Right.
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A
I think the Microsoft license, you know, encourages you to destroy them after use because they don't want you to bring it to.
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B
You know. You know what? I'm actually sure it does, but I don't, it's. I don't know. It was a different era.
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A
What happened to them?
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B
We didn't, we weren't, we didn't care about recycling in the 2000s or whatever. I mean we did, but I don't know.
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C
Dask aol. That was a lot of discs.
- [15:28]
A
Yeah, that's when we had lots of plastic.
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B
That's Right. That was before it was all in the ocean. I feel like they would make good, you know, coffee and tea mug coasters. Right.
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C
There you go.
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A
Anyway, so I'll use it for my Christmas tree actually. It's very.
- [15:43]
B
Excuse me. Oh, there you go. That's nice.
- [15:44]
C
Too sprinkly. I know folks who put them out on their lawns as to keep the crows off because they get with the deer.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Deer hate msdn. They are absolutely.
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B
They're immortal enemies. Yeah. So there was one big. Well, one set of insider releases. Right. They don't do these one at a time anymore. So I think last week we had the record that was seven release builds. This week or this past week it was five. There's nothing really notable in any of these but the updates. Well, with one exception, just notable from a news perspective. Beta 25H2 minor improvements like reliability, type improvements, start taskbar settings, etc. Experimental, which is 24 and 25H2. We're going to talk about that one in a second. But some of those same changes and then, you know, minor changes to some of the sub. The secondary Windows and File Explorer that make them work better in dark mode or work at all in dark mode, I guess. The 26H1 beta. Same kinds of things as reliability, small things. And then experimental 26h1 and I who and then. I'm sorry, an experimental future blue.
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A
Who cares?
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B
You can't take. None of this makes any sense. It doesn't make sense to me reading it. It won't make sense to you hearing it. It's just ridiculous.
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A
But.
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B
But the one thing they did say which raises some interesting questions is that I want to say it the way they say it because it's still not completely clear. Because Microsoft, you got to stick with what you do best, which is communicate poorly in this case. Where is this Devices that are enrolled in the experimental channel. Now, in Microsoft's new scheme, there are two main channels, Beta and experimental. Experimental used to be dev, but there's also release preview and each of those channels actually has at least two sub channels. So they don't actually address this. But if you know what experimental is, you know that there's 24 and 25 H2. I don't think we wrote about this today, but I believe Microsoft is this month starting to. People always write this like it's dramatic, you know, like force upgrade computers to 25H2, but that's ahead of 24H2 exiting support in October. Right, Right. So these systems are the Same. They're not. They don't just look the same, they don't just have features. They're literally the same. It's just a build string number. So they are doing that now. But anyway, they don't address that in the post. But if you have a computer in running Windows 11, 24 or 25H2 and you put it in experimental, this is going to shift over to 26H2 testing soon. In fact, it technically already did if you installed the latest build because it just changes the name, you know, the version name or whatever in the about box, in winver or however you're doing it. They also said that this thing is built on the same code base as 2425H2. Right. Which is nice because that means this will be an enablement package. Install would be super simple, fast. It was left to reboot, but it'll be quick. The bit they did not say was, well, what about the people on 26H1? Right, right. 26H1 technically is only for Windows 11 on ARM PCs that ship new with Snapdragon X2 based hardware.
- [19:14]
C
Okay. Right. So where does the X1 folks end up? Are they Iran?
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B
The X1 folks, unless they put their computer in the Insider program, which you know that maybe is a contorted way to answer your question, they will get 26H2, right? Yep.
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C
Okay, so it's only the X2 folks.
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B
It's only X2. Right. Literally only X2. Now there could be. Well, we'll see. So you know, one of the things we've speculated about this is whether this is going to become Windows 12. Right. Because it could just be called Windows 11 something Windows 11 version. Right, right. Someone I do a weekly thing called Ask Paul on Friday. It's kind of a write in, you know, question answer thing. And someone asked me like what's going on with Windows 12? And it caused me to go back and look what I had written about this. And there was a period of time, and it was early 2023. Microsoft was at first rumored to be bringing out this AI stuff that was going to come to Bing, I think was the first rumor. In February they announced that and there were rumors that Microsoft they didn't talk about at the time, but they talked about AI, which became Copilot in Bing and in Edge. Right. And my initial write up about the Windows angle was like, it's interesting they haven't talked about Windows. Satya Nadella gave some interview around this time separate from that event where he talked about bringing AI, which again at that time, they were not calling copilot to all of Microsoft's products, you know, and the initial thought there was, well, this must mean like, Microsoft 365, right? Which, of course it did. Like, they. In March, I think, they announced Microsoft
- [21:00]
C
365 or Windows 365.
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B
Microsoft 365. In other words, like them bringing the AI, like, when you think about AI capabilities across Microsoft's, you know, platforms, you're like, well, they're talking like Microsoft 365 to me was the, the most obvious initial, you know, kind of thought.
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C
But we were saying that because we figured the Windows guys couldn't get their act together. That was pre.
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B
Yeah, yeah. But then there were these things. Remember, you know, Panos. Panay. There were two events. He stood on stage with Lisa Yu from Lisa Liu. Lisa Lu. Is that her name? From amd. Lisa. Whatever her name is.
- [21:33]
A
Sue.
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B
Sue. Thank you. And he talked very vaguely about how everything AI was going to change everything, you know, And I was like, okay, so he's AIs coming to Windows, obviously. And then there was that weird event where he went to build. We talked about this last week, I think, and just completely blew it because they took away his keynote.
- [21:51]
C
Got hijacked.
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B
Yeah. His big announcement was gone. He had nothing to talk about. He really fumbled around and then put
- [21:58]
C
his people in front and go somewhere else. He went out into the audience, people
- [22:03]
B
like the stage, you know.
- [22:05]
C
Yeah.
- [22:05]
B
I don't know. But Stephen Batish, like, it did a drive by, literally. I mean, on the way to the airport, stop by Build and talk for 15 minutes about AI and how we're going to have this stuff in apps. And it was awesome. You know, it was like, still to this day, I think, the greatest presentation I've ever seen in this area. And, you know, Qualcomm announced that they had solved the problems with ARM chips, you know, for Windows. But this was still six months away before they actually announced those chips. And then a year before they announced the computers. Right. So it was like, yeah, maybe we'll see. All this stuff was happening, you know. So at that time, I was thinking, well, this must be. This will be Windows 12, right? This AI and Windows thing. This is going to be the break, you know, has to be. But it wasn't right, because history shows us that Microsoft was preparing 23H2 at the time. The, the, the release that set the stage for everything we're experiencing now, where one month before that thing would have shipped in October, they released the final monthly Update for the previous, well, not really, but the final one before the new release in September, I guess. And they just. Every feature but one from 23H2 was just splashed out to the whole world in a monthly cumulative update. And this was Microsoft forcing us to get that Copilot app, right? And I left out some of the history there, but they announced Microsoft 365 copilot, I think in March they announced the Copilot naming thing. At some point they announced that Copilot would be coming to Windows at build that year. Right. And then they announced, well, then they released this stuff out in the world and they kept moving the icon around, the app kept changing. Remember we used to freak out about this.
- [23:45]
C
Where is it now?
- [23:46]
B
Yeah, you know, it's as confusing now as it was then actually. But So I, when 23H2 didn't really kind of happen the way we were thinking, and then it wasn't Windows 12, I was like. And we knew there was going to be local AI, but we didn't know how good it was going to be. It seemed like, well, maybe that will be Windows 12. But that became Copilot Plus PC, right? That was like the next time they could have just gone with the brand, but didn't. Copilot PC is really just a set of features that can run on home or Pro. And you know, if you have that hardware, you get additional features and apps like, you know, paint and photos and Notepad and you know, the snipping tool. You get like new apps, you know, things like Click to Do and Recall, which everyone still loves so much. And then that year kind of went by, you know, like 24H2 happened. There was the weird thing where like Copilot plus PC guys got the. Or Snapdragon got 24H2 early, right? It shipped in June, like an early version. They kept updating, it shipped to the rest of the world in October. They had the ARM and sorry, AMD and Intel came on board with their own versions of Copilot plus PC chipsets, et cetera, et cetera. But this whole time it's like, well, okay, but what about windows, like Windows 12? When's this going to happen? The thing is, since then we have this high end spec for Copilot PC which I think is the right spec for any PC. But we have a component crisis and now we have low end chipsets from intel and ARM from Qualcomm now and low memory sets. Right. And we're going to talk about that in a moment. And so computers are now are starting to ship again with 8 gigabytes of RAM. They're not copilot plus PCs. They don't get that local thing. But we just went through a build where they. And I don't know if it was last week, the week before, but I've kind of talked through this notion that hybrid AI, which as a term makes immediate sense if you know anything about this stuff. Because you're like, yes, it's going to be some combination of local and cloud based AI. I actually think it's way more. Not nuanced, but I think there's way more to it than just that. But that's a simple way to say it. And it will have to orchestrate between these things. The agent stuff is actually happening. I mean, they talked about it last year, they shipped it sort of in Windows fairly recently. You don't really see it doing anything yet. But this is kind of the year for that. And now I'm thinking, well, I wonder if this is going to be the, you know, you know, does Copilot Plus PC transition into what I think of as Windows 12? Does someone on an X2 based computer today who has 26H1, do they just get some Copilot Plus PC version of 26H2 or is that Windows 12? We don't know. They never said like we're doing this. I do look at time frames. I mean, Windows 10 came out in July 2015. Windows 11 was announced in June 2021, but released in October that year. So that's about what, six years? Right. We are now five years from that. So a six years, ish. You know, release of Windows 12 would make some amount of sense. I mean the. Of course, if you go back further in time, those time frames don't make any sense at all. You know, Windows 12 to 15 was, sorry, Windows days. Windows 8 to 10 was three years with some big updates in the middle, by the way. Windows 7 to 8 was three years. Windows Vista to 7 was three years.
- [27:31]
C
Yeah.
- [27:32]
B
And then Windows XP to Vista was what, like 17 years? I can't remember. But it was a long time. It was.
- [27:37]
C
So here we are five years.
- [27:39]
B
Yeah, so it's like 2021, you know, not that these things always have to line up. I mean, that's not the way the world works. A lot of times Windows versions can and should be about new hardware innovations and you know, what's the dividing line and where does that make sense?
- [27:51]
C
Well, and we also. They're not going to float three versions. So obviously 10 had to go by.
- [27:57]
B
Yes. Right. Yep.
- [27:59]
C
We are now in a position to have a 12. But I think you're on something here where you can't put out a hardware spec that people can't buy.
- [28:09]
B
Yeah, it's I think from Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if we discovered at some point there was at different times a plan for a Windows 12 and that some sequence of events, whether it was just pushed it back. The terrible reception of AI in Windows 11, the, the poor performance of that stuff, the, I don't know, the local AI versus cloud AI hybrid thing not coming together. So maybe we'll just do this Copilot plus PC and that at least will be a way for PC makers to sell more expensive premium products and maybe that helps the market, we don't know. And then the component crisis happens and screws up, you know, throws a grenade in the whole thing.
- [28:46]
C
Yeah, well, and the AI bubble deflating too. Like why are you going to start designing an operating system based on an environment you know, isn't going to be around in another year?
- [28:56]
B
Yeah.
- [28:56]
A
Really? You think that's the case?
- [28:58]
C
Well, I think the prices are going to change. Hybrid's going to have to be more essential. Like there's so much shift going on and the hardware is constrained.
- [29:08]
B
By the way, regardless of component crisis stuff, hybrid AI was always going to be the biggest thing, inevitable. It was always happening. And we talk about this a lot. Just as is the case in the cloud, when you look at local AI, it has improved so dramatically. And what you really need is some system where whatever it is, the operating system, whatever you're using is going to do what it can locally as that makes sense for you. And then in the same way that you might go into whatever system you're using, if you use GitHub Copilot and you're like, well, I have an anthropic cloud key or whatever it is, I can put it in there and use that. You might do the same thing in Windows and you know, maybe you're getting, I don't know, maybe through a Microsoft 365 subscription, you get some stuff like you do today. Actually, maybe you can point it at a third party AI, you know, whatever it is. Like there'll be some system of orchestrating, you know, which AI is used when. And I just think it's not there yet. Like, I think it just. This is going to take some work. And so, you know, Stevie Patiche, again, like the, the hybrid AI, I'm not even sure you use that term, but the Like I don't remember, but I think of it as hybrid AI, whatever the wording was. My thinking now is that if there is a Windows 12, if we actually do go to this, that will be the dividing point and that Windows 11 will continue to exist. They're doing that work this year like Apple is doing in their platforms to make it work better in lower end systems or systems with lower end systems with fewer resources. Whether it's ram, storage, CPU power, whatever it is, mpu, et cetera. This is going to be good for people who have computers that they want to keep using maybe, or will have to keep using because it'll work better. So no matter what computer you have, it will just work better. That's neat. I mean, whether it's good in 8 gigabytes of RAM, we'll see. But.
- [30:55]
C
And then you get to this idea you used to build the next operating system on the next generation hardware.
- [31:02]
B
Yeah.
- [31:03]
C
And how do you do that right now? Or do you dial it back? Do you?
- [31:07]
B
Well, so, by the way, so we have the existing program, we are improving like I described. But the next hardware platform, I believe Nvidia just announced it. Right. This is the one. You know, if you think about the difference between a computer just as a CPU and it probably has a integrated GPU of whatever variety there, they were often very crappy and today they actually can be very good. But they're in some range. But they don't have really MP. There was no Intel 12th gen. Anything that had to MP. Like they just. That was just not a thing. Right. So you come up with Copilot plus PC first with Snapdragon and those, you know, 40 tops. NPU compared to no NPU is fairly impressive. I mean, we didn't do a lot with it, but pretty impressive. You know, for the second gen X2 stuff, it's 80 or 85 tops I believe is the. Are the numbers. So double, you know, all the tasks you never do will always run twice as fast hours. I have no idea how that works. But. But the Nvidia thing is the conversation we keep having about GPUs, which is like this is not tens of tops, this is several hundreds of tops or even thousands of tops. And that's. I think that's the next hardware platform.
- [32:18]
A
So, you know, increasingly I think tops
- [32:20]
B
is not the dated measurement people megahertz myth.
- [32:26]
A
I disagree on people. No, it really is memory bandwidth and memory capacity.
- [32:31]
B
Yeah.
- [32:32]
A
Because a lot of the local models you'd like to run need a lot of ram and RAM is Of course, a scarcity.
- [32:37]
B
Yeah. RAM is the bigger deal.
- [32:39]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:40]
B
And so I. That's why I sort of think that the. Well, that. And that's why that, you know, the initial systems, they're talking about 120 gigs of RAM, these things. Right. This is bad timing for this product. It's not going to be a mainstream thing this year. But, you know, the way the world works, regardless of component shortages, prices come down, you know, things will happen. So this may force them not to talk about it this year and maybe we look at next year later. I don't know. But I. I feel like that is the next platform. Like, this is the. It feels like a workstation right now, but is essentially what will become the mainstream computer for hybrid AI at a time when Windows will have that sophisticated orchestrator to handle that, you know, routing of where things go. And the stuff you do locally is going to be the other thing. Pretty freaking great on that thing. Right.
- [33:25]
A
Since they blocked Fable is a lot of people are looking at local. What's the best local model I can run?
- [33:32]
B
And by the way, I think we talked about this last week, but in the sense that I'm always looking for the positive in everything, you know me,
- [33:40]
C
you are a shining light.
- [33:41]
B
I am of positivity. I did look at the component crisis stuff and PC, we're going to talk more about PC prices going up. But, you know, the silver lining in here is the stuff related to Apple and Microsoft improving those platforms. You know, when you are forced to make do with limitations, you can actually innovate in ways that are pretty exciting that you wouldn't bother even trying otherwise. And again, I'm not thanking AI for ruining everything, but if this is what puts local AI over the top, if this is what makes Windows and the Mac and whatever Apple makes and Google said whatever it is, more efficient and more, you know, respectful resources on the device, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it. I'm not saying it's a Net win for the whole world, but for this part of the world it is. And, you know, I'll just, I'll accept that. You know, it doesn't matter why they did it. We're all going to benefit from it, whether we buy a new computer or keep the computer we already have. So I think this, maybe this is the little push locally. I need it.
- [34:42]
A
You know, certainly Nvidia is working to make these more efficient, but I don't know. I think there's a limit. I really do. One of the things people are doing now is running GLM, the GPU from Zai model. But to run that locally, GLM 5.2, which is a very good model, it's almost opus quality, you need 256 gigs of RAM. Who has this? And if you went out and said, oh well, you know, it's all about tops and bought a 5090 for $5,000, that's 32 gigs of RAM. You're going to be running Gemini, but
- [35:15]
C
you're going to have lots. You can do the specialty version of the 5090 with 96 gigs, but that's at $10,000 card if you can find one.
- [35:23]
B
There's this tier, regardless of names and brands and whatever. Like there is this tiered system that has existed now for two years between what I'll call like normal PCs and copilot plus PCs. This new Nvidia thing is another tier on top of that. And maybe they brand one, the top one is 12, because that's what makes sense. But like I said, I think Windows 11 will continue until it hits 10 years, whatever it is, for some period of time. And be the one where it's funny because we all pitched and moaned when this thing came out about the hardware requirements and now they seem quaint. And you can have a computer that has 8 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigs of storage and good luck. But Neo is what that's called.
- [36:09]
C
And this is the world you want to bring Windows 12 into, but you're
- [36:13]
B
also not going to. This is a weird thing. Like, in other words, you have to pay a lot of money to get a good machine that can run local AI really well. A 256 gig computer like you were talking about is unobtainable for basically everybody. But there's this. Yeah, right now. But if you're using an A gig, you know, Windows laptop in a year or whatever it is, and you, you know, you don't have an MPU or you don't have a powerful MPU and you don't have enough RAM anyway, it doesn't matter. You're going to be using a lot of are either exclusively or mostly cloud AI, in which case you may find yourself spending money every month on that thing, right? And so if you think about it, you know, what's the difference between. Or does it make sense that there is a difference between you have an existing computer or a cheap computer you just bought, and you have to pay, let's call it 20 bucks a month to access whatever the AI thing is, or you spend 3,000 or 5,000 or whatever. Thousand on some super expensive local AI wonder thing. And you can actually do a lot of that without having to pay monthly for AI. So it's still cheaper to do the first thing, it spreads it out, which everyone. Well, not everyone, a lot of people do anyway. Plus it's like a subscription thing which we're all stupidly familiar with. It does kind of bridge the gap for now, if that makes sense. Right. I mean, there's two ways to do it and I think eventually it will tilt very heavily toward local AI. But for now, the world is what it is.
- [37:45]
A
Well, let's talk about hardware in just a second. You actually have some machines to take a look at.
- [37:51]
B
Yeah, let me just. So sorry, Joe Esposito has a question in here that's kind of interesting. It's like the driving innovation thing. Yes, but what about what's this going to do to smaller players, right? Like in the market, whether they're hardware, software, whatever it is. And this is actually a big deal. I don't care about nothing the phone maker. But they just announced their next phone is not going to happen because they can't afford the ram, you know, and that if they did pay for the RAM for their phone, the phone would be too expensive, no one would buy it. And that's a really good example of like a, an independent. Well, not independent, they're Chinese. But a small company, relatively speaking, very small, who just can't afford to live in this world now because of these problems. And that's absolutely going to be part of it. This is, if you look across, we'll talk about the video game stuff, of course, later. I think we're going to see this in the PC market and I think we're going to see this in electronics generally. There's going to be a lot of consolidation because there has to be, you know, this is, this is a downturn, there's no doubt about it. Yeah, it's unfortunate, but that's definitely what's going to happen.
- [38:56]
C
Hey, it's one of the better reasons to delay Windows 12 is we got to wait for the hardware to sort itself out. Yeah, but I would think the thing you want from version of Windows in this world is that you can use your GPU as an npu.
- [39:12]
B
Right.
- [39:12]
C
Just opening that whole model up.
- [39:14]
B
So I keep looking for some hint that that's going to change at build. Remember they announced, I think it was just three APIs, but three major on device local AI APIs that were previously exclusive to CoPilot PC will now be available to different types of computers that have a good CPU and or gpu, which can include an integrated gpu. So that's one thing. But, you know, one of the hardware things we'll talk about in a moment after the ad, I guess, is, you know, what happens when Microsoft comes up with a Surface that only has eight gigabytes of ram? And every one of those devices for the past three, I guess, two years has been a Copilot plus PC. What happens then?
- [39:57]
C
Yeah, see, I'm thinking the other day,
- [39:58]
B
number five is going to shock you.
- [40:01]
A
And there's another question I have, and I know this may be too general and broad, but why does Microsoft release a new version of Windows? What are the forces that impel it to do so? You know, is there. Don't answer. Hold that thought. I'm going to give you a chance to actually, this time think about your answer.
- [40:19]
B
I'm picturing a monkey with an organ grinder and a little like little puppet thing comes out of it. I think that's how they go through it. But. But I'll get into it.
- [40:29]
A
But it's an interesting. I mean, it's a real question. It's like, is it just to sell more computers? I mean, what is it technology driving it?
- [40:36]
C
We had the argument that 11 was purely a response to the new Mac OS release.
- [40:41]
A
Yeah. And I think at the time we also said, and it's to help the OEMs sell computers in a more abundant market because the market had undertaken.
- [40:50]
B
So, by the way, I do think a lot. And I think that was what Copilot plus PC was. That's a modern example of Microsoft, you know, doing a thing, I don't know what, like an initiative. There's a brand, there's a, you know, a logo. And, you know, intel does this a lot, by the way.
- [41:06]
A
I have not evo. EVO PC.
- [41:08]
B
I mean, you see, Intel. Intel has specifications for things that meet certain whatever. You know, they. They coined the term AI PC. And, you know, that is as exciting as Copilot plus PC.
- [41:20]
A
It also sounds like a political action committee.
- [41:23]
B
Yeah, it does. But abortions are okay, right? So it's like
- [41:30]
A
you went there.
- [41:30]
B
No, it's. It's a. Sorry, that was an intel joke, if you can believe it. So I just say, like, it's not a bad thing that Microsoft will try to drive unit sales growth in the market. That's no, you know, their ecosystem. Those are their partners.
- [41:48]
A
No, I'm not saying good or bad. I'm just curious yeah.
- [41:51]
B
Anyway, but I think, I think that's a big. That. I know. I'm sorry. That is. I think that's big. Part of it.
- [41:55]
A
Part of it.
- [41:55]
C
I'm pricing out 256 gigs of RAM. I think it's coming up about five grand right now.
- [42:00]
B
Oh, jeez.
- [42:01]
C
Okay.
- [42:01]
A
Just for the RAM.
- [42:02]
C
Just for the DDR.
- [42:03]
A
And that's DDR5.
- [42:05]
C
Yeah.
- [42:06]
B
I'm going to start just selling people a laptop so they can strip the
- [42:08]
A
RAM out of it. You know, save your old computers, kids. They're going up in value. Well, you'd have to save the computer. Just the ram. Our show today, we're going to take a break. Come back. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul and Richard. Our show today is brought to you by Webroot. Oh, you know, I think as we talk about this, you know, and new computers and all this stuff, I think sometimes people want an excuse to buy a new computer. And if your computer, you know, is starting to heat up a little bit, you know, it sounds like it's taken off when the fans start to spin off, windows start to open like this. And you actually. And I don't want to take this away from you. Sure, that's a good excuse to buy a new computer, but it might not be the problem. It could be that big, bloated, fat antivirus. You're running many of the biggest name brands, and you know who I'm talking about, are bulky, they're complicated, they're full of pop ups and upsells. And that's why I wanted to tell you about Webroot all in one digital protection for up to 10 devices with a variety of plans designed to protect you and your loved ones from digital threats. You get great antivirus, very powerful antivirus. You get identity protection, too. But what you don't get, you don't get the fan going with the slowdowns. You don't get the upsell pop ups that drive me crazy. Webroot keeps you protected online while staying out of your way. I'll give you some hard numbers. Webroot Essentials. The Basic antivirus scans 6 times faster and takes 33 times less space than the average competitor. And it's still number one in performance compared to. I'm on the names, all right? McAfee and Norton. In fact, let me give you some actual numbers. Webroot Essentials vs. Norton Antivirus head to head. Webroot scans 3.7 times faster, installs 35 times smaller, uses 5 times less RAM. When idle, you use McAfee. All right. Webroot Essentials is 10 times faster, 16 times smaller, 5 times less RAM when idle. And that's the difference that can make your computer feel new. Even if you don't have a new computer, just it's faster, it's easier to use because you don't have that bloatware in between you and your software. Webroot also offers Webroot total protection, which includes the antivirus identity monitoring. You also get privacy protection and you get cloud backup all in a single simple hassle, free subscription designed for everyday life. And you might say, well, now that's going to be slow. No, Webroot total protection, all of that ranked number one overall when compared to the top competitors. Seven times faster than the average competitor, three times smaller than the average competitor on the hard drive. There's one more thing you might want to consider. As we've been talking about. AI has completely changed the cybersecurity game. Scams are smarter, malware is faster. Those phishing emails look shockingly real. But the good news is you don't have to be a tech expert to stay ahead of it when you use security that can keep up with AI threats. A lot of the free antivirus tools and the older security programs just don't even know about AI. Webroot is built to counter modern AI driven attacks. So to summarize, it's fast. WebRute's lightweight. It's designed to spot threats before they ever reach you. Live a better digital life with Webroot. Webroot is offering our listeners an exclusive 60% off offer. Visit webroot.com twit to learn more. That's webroot.com twit we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly.
- [45:55]
B
Leo, I'm going to follow your advice and I'm going to lead a more bitter digital life.
- [46:00]
A
Lead a bitter.
- [46:01]
B
I feel like doing my thing. I'm kind of on that path.
- [46:05]
C
I think you've already kind of a specialty. Really?
- [46:07]
A
Yeah. You're leading the way on that.
- [46:09]
B
Yep. I am a trailblazer in bitterness.
- [46:14]
A
Let us talk a little bit about hardware in this Windows 12 mode. Actually, do you want to answer that question that I posed before we do that, like why Windows? Why would you want to release Windows 12?
- [46:30]
B
So first you get a roulette wheel and I don't know, I mean it's, you know, I think there are different, different reasons at different times and there are combinations of reasons. Right. I mean, if you go back to the 90s, one of the things everyone would have said about Windows at that time, one of, one of the things it was like ahead of the hardware, like this thing will run awesome when we have better hardware was the next hardware. We have not had this problem for a long time, right?
- [46:55]
C
No, I mean, it's been true essentially since 2000. Yes.
- [46:59]
B
I mean, and if you, you know, in this place, I have dozens of like Intel Core, 12th gen, 13th gen, 11th gen, somewhere in there, varying amounts of RAM, hopefully usually 16. I would think those run Windows great. You know, it's like, it's a weird thing. I mean, I'm always moving on to the next thing. That's part of my job. But, you know, I bring up some of these computers for, you know, doing screenshots and things. Of course now with the stuff they're doing in Windows, you kind of will look, look at that, whatever. But that hasn't been a reason for a while. Sometimes there are hardware innovations, sometimes there are competitors like Apple. You know, Apple comes out with OS X in 2001 or whatever. They're doing hardware accelerated graphics. Windows is doing bitmap graphics where the icons are literally a specific size of a small size. So they look terrible when you scale them up. You've got like high DPI screens, we've got multi touch screens. We start doing smart pens, you know, whatever. The thing is, you would. Sometimes Microsoft responds just to look at them, to market things. Sometimes they actually are on the leading edge of it, trying to push other PC makers or PC makers or whatever to adopt new things, things they see as being kind of interesting for the future. Sometimes these things fall flat in their face. Sometimes they go absolutely nowhere. I would say, you know, like maybe I'm an outlier, I don't know. But the way I use a computer today is not that different to how I did 20, 25 years ago, really. Right. I mean, we have thinner, lighter, faster computers. There's more ram, there's more storage. The cloud sync thing has been really nice. That's a big deal, I think. But for me, multi touch tablet, smart pen kind of came and went. If you are someone who likes to take notes or write by hand, that's not true. If you're an artist, that's not true. So those things are still out there and they still work really well. Obviously. Of course they do. They don't decline in functionality per se. But you know, Bill, if you had asked Bill Gates in 2003, he would have told you every computer in the future is going to be a tablet PC. Computer. And that's not the case. You know, that didn't happen.
- [49:05]
C
So now they, you know, the panic in 2010, 2011 to make Windows 8 to counter the tablet just overestimated the impact the tablet was going to have.
- [49:16]
B
Yeah, I think. Yeah. So I, you know, the thing for my, I mean, to be fair to them, Apple came. That was the third of three enormous innovations, or however you want to say that out of Apple. Right. You know, the ipod first, which is a classic Apple product in the sense that they did not invent this technology. They just looked at the market and said, you know, we could do this better. They did the same thing again with the.
- [49:45]
C
Well, really what made the ipod Profound was the 99 cent song, which, you know, largely Jobs convinced the music industry to its music industry did not.
- [49:54]
B
But remember, it also had a one like a. What was the size of the ssd? You know, Toshiba had made a bunch.
- [50:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. So they had a terabyte drive that
- [50:02]
B
actually was a hard drive, if I'm not mistaken, 2.5 inch.
- [50:05]
A
But they never set the capacity. They only said a thousand songs in your pocket, which was.
- [50:08]
B
Yeah, but we could have. I mean, so it must have been a.
- [50:10]
A
It was a terabyte. It was a terabyte.
- [50:12]
B
Yeah. We know, in that size, in something that could make sense in a. You know, so you're going up against Flash based devices that are clunky, that have only, you know, 16 gigabytes of storage or some stupid amount. This was an attractive proposition. You could put every song you own on a thing. And then, of course, yeah, like Richard said, they came out with a store, they legitimized digital music purchasing and so forth. It was great. They did that. And it's like, okay. And that, you know, there was a period of time their ipod was over 25 or, I'm sorry, 50% of their revenues. I mean, the ipod, they were the ipod company, you know, until they weren't because they came out with the iPhone. And iPhone was stratospheric. I mean, I just took it in a different direction. But it's a phone. Yeah. It's not a computer. I mean, it is a computer.
- [50:55]
C
Right, but it's not a computing device for most people.
- [51:00]
B
Yep. Yeah. Which is something. They were talking about this in the discord, which. And this is something I bring up all the time, which is, you know, is it better to start with something simple as a platform and then build capabilities on top of it? You could make the argument kind of Apple does that sort of with the iPad maybe. Or is it better to start with something complicated? Which Apple also did by the way, with Mac OS X, which came from NextStep, which came from Unix or Kernel Unix, whatever, or FreeBSD, BSD and Windows. You know, we did this in, you know, we have nt, we have like regular Windows, NT Windows and then we have like Windows CE and Windows Mobile. And you know, we're cutting and cutting and cutting and trying to get to this thing. That makes sense. You know, there are different ways to do it. Right. And then of course now we have AI, so now we can just tell AI to do it, I think was what someone was trying to say, which is kind of funny. Which is, you know. Yeah, you know, we'll see. But I don't know. What I do know is that for some unknowable period of time, we're going to be suffering through this component crisis. It's raising prices dramatically and it does
- [52:04]
C
derail the need for a new os. And I would double up on knowing that AI is going to go through major transformations in the next year or two. Why would you try and design an OS against the current state of it?
- [52:16]
B
So this is a pick your parallel to the past, kind of a contest. Right. So Microsoft at any given time has had a couple of different versions of Windows and market being supported at the same time. Right. The most dramatic version of that maybe was when they had NT and DOS based Windows at the same time. There was this. You could see how they differentiated it. You needed a really powerful computer to run NT and so they 9x and whatever the DOS versions of Windows were for consumers and then this other thing was for businesses and workstations and servers and that kind of thing. And you could make a pretty good argument that this is an environment to do that as well. Right. If Windows 12 becomes the thing that was nt, we keep selling Windows 11 and improving it and it runs on normal computers as we think of them today. We are counting on, just as they were counting on with nt, that prices will come down on this expensive hardware. The capabilities will continue to improve and hopefully that doesn't happen in five years. Hopefully it happens in a year or two years maybe, but we don't know. Look, there has to be a reason Microsoft has been so weird about this. That's the thing that kills me. They've just never not been vague about it. I don't know. We have 26H1 and they're like, it will get something, we're just not going to tell you what it is. Okay, I don't know why, like what? You just tell us. I think it's tied to the Nvidia thing, but anyway, we'll see. So Microsoft a couple of weeks ago announced new generation Surface Laptop and Pro based on Snapdragon X2 plus an Elite. A couple of weeks or three, four weeks, whatever it was before that, they announced the new versions of those products for business based on intel chipsets. They said this at the time, no one paid attention, but they did say there would be 8 gigabyte configurations of these machines in the future. Remember, these things came at the gate, 3 to $500 more per model than their predecessors. Right. For the same configurations. And you know, because of this component crisis, because Microsoft is essentially a boutique PC maker, they said, look, we don't have them now, but we're gonna, we're gonna release these things at some point. And I have to be honest, I thought they meant in the fall. I didn't think it was going to happen. But they just quietly added those configurations to their surface.com website. So if you look at the latest Surface Laptop and Pro, you can now buy 8 gigabyte configurations with 256, he says, learning the language. Gigabytes of storage. If you're buying a laptop, it's $950 is the starting price for that. And if you're buying the Pro, which by the way does not come with a keyboard, $850. To go from that to 16 gig, you have to do two things. One is, well, you have to pay more. Sorry, you pay $300 more. Right. But you also only get the 8 gig configuration in a single color choice, which is one of the other weird problems that Surface. Right. Like when I bought my Surface laptop two years ago, what I wanted was a platinum colored 15 inch Surface laptop with 32 gigs of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage. And that was not. They did not sell that product. I could get it in black or I don't know if they had another dark color. I don't remember what it was, but it was a color I did not want. And that's what happens, you know. And they don't sell a lot of computers, so you don't really get a lot of these choices, which is kind of terrible. If I didn't make this point last week, I do want to make it again. Lenovo has a, I think it's a 15.3 or 15.5 inch laptop. Snapdragon X plus 16 gigs RAM, 512 gigs of storage that you can Buy right now on from their website for $849. That is the same price as a 8 gig Surface Pro with no keyboard. It's a hundred bucks less than an 8 gig Surface laptop with no keyboard. And it's an awesome computer. That's a, that's, you know, and that's just one computer. But it's, but I, but it's a really good example of a rare deal that is exists today. It's been here for months. I don't know how it's not disappeared but there it is. That's a better computer. It's also made by a company that knows how to make computers storing it out there. But the one you know, I keep holding up, Tim. Well, Apple, but Tim Cook really as the company leader, for lack of a better term, who has the firmest grip on hardware component availability, pricing, et cetera. They sell in such huge volume they get preferential pricing and consideration. Except now they don't. It turns out Nvidia spends more at TSMC and wherever else and spends more with the companies that are making memory and spends more in a couple of other places. Now Apple is on the bench. Tim Cook gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal where he said price increases are inevitable. There is some thought that that could happen before the next gen devices come out in the fall. There is a prime sale thing going on right now. If you have your eye on any hardware and it's on sale, you might want to think about it because I think these things are all going to go up pretty dramatically. If I remember correctly, the Wall Street Journal had a nice. Well this I do remember correct. There's a nice chart where they show all the components in the phone and if there are 15 of them, the price doesn't change on 13 of them. But the RAM and the storage go up not exponentially but dramatically like 5x. And so their estimate was that new iPhones for example are going to have to be at least $200 more per model for the same configuration this coming year compared to last year. That's Apple though. And that's the thing, you know when people like look at like Surface computers and like this is out of whack, you know what's going on. It's like you got to remember they're not getting preferential pricing. Apple is. And they're still, those prices are going to go up pretty dramatically. I'm really curious to see what this world looks like. It's going to be ugly. So I don't know if anybody can
- [58:20]
C
get A deal on hardware. It's Tim Cook. That's his claim to fame, right?
- [58:23]
B
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean look, I get, I get notifications on my phone. My dad calls, my daughter texts. He gets them when the component price of something goes up by a cent and some spreadsheet changes. You know, this is where his head is at. He's really good at this.
- [58:36]
C
Yeah.
- [58:37]
B
And Apple has the, you know, the scale now where they can just do what they can do. But Apple suddenly is not number one in this capacity, which is kind of interesting. You know, maybe that Nvidia computer will be cheap. They're getting good photo prices.
- [58:50]
C
I don't know. Yeah, but I don't know why Nvidia would bother building a computer right now. I know when just need to ship their cards, which is what everybody's demanding
- [58:57]
B
of them, right
- [59:00]
A
Spark? I mean, right. They have.
- [59:02]
B
Well, this is reference models. Someone I don't. I'm not outing anyone for. I'm. They. I'm sure they're making a good point of some kind. But the headline was something like Nvidia's real advantage isn't hardware, it's software. And it's like. No, it's, it's, it's hardware. Well, it's hardware. It's hardware.
- [59:17]
A
Cuda. Because.
- [59:18]
B
No, it's. I know it's. But no, I know, I know that's what it.
- [59:20]
A
A proprietary lock into their hardware.
- [59:22]
B
But you have to like they have so many units out in the world that this is, this has become the lock in. Right? It's the. It is. Yes, it's Cuda, but it's. Yeah. I mean they're so popular that having CUDA compatibility, which I believe is essentially what they're doing on the client. Right. With, with this new generation of computers and chips is interesting, but it's. I don't see any. I mean you can't do CUDA on like AMD hardware, right?
- [59:49]
A
No. In fact there's models I can't run because I have an AMD Halo Strix computer and it doesn't do cuda. So that is a lock in. I mean there are models that work best with Cuda.
- [60:03]
B
I mean we've never heard of a hardware company doing lock in through software before.
- [60:07]
A
Apple's working as fast as they can to do the same with mlx. Right. That's their version, of course. And people. Because they. There were a lot of Mac Minis and Mac studios sold because of their bandwidth. The memory bandwidth is quite good on Apple Silicon, but geez.
- [60:21]
B
I mean, yeah, I think that actually is the primary advantage there because I don't, I don't actually think they're silicon is particularly good, you know, compared to the best NPs and GPUs out in the world. I mean, whatever. I'm sure they're, they're good, very good. But like, I don't, I don't think they're well.
- [60:36]
C
And normally we never press against those limits, so. Right. You know, it's only because of this particular workload that suddenly we care about memory bandwidth rates.
- [60:45]
B
You know, we've seen little things like this from time to time and these are going to become more pronounced like, I'm not going to get this exactly right. It might have been as recent as last year. No, but it wasn't. No, it might have. It was either the Pixel 9a or the 8a. They had just come out the previous December with Gemini Nano, which their on device model, which they made a version of that went in all their phones at the time, whatever that series, either Pixel 9, it was probably Pixel 9 or Pixel 8 series, I don't remember. So the standard Pixel, the Pro, the Pro xl, maybe, I guess the fold, whatever they had that year. Right. This, by the way, is the same model that went into Chrome that caused a big kerfuffle there a couple months ago, a month ago, whatever that was. This is their on device model. Right. But the Pixel 8 or 9a, again, I forget which, comes out a few months later, early the next year. And the original announcement is this is not going to have Gemini Nano on it because there's not enough ram. And again, I'm just going to guess, I don't remember, but I bet it had 8 gigabytes of RAM and the other pixels had 12. And that was the line. Like they were like, it's just not going to work. And people complained and they put the Nano on there. It's reduced functionality. It doesn't work as well, obviously. I think it doesn't do a couple of the features, you get another Pixels. But they did make it work and Apple is doing that right now. So when they announced the new Siri stuff, whatever Apple intelligence stuff they just announced at wwdc, if you look at the dividing line, there's like this good news thing over on the left where they're like, we're going to support an astonishing range of iPhones in iOS 27, but if you want to do that stuff, you actually have to have last year's Pro or better like it's not even going to work. On the iPhone. 16, I think was the one from a year ago. Am I right with that? Something like that. 16 or 17, the iPhone that they marketed as being designed for AI is not going to run their AI and it's either a year or two later. I don't remember the time frame, but this is going to happen everywhere. This is the dividing line between a Windows 11 computer and a copilot plus PC. And soon the Nvidia thing, right? There's always going to be this kind of back and forth and push when it comes to these AI things. And a lot of it has to do with ram. So this is a tough time to be scaling back to gigabytes of ram. It's just so weird to me.
- [63:09]
A
But I blame the AI data centers, of course.
- [63:13]
B
As you should. As you should.
- [63:17]
A
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B
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C
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B
Monday, 24 nuggets for ten dollars. Tuesday, eight piece fried chicken for ten dollars. Wednesday, ten wings for ten dollars. Thursday, eight tenders for ten dollars. Friday, 24 nuggets for. Oh, you guessed it, didn't you? Ten dollars. The ten dollar bucket of the day deal every weekday only at KFC. It's finger licking goo. Prices and participation Variable supplies last not available on third party ordering platforms.
- [64:14]
A
Tax extra.
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B
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- [64:25]
C
of the most user friendly. It was important to me to think
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B
about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, they're just right
- [64:33]
C
there on your dashboard.
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B
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C
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- [64:45]
A
you're watching Windows Weekly. That's Paul Thurat. To my. Let's see to your right, my left. And to his right, left, up, down. It's Marcia Brady. No, no, I'm sorry, that's Richard Campbell.
- [65:00]
B
What's he doing up there?
- [65:01]
A
From runninsradio.com I think we have to get Cory Doctorow on pretty soon. I didn't realize he's got a new book.
- [65:09]
B
Oh, you're gonna have Monsoon. Because I pre ordered his next book months ago. Right. And shitification was such a big thing. But I did know because I watched a lot of interviews with him and he just says the same things over and over again. He's a very good public speaker in that way. Right. He latches onto these kind of terms and phrases and things and whatever. It's fine, I'm not complaining. But you hear the same thing again and again. But as he's moving to the next thing, the whole time I'm like, this is not. It's not that he's wrong about anything, it's just that he, you know, every once in a while someone will come up with a term that's perfect. Right? And let's give Microsoft a little credit. Copilot was that term for AI. You know, at the time especially. It made sense. It's like this thing that's going to work next to you.
- [65:58]
C
It's GitHub's term.
- [66:01]
B
Okay? But they, you know, they beat him to death.
- [66:02]
A
GitHub's term before Microsoft acquired them.
- [66:05]
B
No, but GitHub out of GitHub, which
- [66:07]
C
is the independent entity.
- [66:09]
B
Right, right, yeah, yeah. And then someone over there obviously, you know, was looking at this and was like, you know, this is a good, we should use this term. It's a good term. Insurification is like that. It's a good term. It's one of those things where I know some people offend some people. I guess it's a little crass or childish, however, you know, But I'm sorry, it's plain spoken and it's immediately obvious what it is. And as soon as you understand what it is, you see it everywhere. Like it's perfect. Right? But now he's looking at the word what he thinks of as like the post AI world, which is not really the right way to describe it, but we've shifted into this. We're in the AI hype cycle. It's a bubble, it's going to burst, whatever's going to happen. But as was the case with previous bubbles, there's good and bad things that come out of it. But the term he came up for this is just like, it's like, how could you be so wrong on this when you were so right on the last one? We understand it's not going to be hit like the last. You can't you're never going to duplicate it. But the term he uses is reverse centaur.
- [67:10]
C
I'm not in love with that term.
- [67:12]
B
No, it's terrible. And the reason it's terrible is the same reason that insidification is so perfect. Because you have to explain. Takes a bit. You have to explain what a centaur is. Not mythologically, but in the world of automation is where this comes from. And then you reverse it. And that's reverse centaur. And you're like, no, I understand it. I'm just telling you I hate it. And I hate it because it's just not good. I don't mean, like. Well, you know what I mean. I mean, you get, like, in shitification. You're like, yeah, no, I get it. This one. You're like, no, you explained it. I still don't get it. It's still terrible.
- [67:48]
C
And when I do get it, I don't like it.
- [67:50]
B
I don't like it. Yeah. So. But I've only just. Sorry. The book came out Tuesday. I had gotten a. Well, actually, what happened was I was on YouTube and I saw there was an interview with Cory Doctorow that was new. I'm like, oh, interesting. He started talking. He's like, oh, yeah, right. This new book's coming out soon. Okay, great. And then I. Apple News plus, it was somewhere in some newsfeed thing, and there were a couple of interviews with. In print with him. And I was like, oh, we're gonna go through a cycle now. I'm just gonna get a bunch of new Cory Doctorow videos. And then I checked Amazon and it was coming. It came out Tuesday. So I think when I saw this, it was Monday, but so I just started reading it. It's very good. He's a great writer and he's smart ideas. He's on the right side of history about just about everything. He breaks down the OpenAI Microsoft relationship in a way that I found both amusing and gratifying, because I've been kind of complaining about this forever. The way I would have said this at the time was like, I want to call this a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid is too basic of a shape, but it is that kind of scam. And very early on in the book, he's like, Microsoft, and there's a lot of quotes. It's like, invests $10 billion in OpenAI after their initial 1 billion, but the investment is like 2 billion in between those two, too. Yeah, but it's like an exchange of things that have no discernible value. We're going to give you tokens, we're going to give you $10 billion worth of tokens that you will then spend on Azure infrastructure. We are going to book that as revenues, even though we're the ones paying for it.
- [69:27]
C
Right? The old double value. I make a billion dollar investment and I get a billion dollars worth of sales.
- [69:33]
B
I'm not going to get this exactly right. But he compared it to having an ice cream truck and some kid comes up and he's like, I can't afford the ice cream. And he's like, no problem. Here's the $2 to buy the ice cream. I'm going to invest in you. And then the kid gives it to him back and he says, could I have the ice cream? He says, yes, you can. And then he walks away with the ice cream. And it's like, there you go. There's my $2 investment. That kid now has ice cream. It's like, I'm going to book those as revenues. But you gave him the money.
- [69:58]
C
You still have the investment.
- [70:00]
B
But I have the investment. Look at that kid. He's so happy. Anyway, I'll get through it. We'll see what else comes out of this. I will say one thing that always intrigues me. This was like Neal Stephenson's like this Cory Doctorow. As I read more and more of his stuff, I'm thinking to myself, I wonder, like, what does he use? You know, because one of the problems with his insertification book was he never talked about, like, what we can do as individuals to kind of fix these problems. Right. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of this in the back of the book today I wrote that Deinsurdify Windows 11 book, which is my attempt to address that in that space. But he never really did that. And, you know, every once in a while I'll see something where he alludes to maybe like a specific tool he uses or app or something, whatever it is. And he does talk a little bit about that in this book because he actually uses AI. You would think he would just be a complete anti AI nut job or something. And he is not. And this is like the Internet bubble thing where it's like, look, not all of this is terrible. Was it stupid that you could have someone deliver a candy bar to your office at 3 o' clock in the afternoon in Manhattan and not pay a fee for that? Yes, that was stupid. But that was part of the reason that the bubble burst. And then the good stuff kind of continues on. And so, you know, he doesn't use it to write, like I won't use it to write. But there are things you do around writing which you can use it for. And he has a good example of using it for. You know, he wanted to find a specific quote from a podcast, but he couldn't remember the person who said it or the podcast, let alone the episode. And so he fed the transcripts to some dozen or so podcasts and then found it that way. And I was like, yeah, that's okay, that's cool. You know, grammar, spell checking, type stuff, you know, whatever. I mean, there were good uses of AI, of course, you know, regardless of what you're doing. So I kind of appreciate that he's even killed on that. But I.
- [71:44]
C
Well, I mean, credit for. He's not just criticizing blindly, he's criticizing from real evaluation.
- [71:52]
B
Oh, he is. He has the history and examples to make his points. He's not, he's not pulling ideas out of the sky, you know, and he
- [71:58]
C
also does tend to, when you do hear about his stack is a lot of offline stuff and open source stuff and he does try and minimize the amount of surveillance he's undergoing.
- [72:10]
B
Wherever we're at in the privacy, whatever thing, the fact of the matter is we have a couple of choices on mobile that are mainstream and then a couple of really far out there choices on desktops. The choices that used to be really far out there, like Linux, are now much more mainstream and more approachable. They're still not the type of thing I think my wife or brother or mother or whoever would use, but those things are better than they've ever been. I think that's really cool. And so the thing is, you have to make this, we're making this little deal with the devil every time we do anything. If I get in the car and I want to drive somewhere and I'm using Google Maps, I do that with the understanding that this thing's tracking me. It's selling the information to advertising. This is part of what it's doing. It's putting me in front of advertising. You see, in the map surface itself, we all understand it to some degree. I don't think we all understand how bad it is, but we, we do, we have an understanding of it. I think AI is causing the same dynamic, you know, where people are like, at first it was just free all the time maybe, or some low monthly cost, and now they're like, oh no, we gotta actually charge you from interesting costs and yikes, you know, it's like, oh, I see this is actually this. This is a problem.
- [73:22]
C
I mean, the interesting part about this is, should OpenAI collapse and that investment becomes worth nothing, they still made 10 billion in sales.
- [73:32]
B
Also, I would just say, from Microsoft's perspective, they didn't just throw away $13 billion. They have the assets. I mean, they have. You know, they are building stuff off of that today.
- [73:44]
C
They're busy building their own models. They've learned from OpenAI.
- [73:47]
B
Yep.
- [73:48]
C
Their dependence on OpenAI is largely, I think, gone at this point.
- [73:53]
B
Well, even if it isn't, I mean, if OpenAI just closed up shop, I mean, they still have the models. You know, they could, you know, at that point, I suppose they could do what they wanted with them, maybe. I don't know.
- [74:02]
C
But what they would do is get a whole lot of compute back.
- [74:06]
B
Right, right. Which, by the way, they spent two years doing anyway. Right. Like through various re.
- [74:12]
C
Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that M Dash is just trained off of. Of Claude Mythos too. So, like, Microsoft's done a good job of getting their own versions of everything.
- [74:23]
B
Oh, is that true? So they have not said. They've not said that. What they have said is that M Dash is basically an orchestrator that works against multiple models. There's no doubt that Fable or Mythos, whatever, is the center of it. I mean, there's no doubt, but. But there's also no doubt that they're working on their own models. And look, in the same way, look, we just talked about this.
- [74:48]
C
So as long as that API from M Dash that's calling Mythos has an American passport, it should be fine, right?
- [74:58]
B
Your understanding of technology astonishes me. Yes. The answer, yes, no, But I mean, like, as models improve because of the nature of this tool, it's going to evolve to, you know, we'll work with whatever the better tools are at the time. So I think a big part of their initiative to have their own foundation models will include having models that are for security. Like we. When I was talking about, like, the most recent one was Apple did wwdc. There's an update to Xcode that's in beta now. You can install. It has an integrated AI functionality. It's not just a sidebar. You can plug in your own AI if you want, you can build an app with it. And it works really well. And part of the reason it works really well is the same reason that what Microsoft announced at Build and what Google announced at Google I o same exact idea, which is we have a model that's specifically for coding, but we're also using a. The terminology differs, but it's a way to ground it in only the documentation for that language and or framework. And you don't get the mistakes like I used to see. Like late last year when I tried to use Anthropic Cloud to do Windows app SDK programming, it kept making mistakes. Remember I ran out of my free allotment in November and it was like, no, you ran out of my free allotment. Like all you did was make mistakes and then tell me I had no more space left. It was because C is the language. It's common. XAML is common. But. But Windows app SDK and WPF look a lot alike. So when you're just blasting out to the web looking for answers to questions, you're like, oh yeah, you just use this control. And you're like, no, you don't. That does not exist in the Windows app SDK. It's making that mistake. So when you ground it in the actual documentation, it works really, really well. And I think that's kind of the model they'll follow for EM Dash and for whatever security models. Right. Same kind of thing. He says confidently, like he knows anything about anything.
- [76:57]
C
Yeah.
- [76:59]
B
Anyway, there's also that great Bloomberg graphic
- [77:02]
C
talking how Nvidia took the page out from Microsoft and is doing the same thing, only they're picking little AI startups and investing in them, who are then immediately turn that money into orders for Nvidia chips if and when they ever take delivery of them, which is a separate issue.
- [77:23]
B
I Is the word term circle jerk too crass?
- [77:27]
C
I mean, this whole thing, this reminds me of 2000 at the towards the end of the dot com boom, like it was the same thing. The companies with the money were investing in the companies to make purchases from those companies.
- [77:41]
B
Yeah, well, and to the point, I think it was Joe Esposito in the discord was talking about consolidation and companies disappearing. Not every day, but there was an announcement. Qualcomm is buying some small startup. Nvidia is buying startups, Apple's buying startups. They're a little more secretive about it, but they do. They're not against big acquisitions. They just haven't done any. Microsoft obviously has been very aggressive in this space. Google's doing the reverse of giving all their executives to other companies. But they are also, I think, are buying companies here and there as well. I mean, this is what the rich get richer, if you're lucky as a company and your goal is to kind of cash out and be successful. This is Not a bad outcome. If you're an end user and you want to have variety and choice and open and closed alternatives, et cetera, et cetera, this could be a dark time. We'll see. But I do think the whole. I think the one thing saving grace for all this AI stuff is that we'll always have open options. The local stuff's only going to get better. You know, Leo's living on the bleeding edge of this right now, and it's going to go from being a kind of weird, esoteric thing that almost no one does to just being very normal and, you know, typical, I think, as it becomes better and simpler.
- [78:55]
C
Well, and you know, to the preliminary on this about how workflows largely haven't changed around software. Why do we need new os? Workflows are in the process of changing right now substantially.
- [79:07]
B
Right. I mean, one of the little kind of asterisks to my conversation earlier about what is the line between 11 and 12 when it comes to Windows is actually. I said it too. They have released the agenic capabilities into Windows. The first version of it, the thing that allows agents to appear on the taskbar as buttons that look like apps, and you interact them with them as you do with apps, and you can bring up a menu off of that button and see the status of things, or it can notify you with a standard toast notification that we get in Windows when it needs your feedback or wants to tell you that it's done with something or whatever it might be. You know, so this is, you know, when you're a hammer, kind of a scenario like you, you know, we're going to make AI look like a nail, you know, in Windows, my Apple's doing the same thing on his platforms, Google's doing the same thing on its platforms just to meet the, you know, whatever the user experience is. So that, that's kind of weird, though, because why would they put that in Windows 11 if that's going to be 12, you know, and it's not in Windows 11 in a beta or something. It's like it's actually shipping. It's. It's in there. It's just not doing anything. It's like a, a sleeper cell on your computer, you know, waiting to screw everything up. But it's. It is an 11. And that makes me wonder because it seemed like, you know, the local AI stuff with MPUs might have made sense for a 12, just copilot itself and all the AI capabilities might have made sense as 12. And now I'm thinking they were Going
- [80:38]
C
to have a window to do an AI edition and call it 12. It was over a year ago.
- [80:43]
B
Yeah.
- [80:43]
C
Now as the market clearly evolved and we see the change in shape and we know it's going to be different than this, by the time you get this thing out the door, you're going to be wildly wrong.
- [80:53]
A
Yeah.
- [80:53]
B
So, okay, so you.
- [80:55]
C
And you don't have any hardware.
- [80:57]
B
Yeah. You just triggered an idea way back
- [81:00]
C
to the last break. Why are we making a new version of Windows? Because we need to sell new PCs. Well, you can't sell new PCs right now.
- [81:07]
B
Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, we're going to see.
- [81:11]
C
And you're still cashing in on the win 11 wave, right? Like the force to win 11 by retiring 10 last year did kick off some sales before the tariffs and all the stupid showed up.
- [81:23]
B
It's on over a billion devices now and you get mission accomplished.
- [81:27]
C
You can take some time now to
- [81:29]
B
kind of answer my own question. And this is triggered by something you just said. They did add the code for Agenic, whatever interfaces in Windows 11 is there. The dividing line though maybe is not agents because we're going to have. The thing that triggered last week's conversation about hybrid AI and how nuanced it was, was about agents. It was actually the agent sessions of Build that kind of put this into my brain, which is you will have cloud based agents in Windows 11 broadly. But maybe the ones that are local, hybrid, that are more capable will be 12. Right. That you. That maybe it is the 256 gigs of RAM, you know, Nvidia or whatever next gen advanced hardware from whatever company. It's not happening tomorrow. This is a slower boil. Maybe it's not mainstream till next year or the year after, we don't know. But maybe that, you know, maybe that really, maybe that is it. You know, I'm always looking, I want to, I want to answer a question no one has ever asked or whatever. But I'm trying to figure, you know, and we'll. Five years from now we'll be like, what happened to Windows 12? Like, I don't know.
- [82:42]
C
I think the whole thing's derailed until the hardware crisis ends. It makes no sense to spend that much money putting out a version. And I'm talking about the marketing dollars until there's stuff for people to buy. Who wants to make an upgrade version of an OS that's not beneficial for the companies?
- [83:03]
B
Yeah, I mean there's so many market forces and just changes that have occurred.
- [83:09]
C
You know the fun one here Is it might be the hole to into which a better OS and I'm not really taking an operating system, but a better approach to AI gets inserted and they miss this opportunity entirely. Like I'm kind of going to delight in.
- [83:24]
B
That's a good point.
- [83:24]
C
You dumped so much money into this, you over inflated the market, blew up the entire supply pipeline and then missed the window for the right way to do this.
- [83:33]
B
So it's an interesting risk here that, you know, look, we live in a world, we're concerned with PCs here. I am, you know, but PCs are the smallest platform in this ecosystem now of personal computing in many ways and it's certainly the least engaged part of it. Right, sure. Meaning we're not sitting here in an app store in Windows looking for new apps every day like a lot of people still do on phones. Right.
- [83:57]
C
I gotta tell you, I know a lot of devs fully in the agentic mode that are doing most of the development by negotiating with agents over their phone.
- [84:04]
B
I was gonna say anymore, I wasn't sure if you're gonna use the word phone in there. But that's the important part of it, I think because there's always going to be that like half step to the future you have to have. Right. Which is the, excuse me, the computer use stuff that you can use remotely from your phone. So you have a Mac or a PC now in Linux, I'm sure where it's on somewhere into your home or whatever. But you can from your phone because you're integrating with it, whether it's a separate app or the same app, like I think Cloud uses, that's the same app. And maybe I'm reversing this. I know like OpenAI I think has different apps, I don't remember. But it doesn't matter. You know, you can be out in the world and you have an idea and you're like, oh, and you have that conversation thing. And this is again, this is something we actually did talk about, not in this context exactly, but a month, two months ago, where I think it was Leo was saying that, you know, he and a lot of developers are turning, turning to a mode where they're conversing with a chatbot, essentially not typing code into an editor and having that thing be on the side. And that's what this is. Right? Except for whatever, you still got the
- [85:14]
C
local aspect of this. But now it's going to be a headless machine, possibly in your home, stuffed full of GPUs. It's not going to be your workstation anymore. We're splitting the load. Your interface is the thing with you wherever you go. But I'm already.
- [85:30]
B
But it's not doing any of the
- [85:32]
C
processing promoting services into my 5080 to do work. And I'm not even touching that machine. I can only tell it's busy because the fans are humming.
- [85:40]
B
Well, it's so great that Microsoft spent the past 15 years ignoring and nerfing the remote desktop stuff in Windows. But you know what? Whatever. I'm sure we'll get that.
- [85:48]
C
It's all API calls these days, dude. Right?
- [85:50]
A
It's all these running cron jobs and servers and.
- [85:53]
C
You know, the only part of OpenAI that might survive this whole thing is the bloody API. Because everybody uses it.
- [85:59]
B
Yeah.
- [86:00]
A
This is the picture I just saw on Reddit. Local lead engineer just got rid of his keyboard. There is no keyboard. He's sitting there talking into a microphone. And of course he's. He's five. Coding. He's doing. He's doing it all with AI.
- [86:12]
B
I'm sorry, but I think that's pretty fake.
- [86:14]
C
Nobody.
- [86:15]
A
I think it's a joke, obviously, especially.
- [86:17]
C
It would be. It would be a headset microphone Max.
- [86:20]
B
Which makes sense. He's like a. Like, you ever see like a. You're watching like a. Like a hard rock concert. The guy puts the guitar behind his head.
- [86:27]
A
Yeah.
- [86:27]
B
He's like playing like a solo. That's how I type on my keyboard now. I'm just like, yeah, I don't need the keyboard that much, but when I need it.
- [86:33]
A
With his tongue. Yeah. Yeah.
- [86:35]
B
So stupid. Anyway, so I. Look, I hope it's obvious to anyone listening or watching this that, you know, we're. We just have. This is questions. Like, we don't. We don't have answers. You know, we have hints, we have ideas. We're kind of navigating this as it happens.
- [86:54]
C
Some familiar patterns.
- [86:56]
B
Yeah, I mean, we can look to the past and. And maybe that gives us some answer or some version of an answer. You know, this. What else can you do? But, yeah, I don't know. I don't. I. This. I'm still just struck by how quickly this improves and how, you know, you got to. I don't know. You have to be open to doing things differently, I guess. It's interesting. This is not an important story, but, you know, Google, last fall, when they announced the Pixel 10 series, announced this Google home speaker that would replace their Nest speakers. It's arriving tomorrow for the first people who bought it, the first reviews are out. This thing is about somewhere Right between a Nest Mini and a Nest Audio, which was that one they had for seven or eight years and never improved once. I don't know why anyone would buy this thing, frankly, unless you just need a thing in your house to talk to when you're a Gemini ecosystem person. Right. Because you'll have it on your phone, you'll have it on your watch. I'm not sure you need another place to have a matter hub that's a microphone or something, but it would do that. I can assure you the sound quality is not going to blow anybody away. And I'd love to know why. Apple and Google both don't make home theater setups. So you can have five speakers or something and have it be some awesome Dolby Atmos thing, but both of them just do stereo pairs and then some version of Airplay Google Cast where they're just playing the same thing, but they're not, you know, working in concert. Right. I don't quite get that. If you care about audio quality, you're not buying the Apple or Google products here. You know what I mean? You're buying a, whatever it is, a Sonos edifier. There's a lot of third party stuff now and if you want an actual smart speaker, I guess it's out there. But this is the Gemini thing. And the thing that's interesting about this to me is, and I bought one, I'm going to review it and look at it just to find out what's going on here, because I hate money. But this is the difference between Google Assistant and Gemini. Right. Writ large. Just like if anyone's been using like iOS, especially 27 beta or iPadOS Mac OS. I'm probably going to write about this soon. But like, you know, Siri, which I hesitate, shouldn't have said it loud, but is, you know, the, the sad stepchild that everyone was embarrassed by for the past 15 years. I'd say it's pretty good now. Like, and that's an interesting. Yeah, it's, it's often by mistake, you know, that's how Siri works. But, but I also, you know. Yeah, because we were. Yeah, exactly. It comes up all the time. But we were away last week and I used it to find things to do a couple of times. I did it just to, you know, you do that standard, hey, I'm going to this place for this amount of time. Can you give me the top, you know, whatever it is, 10 sites, the, you know, best places for local food, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And you know, these things. If you've ever done this and I think everyone kind of has. You get like a nice report and it's really nice looking and whatever. And it, it did that. Like it's, it's, it's, you know, it
- [90:00]
C
writes very confidently and happily. It's just sometimes wildly wrong.
- [90:04]
B
Well, the stuff I've done has been fine. I would say. My interactions with Siri prior to this were universally terrible and were always some version of it coming on when I didn't want it to or it telling me it couldn't understand anything I wanted it to do. It was one of the two pretty much. I mean I didn't use it to set a timer or tell me a joke or any of the nonsense people do with their little Pringle can things. But, but I did, you know, I look, use an Apple device, you're going to interact with this thing unless you do everything you can to turn it off. And, and I can tell you like on a Mac, I'm turning this thing off all the time. But the version and whatever, 27, this is pretty good. So that might surprise some people, I think. And then we could just do an Adobe AI of the release show standalone if we wanted to. And this one's a little confusing, but I think people understand that Adobe has this creative cloud suite of applications. They have the big hitters like Photoshop, Premiere, et cetera, Illustrator, whatever else they have. They have Firefly AI which if you're a creator is super important because this is built on the content that they own and they indemnify you that this is not going to be a stolen idea. Like this is we own not the IP but the, the content. I said, you know, basically it's built on the.
- [91:33]
C
Right.
- [91:33]
B
And now what they have and they're gonna. Yeah.
- [91:35]
C
And they're gonna hold you protected if anything weird happens.
- [91:37]
B
Right. Which is, you know, that's what, that's what those guys want and you know you pay them a lot of money for this, right. And it's whatever, that's great, it's fine. But they, it's weird they don't. That capitalizes like a brand. But they now have this thing they've been talking about for a while which is a creative agent that works. And again it should be like capital C. I don't know why it isn't but it's a creative agent that works across all these products I just mentioned and others. Firefly and Photoshop, etc. It's a way to do agenic workflows either in the app, you're using. So if you're like a Photoshop guy, you're going to be in Photoshop and using it for that, where you have these natural language conversations to get it to do things or using it from outside those apps and it is orchestrating which capabilities in which apps to use to get the thing done that you asked it to do right, which can be multi step workflows that are all going off in different directions and working side by side, et cetera. So my own little space, I kind of focus on Windows productivity. It's not so much creator but this is if you think about it, the stuff we've seen from anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and actually in their own sphere, Apple too, for whatever that's worth, adding these capabilities to their apps. Anthropic, OpenAI, adding them to Microsoft's apps. Google's doing it for Google's apps, but they're doing it for theirs. And their apps are Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever they have in design, et cetera. So it's not my space but if I was a creator I would pay attention to this. Like this is, it's rather astonishing. They're moving very quickly and seem to be, you know, they don't seem to have, they've had some stumbles but they don't seem to have had, you know, those major problems like Google has run into for example, where they have to pull a model or pull a capability from a model because it's creating these crazy racist images or whatever it is. Like they don't seem to have ever suffered from that kind of thing. And you know, this is, we can complain about how much their stuff costs, which I would or you know, whatever it is, but if you trust this company, pay them you want. You know, this is, I don't know, it's kind of amazing. So there's a lot going on there.
- [93:48]
C
So good, so good, so good.
- [93:51]
B
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C
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B
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- [95:47]
A
Okay, there's a lot going on here too, ladies and gentlemen. You are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly. That's Paul Thurat, that's Richard Campbell, and we are glad you're here. And you've been very patient. So I think you deserve. I guess this is the kind of the lollipop at the end of the show. How many got your shot?
- [96:10]
B
How much does it take to get to the middle of a Tootsie Pop?
- [96:13]
C
Who's a Tootsie Rol?
- [96:15]
B
Is that what you just said?
- [96:15]
A
Yeah. Get ready for the center because here comes the Xbox segment.
- [96:20]
B
It's like how many licks? It's like one, two and then he bite it and said three. The owl, if I remember.
- [96:27]
C
Yeah, it was the owl.
- [96:28]
B
So Xbox, which we must now yell because it's all caps and gaming. A couple things going on. One of the things that isn't going on, I swear to God, I'm like pins and needles almost with this. I keep expecting any second there to be some news or whatever. So it's June 24th. As we record this June 30th. Less than a week away is the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. There is a day or some number of weeks of reckoning coming. We all know this. They've been pretty clear it's coming. You know, they just haven't said exactly what it is. So there hasn't been any movement on that. I'll just put that
- [97:03]
C
there.
- [97:04]
B
I was, you know, I mentioned the Ask Paul thing I do on Friday. Somebody asked me last Friday about this and said, you know, given that Microsoft is probably going to let a lot of people go get rid of some studios, definitely cancel some games. Is there some scenario where one of their competitors like Sony or Tencent or whatever could buy any combination of those things, like, or some of them or whatever it is. And the answer to that is like, yeah, of course. I mean, I think one of the best outcomes here, given that this has to happen in a sense, in other words, or I should say given that this will happen, is that you don't just, these things don't have to just disappear. Right. It would be great if some other company, and there are companies I didn't mention, you know, that are out in the world like EA or, you know, Nintendo or whatever the, you know, whatever companies are out there making money or smaller publishers that may be, you know, another form of consolidation would be smaller companies that kind of band together to make a game studio that has, instead of two or three games, has nine or ten games or something. I mean, there's different outcomes.
- [98:11]
C
The pattern for many years has been when you want to make an original game, you take your team out of the big company, whatever it may be, you set up a little studio typically on the back of the money you already made from the last time you did this. You crank out your game and if it's a hit, the big guys come and buy you back again. I have friends who've done that like three times.
- [98:30]
B
Yes, those people probably refer to themselves as serial entrepreneurs, which is one of my least favorite phrases of all time. But God bless them because they're probably rich.
- [98:39]
A
You mean like Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger?
- [98:44]
C
I thought you were going to say
- [98:45]
B
Captain Crunch and Tony Tenille.
- [98:47]
A
And I was like, yeah, the Captain.
- [98:49]
B
It is the Captain and Tenille. The other Captain and Tenille.
- [98:52]
C
They're just game devs, you know, and they like making games and they do their two year vest at EA or wherever they may be. And at the end of that they sort of look around and go, what do I want to make? And if they can make it in the shop, they'll make it there. And they usually can't. So they leave again.
- [99:07]
B
I mean, this entire market in many Ways started when some programmers from Atari who were not getting credit for being the people who made whatever games were like, screw you, we're leaving. And they created Activision. Right, Right.
- [99:19]
C
And the bigger part of this is that you just don't need that big of an ARG to make a lot of games these days. You know, you can do pretty well with smaller games. The indie market's doing just fine. Even if the tier ones.
- [99:32]
B
Yeah. And you know, not to keep beating this to death, but I really do feel like AI is going to, you know, AI as a democratizer, like in the same way that you can with an iPhone or cheap equipment, make a movie essentially. Right. You don't have to be in, you know, no one's going to see it per se, but you do have ways to get it out in the world.
- [99:53]
C
We were already doing frame filling. It's just going to go further.
- [99:56]
B
Yeah. I mean AI is going to help these people a lot. And I know there's a weird thing with this AI in gaming. I'll never understand this. Like this is one of the most obvious places where AI should be used. Creation of gaming.
- [100:07]
C
But I also know whole studios that are like AI free.
- [100:12]
B
Yeah. And those guys will be. That's the indie route. Those are going to be the artisanal handcrafted, you know, some of them will be like 8 bit graphics. And we rendered every pixel, you know,
- [100:23]
C
by hand, picked up each electron with a chromium tweezers and aligned them up on the deck, you know.
- [100:28]
B
Yep, yep. They had the giant eye, you know, the eyepiece thing looking at it, you know, look, that's. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm. But in the same vein, there's a. Between that game and the latest Call of Duty, which is some multi, you know, billion dollar extravaganza, there's a big area, you know, there's. And you know, for people that kind of want to level up as game makers, so to speak, you know, AI can help democratize that. I still think this is going to be good. I don't think there will be good outcomes for everything that Microsoft's getting rid of. We should be honest about that or realistic or however you want to say that. But I do have a hope that they showed off that Shinua game. Clearly it's in a good place, it seems. I mean I could be wrong about that, but it would be horrible for that just to disappear, you know, and I hope it doesn't. So we'll see. But they haven't said a thing yet. Not yet. You know, like the magician that is trying to take your eyes away from where the magic is happening. Microsoft has got a lot of bad news going on in the Xbox space. And so sometimes you'll see these announcements that are clearly like a look over here. Not everything is terrible. You know, there was an. I think it was people. No, Entertainment Weekly, you know, that publication I subscribe to and know really well.
- [101:55]
A
Is it still around even I know.
- [101:57]
B
Please. Someday we'll talk about what Newsweek has become and dear God, what has happened. But I don't know anything about this publication, but I guess they spoke with people at Xbox and they were told that Xbox as an organization has over 20 franchises that have made a billion dollars lifetime, and that they want to get those things out that IP out into the world in the form of movies and TV shows, which. Duh. And this. They have over a dozen movies and TV shows in various stages of development
- [102:29]
C
or playing with treatments. Right.
- [102:33]
B
Like 100%.
- [102:35]
C
Let's be clear. You know, Fallout and Minecraft are the exception. Most video game movies are terrible.
- [102:43]
B
So as a huge fan of the Rock and of the Doom games, I have to disagree. No, you're.
- [102:47]
A
No.
- [102:48]
B
I mean, yeah.
- [102:49]
C
So I mean, I'm gonna say nothing bad about the Rock. Great movie in its horror. Right.
- [102:54]
B
Look, I'm telling you is that it had the first person view for a few minutes and I was like, that's amazing. You know, the last of us TV series is very good. You mentioned Fallout. What was the other one? You said Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft. Yeah, I. You. Have you been to watch the mic? No, I'm not going to do that, but Nintendo has had.
- [103:13]
C
You need to go to a Saturday matinee of the Minecraft.
- [103:16]
A
The one with Jack.
- [103:17]
C
It is the new Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- [103:19]
A
Oh.
- [103:20]
B
There are not enough drugs and alcohol in the world for me to ever get to see this thing.
- [103:25]
C
You come out the other side of that, you will feel high. It's a nutty.
- [103:29]
A
You're saying don't see it though, in your home privacy run home. You need to see.
- [103:33]
C
You're not there to watch the movie. You're there to watch the audience.
- [103:37]
A
I didn't know that was the case. Interesting.
- [103:38]
C
Oh, no, the kids.
- [103:39]
B
I don't know if you've ever made this kind of deal, like, you know, if you're married. We're all married. Right. So we have these wives. And wives have different interests maybe than we do.
- [103:46]
A
These wives.
- [103:47]
B
Yes. And, well, you know, you know, you make compromises Right. So one of the. Like when we were younger, and I mean like, like literally night, late 1980s young, my wife wanted me to see
- [104:01]
A
Ghost and Oh, great movie with Whoopi.
- [104:05]
B
Okay, so this is Patrick Swayze. My response to that was they will never make enough Friday the 13th movies for me to ever see that movie.
- [104:12]
C
Yeah.
- [104:14]
B
And I, you know, I. And I feel like Minecraft is there for me. Look, I like Minecraft. I. Jack Black. I could. I would push him off a cliff if I met him, but. And I actually have met him, so actually. But that's beside the point. I just couldn't do it. Anyway, look, most video game adaptations are terrible, but some of the ones you cited have. And also the Last of Us have.
- [104:41]
C
Yeah, you're right.
- [104:41]
B
Last of Us also are a really good exception.
- [104:43]
A
Pretty good.
- [104:44]
C
Did you see Fallout?
- [104:44]
B
Was great. Fallouts, I think might be the best one of all. For me. Anyway, there are other forms of media that make their way into this world. Like the Walking Dead TV series started as a series of graphic novels, for example, which are actually very good and a little different from the 007.
- [105:01]
A
Started out as a novel and a movie and then a game franchise.
- [105:05]
B
There you go. Yeah. So I. Look, there's no doubt that Microsoft has a lot of good IP that would. And I've been talking about this, you know, how is there not a series of Call of Duty games? You know how.
- [105:16]
C
Oh, I can imagine.
- [105:17]
B
Halo. Halo was a TV series. I only saw bits of it. I was. It just kind of didn't interest me that much. I. I feel like it just kind of went nowhere. I believe there were two seasons and it just kind of came and went. I don't remember. But. But they do have some specifics in here. The game Sea of Thieves. Right. Which is not an indie title exactly, but kind of a lower, you know, low end, you know, not a bigger game. AAA title. Right.
- [105:41]
C
Yeah, it was.
- [105:43]
B
They did a great job popularizing it. They put it on multiple platforms. They kept supporting it with new content that is going to be adapted into a live action movie. You can believe that. Hopefully with Gina Davis, there's the. Well, there's a Minecraft animated series in development at Netflix. There is a live action Wolfenstein show at Amazon, which totally makes sense because Amazon's where everything good goes to die. And Fallout Shelter is a reality competition show currently being filmed based on Fallout, sort of. Right. I assume they're not actually going to irradiate anybody, but whatever. There could be a new Halo something. Something. I don't know if it means a movie or TV show. They haven't really. They're being a little vague on some of the this stuff. But I think we can all agree the one Microsoft property we're waiting to see turn into a movie or TV show is Candy Crush or maybe Clippy, one of the two, you know, But I don't know. We'll see what happens. But this makes sense to me. Right. By the way, Nintendo has had. They had one year where their finances were dramatically improved late in the original Switch lifecycle from the first Mario movie. Not the first one. I mean the first reason one obviously. Did they have a Mario? Yeah, they had a Mario movie a long time ago. Right. With John. So in the modern era there have been two. Now those movies have both done fantastically well, I guess like Minecraft and have lifted those companies. And this could help Micro Xbox. Right. I mean, why wouldn't you do this? This makes sense.
- [107:17]
C
Why would you try? The trick will be can will Hollywood push back when it's just a bad idea?
- [107:23]
B
Yep. One thing we've never talked about but this way my brain works is when Microsoft was buying Activision Blizzard or trying to, obviously everyone was like Call of Duty, but Microsoft kept making the point. Well, hold on a second. Yes, Call of Duty, but also mobile. We just don't have a good position in mobile. You couldn't point to a single thing they've done in mobile since they acquired Activision Blizzard. I don't know what's going on. They've just let that sit there. I don't know what they're doing. I, I've long felt that a lot of the big game franchises should come to mobile.
- [107:55]
C
Well, in all that argument in the Blizzard Activision about we need a mobile story and it's just amounted to nothing.
- [108:03]
B
I, it's. I literally, as far as I can tell, amounted nothing. I can't think of anything they've done.
- [108:08]
C
I mean, other than layoffs. What have you done?
- [108:10]
B
Right. The only time. Right. The only time King ever comes up. Yeah, I don't know. I, I don't know what they're doing. Doing there. Nothing is what it seems like to me.
- [108:18]
C
Yeah.
- [108:19]
B
So I don't know. The Xbox Insider program seems to have changed recently and I don't know if it's tied to the new leadership, if it's tied to the kind of underlying need like we have in Windows to kind of improve the platform or something, but it seems like there have been a lot of insider updates lately and not always big ones. You Know, Microsoft obviously. Well, maybe not obviously, but Microsoft does do like a, what they used to call a dashboard update, but just like a Xbox system update. Every month for a while they were kind of commingling these updates across console Windows Mobile. Right. You know, different updates on each side. These days they're focusing a lot on the console stuff. Right. And so one just went out today. This is Xbox Insiders. There's changes coming to gamer tags, Game hub, wish list and probably some other things. I didn't have a chance to look at this very big, very much, but it just happened. But so this is basically, these are just features that are going to come later in this year while we tread water, praying to God that there is a next console and it doesn't cost $2,000, you know, and we'll see what happens. But seems very unlikely.
- [109:32]
C
But I know this is a great time to delay shipping a console.
- [109:37]
B
It really is. Yeah, yeah, yep. You have every excuse in the world, you know.
- [109:40]
C
Yeah.
- [109:41]
B
I'm going to jump ahead to one thing because of that. I, I, this is fascinating to me. So we've talked a lot about GTA 6. Right. This thing was delayed. It was supposed to come out I think originally last year and then early this year.
- [109:53]
C
Yeah, it was 2025.
- [109:55]
B
Yeah, it's been a while.
- [109:56]
C
Yeah.
- [109:57]
B
It is coming out November. It is going to cost 79.99, which is, you know, fantastic. Obviously Eagle could have been $100, man.
- [110:05]
A
Could it preorder tomorrow? This is exciting.
- [110:08]
B
If you want to spend 100 bucks, you can. There's a version that costs 100 bucks, so you can do that. Here's what's interesting about this. And the first half of this will make perfect sense. You know, it's like it's only going to run on like current generation consoles. Right. There's not a version for Xbox One or PS4. It's going to run on the Series X and s and the PlayStation 5.
- [110:29]
A
Like great.
- [110:30]
B
What about the PC? That's coming out in a year. So this thing's gonna, it's not coming out in November, it's not coming out in February, it's gonna come out the following fall. The PC version of this game is not shipping. So in a world in which there are component crisis happening, video games shutting down, publishers shutting down, layoffs, you're gonna ship a game more expensive than most, only on the two latest versions of consoles which aren't really selling that good. I mean PlayStation is a lot better than Xbox, but still. And that's your go to market plan. It's like, okay. I mean, on the other hand, they're
- [111:09]
C
still selling copies of GTA 5. I know, like, I know the release date just isn't that important knowing the Lego.
- [111:18]
B
It is in a distance. I mean, you got to get it out for one thing, right? You got to get something out.
- [111:24]
C
You got to get something out and it better work. Although, you know, Cyberpunk was a disaster on its release and still made a pile of money.
- [111:33]
B
Yeah, but Cyberpunk also wasn't like a follow up to one of the best selling games of all time that everyone was eagerly waiting for. You know, like this could be a Duke Nukem forever. And I'm trying to think what else? What's an example of something that actually came out was awesome even though we waited forever for it? I can't think of anything actually. But there must be something. We'll see. I mean, I. There's no way this thing surpasses GTA 5. He says so confidently. He might be AI, but I. I just don't see.
- [111:59]
C
Well, we won't know if it is GTA 5. Wasn't GTA 5 when it was released. It became GTA 5 after a decade. Right? GTA 6. You're not going to know how big a hit it is for a long time.
- [112:14]
B
Yeah, one day we'll be talking about how it found its legs on some next gen thing we don't even know about yet. And maybe that's true, I don't know, but we'll see. I don't know. I wonder if we have the Vision
- [112:25]
C
Pro was what made gt.
- [112:28]
A
Wouldn't that be ironic?
- [112:31]
B
Sir, Excuse me, this show is not on Apple tv. Plus, I don't know why you just said that. I feel like this came up before, but I had heard that I guess Activision or whatever it was making remakes or remasters of Call of Duty Black Ops 1 and 2, which is very exciting to me. But now they've revealed that those games are in fact coming to modern PS consoles, meaning PS5 thing. And the indication is that these are just ports. They're not actually doing anything to make them work particularly good or look better or anything like that. So. So I was kind of hoping on PC especially I could buy like a modern version of those games with better graphics in the way that like, you know, Valve has done this with like the Half Life games. Or you could get like Black Mesa for Half Life 2, you know, where you can make the thing that came out in this case, you know what 10 years ago. Ish, whatever that was. Maybe longer. And have it look awesome on like a 4k stream with HDR and whatever sound system you have. Like, so I don't know, it doesn't seem like that's happening. That's too bad. Gta. Yeah. And then speaking of Duke Nukem forever. Valve, Steam or Valve. Yeah, Valve announced that the Steam machine is coming June. What's the day? 29, I think whenever. It's coming this month, late this month. Starting price is 1049. This is for a, I assume 16 gig machine with a 512 SSD. Like I said, three people via text and. Or WhatsApp and then someone else via email. But it's interesting to me that people have been reading and then actually Raphael also was talking to me about this. I would say not universally, because Raphael's like, I don't care how much this costs, I'm buying this thing immediately. Almost universally people are like, this is really expensive. And yeah, I mean it is. But then again, you know, when you look at that 8 gig Surface laptop that starts at 949, which is pointless, or a MacBook Neo, which is only 650 and. Or whatever the price, 6, 700 bucks depending on the configuration, which I think is mostly pointless unless it's just a secondary device you barely use. It's kind of in there, you know, I mean like we know there's a component crisis, we know this company doesn't have favorable pricing anywh,
- [115:02]
C
and we know that Jade Newell doesn't care. It's not important to him at all.
- [115:05]
B
Well, this is going to be an interesting test of the fan base and the market for this thing. The resilience they may or may not have in the face of what's going on in the world right now. The one thing for me though, I get it. I look at this thing and I'm like, I really like it. I like the whole idea of it. But I also am very much against anything that has to sit in one room in one, one house with one TV or whatever screen and that's the only place you can use it. And you know, one of the neat things about moving to the PC for gaming is that I can game anywhere, you know, and I can, you know, I went to Nashville last week. I played Call of Duty a couple times, you know, on a really nice laptop from someone else's, like an Airbnb type there, a vrbo, whatever it was. I, you know, I, I don't, it doesn't bother me. They're doing this, I'm a little surprised this isn't being accompanied by a Steam deck revision with more powerful innards and better screen, et cetera.
- [116:04]
C
I wonder if there is but the same problem. Why make the hardware situation worse?
- [116:10]
B
Right. So I don't know.
- [116:12]
C
Anything you haven't promised in hardware right now you should push back.
- [116:16]
B
Just gets you right. Yeah, don't start talking. Yeah, exactly, I agree.
- [116:21]
C
But let's face it, like, they're probably selling this gear for exactly costs.
- [116:26]
B
Oh, I should.
- [116:27]
C
Because its whole job is just to sell casin games.
- [116:29]
B
So. By the way though. So the 512. I'm sorry, the base configuration, this does not include a controller.
- [116:36]
C
Yeah. So nobody's going to do this. You're going to spend 1300 and load it up. Like why would you do anything else?
- [116:45]
B
You into the dealership situation. But look, when phone companies started getting rid of the power brick, you know, the argument was. Well, you know, everyone has a bunch of these but this is just digital, you know, e waste like whatever. And then, you know, sometimes you don't get a cable. You know, they got rid of headphone jacks. However you want to. Whatever you want to compare this to. I'm not sure everyone has a controller, you know, that would work with this or like controllers.
- [117:10]
A
Would an Xbox controller work?
- [117:12]
B
Yeah, I think an Xbox and PlayStation control would work.
- [117:14]
A
So you don't need that.
- [117:16]
B
I suspect others too. Yeah, no, you don't need the thing that they have. But you know, it's a. It's still a PC. It's Linux. Right. I mean it's just work. But I. Look, I don't know about you guys. Brad seemed confused by this, but I. I go through. I think I ruin a control, an Xbox controller at least twice a year. Meaning by just ape forcing it with my hands or because I'm clumsy and I throw it on the ground by mistake or it hits whatever it does. Like one of the.
- [117:42]
A
Yeah, by mistake.
- [117:43]
C
Yeah, mistake.
- [117:45]
B
I said what I said. The point is there's a quality control issue here and it's not my fault, so. But I mean like a. Like a Steam controller or whatever they're calling it.
- [117:56]
A
You want to throw that to the ground?
- [117:58]
B
No, it's 100 bucks. You want to be like, you know, delicate. Which is by the way, why I. So the first elite controller. I got one of those. Super excited about this thing. That one was fun because when you dropped it by mistake, like I would. It would explode like a Lego factory into a million little pieces. And it's like, but you could put them.
- [118:16]
A
You could put.
- [118:17]
B
So you collect them all. You collect all the pieces. You put them back the wrong way maybe and whatever. And then. But I still ended up breaking the damn stick. And it's like this thing was 150 bucks probably at the time. I was like, I'm never buying an expensive controller again. But yeah, I'm just. I'm like the gorilla jumping on the Samsonite luggage in the ad or whatever back in the 70s. Controller not work. Yeah, yeah. Stupid Xbox. Like, maybe you weren't standing on it. You know, like, what are you doing? It's.
- [118:48]
A
We're gonna take a little pause, but guess what? The back of the book is just around the corner. In moments, Paul will tell you how to save $100 a month. And I know you want to stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, let me tell you a little bit about how you can spend $10 a month and get a superb experience by joining Club Twit. You still net $90. Okay? So it's still a good deal. Club Twit gives you ad free versions of all the shows. We have lots of excitement going on in our Club Twit Discord, where all the smart people hang out and special programming that you only get if you're a club member. Coming up Friday, actually, it's the return of the crazy man coding horrors, Jeff Atwood. We will. It's. It's got a great programmer joke name off by one is. Is Friday at 2. 2pm Pacific. Time 5pm Eastern. The June 26th. That's going to be a lot of fun. I hope you'll tune in for that. Our AI users group is on July 3rd at 2pm Pacific. We also record shows like iOS Today and Home Theater Geeks this week in space in the club Micah's Crafting Corner photo time with Chris Marquardt. Micah's doing a media club. We have a Stacy's Book Club. We're also doing a media club. We just did the Fifth Element. We will be doing well. We're voting on what the next media club thing will be. I have my faves, but you get to vote if you're in the club. You also. There's some other benefits you also get because they're ad free. The Club Twit versions of all the shows, including this one, have chapter markers so you can jump around, which is really handy. We can't do that with the shows that are not ad free because some of the ads are inserted after we produce the show and they are variable length. So we don't know exactly where the chapters would be once that ad hits, so we can't do a good chapter markers. But if you're a club member, and that's a nice benefit, if you want chapter markers, join the club and do the ad free feed. You'll get a special link just for you when you join. Most of all, you get the good feeling in your heart that you're supporting independent journalism. High quality independent journalism with no that we're not owned by a big company. That's why we need to have a club, frankly. And I'm pretty proud of what we do. So you should support independent journalism. You should Support Paul's website, Thorat.com and any blog or podcast that you really appreciate. I think it's important to support it and I hope you will include us in that list. Twit TV Club Twit. And thank you in advance. Now, ladies and gentlemen.
- [121:38]
B
Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan.
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A
Yeah, hi.
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B
Quick question.
- [121:41]
C
Why are you not spending your Venmo balance?
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B
Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.
- [121:45]
A
Ugh.
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B
You love buying stuff and earn cash
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C
back on eligible purchases. Mm.
- [121:50]
A
You love purchasing eligible things.
- [121:52]
C
So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches.
- [121:57]
A
The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.
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B
Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmo stash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and Exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Terms, ID verification required to use a Venmo balance.
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C
Get business done with the new American
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A
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B
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A
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B
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- [122:31]
A
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B
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- [122:54]
A
Boys and girls, children of all ages, it's time for the Back of the Book. Beginning with Paul's tip of the week.
- [123:02]
C
Paul.
- [123:03]
B
So I think it was back in May. Yeah, we were still in Mexico and I got an email from Netflix about a price increase. And I was like, yeah, I'm done. I think I'm done. And part of it was just the irritation of Netflix continually bothering me because I go back and forth from Mexico to the United States. Right. So I'll be there. And it's like, it looks like you're not home. Like I am home. It looks like you're not home. And then, you know, my Netflix subscription, which was probably $14.99 at one point and is now 27.99, I think they're being very aggressive about not allowing my kids who do not live in the house, but in at least one case is financially dependent on me from using it as well. And what they would like to do is charge me another $10 per month for each one of those kids to use this service. So I was like, you know what? No, I think I'm going to be done. So I didn't want to do anything in kind of a knee jerk way. We knew we were going to see the kids like we did last week in Tennessee, so I figured I kind of prepped them for this. I want you guys to think about the services you use, primarily entertainment, but also things that are productivity related, like Microsoft 365, Google, whatever it might be. And I want to go through this list and kind of talk to you about it and see if we can't save some money, because I'm just tired of this. And I do think there's. Leo was just talking about Club Twit, which is a good example of, of not big tech, you know, small company making content that people like, and that's a good thing to pay for.
- [124:40]
A
But we never ask you if you're home. Notice.
- [124:44]
B
Yeah, you're not like, oh, I know you're in Mexico, you owe us another 3 cents or something. It's like, what are you doing? You know, like, so there's like a. It depends, you know, there's all these different strategies. We all, we've all had some of the same ideas, like maybe I'll use Netflix this month and then kill it and go to Hulu and then kill that and go to whatever, you know, hbo, Max, whatever. That's one thing. You know, maybe, you know, we'll see. But it was interesting stepping through. Part of the problem is where we are in life, because my kids are sort of adults in one case. It's more than the other, I guess. But my Son lives with friends and they share certain things and they do certain things. And so he's not using my Netflix account anymore. No one is actually. But that's beside the point. But at the time we still had this. And anyway, we went down the list. It was interesting to me what like, people felt strongly about if you just do it alphabetically. This is not the way it came out of my mouth. But the first one is, I believe is Amazon Prime. And my son was like, please, dear God, do not get rid of Amazon Prime. And this is the one example of a service that they can use even though they're not in the same house, which is astonishing. You have to think they're going to.
- [125:51]
A
Oh, that's interesting.
- [125:52]
B
I didn't know that. They're absolutely going to put a stop to that. But right now that works fine. We go to Mexico. There's an Amazon prime in Mexico as well. It's actually a separate account. You can use the same email address. And let me tell you, that was a huge mistake on my part. Super confusing. It's incredibly cheap in Mexico. It's something like $4 a month. And the only reason I never thought to pay for it there, but I paid for it because I was, I think I bought a monitor for the computer and I saved like almost $50 by buying it that way. And it was like, this is going to pay for the whole year. Almost like, I, of course I'm going to do it, you know, so it's cheap. Why not in the United States? I want to say it's 130, 940 bucks, something like that.
- [126:32]
A
I do wonder, though, if now everything's delivered fast, right? I mean, does it make that much of a difference in speed of delivery?
- [126:40]
B
Look in. I, I don't know. I. That's a good question. We're going to cancel to find out. Yeah, I bet.
- [126:48]
A
I wouldn't know.
- [126:49]
B
We're going to keep. Well, so the thing is, they will tell you you saved X amount of dollars or something if you had to pay for delivery. But, but to your point, like I did, I, I actually don't know, but I. Prime prime has escaped the chopping block for now. I think we're going to be okay.
- [127:06]
A
The other big one, now it's Prime Day. This is a national holiday, my friend.
- [127:09]
B
Thank you. It's. It's not. I mean, it's no flag. It's no flag day, but yes, fair enough.
- [127:16]
A
You mean Bezos isn't going to have a US UFC octagon installed?
- [127:21]
B
But it will be in space. Apple 1. I paid for the most expensive one they have. I know it sounds insane, and this is a tip. This is a great example of subscription service because it starts small. It's like two bucks a month for iCloud plus storage. And suddenly it's 40 bucks a month. And you're like, what happened? But I have all four of us use it to some degree. Apple has family sharing and it works great. And again, geographically does not matter. So the two kids and me are backing up devices, multiple devices to icloud. So there's that. My wife and I both read Apple News. My wife now uses Apple Music because one of the things I got rid of kind of necessitated that we watch Apple TV every day. And I might be missing something, but there's a lot of stuff in there. So you kind of do the math. And of course they structure the subscriptions in such a way that you couldn't do exactly the four things I want anyway. But whatever, it's going to be more expensive, et cetera, et cetera. So that one passed, I'm sad to say. I'm getting rid of my Audible Pro subscription. I don't know what it's called. Whatever. Audio premium plus, 15 bucks a month. 15 bucks a month used to be 10 bucks a month, but it's not just. The problem is I don't have enough time and I often build up credits.
- [128:35]
A
Exactly.
- [128:36]
B
And I have to pause it, which they do let you do. And it's easier today than it used to be. But I just. I just don't. I have so many audio books, and one of the things I mentioned, libraries. Sometime in the last year, I'm going to write about this again. Between Audible or ebooks and audiobooks, there is an astonishing range of ways to get these things free through libraries and related programs. And most books, not all books. And I'm maybe a weird example of someone who has read many books many times. You only listen or read them once. Right. So if you're going to do that, buy it. I mean, then you spend whatever you spend on the book. But I'm spending 15 bucks a month on something. Sadly, I feel bad about this one I don't use. I've been paying for this one. Didn't affect my kids at all. Actually, Audible didn't either. Clipchamp. I've been paying for that. You don't have to pay for Clipchamp, but there's a premium thing. It's 12 bucks a month, but they've changed it so that some of the Benefits of that thing now go through if you have a Microsoft 365 family subscription, which I do. So I got rid of that. There's some Google one, Google AI Pro something. We'll see how that evolves. I've gotten a lot of free stuff through having Pixels and things, and eventually that will end. But I will say their online storage thing makes much more sense financially than Microsoft. So that's out there. Hulu shocked me.
- [130:03]
C
How much?
- [130:03]
B
It's basically 20 bucks a month.
- [130:05]
A
So expensive. Yeah.
- [130:07]
B
And it's like, I. My daughter. This is. This is the one my daughter piped up and I was like, you're going to have to figure this out, kid. I'm sorry. Like, she can still get Edu pricing on things. They don't have a. A Hulu no Ads version for students, which is kind of bizarre. But she can get the version with ads for, like, nothing. Like, I want to say it's two bucks a month. Like, so you're going to have to watch some ads or you're going to just. I can't. I can't do it. Netflix. Like I said, dead. The big one.
- [130:34]
A
Pay for YouTube Premium. You must.
- [130:37]
B
That's the last one. I'm gonna get that. So that's the big one. Spotify. I've been wanting to kill this forever. It's not quite 20 bucks. It's 18 months. I hate Spotify. I don't use it. My daughter and son always used it. My wife moved to it at some point. She doesn't do a lot with music, but she had been on Pandora and I don't remember what it was, but
- [130:56]
A
we had Pandora replacement.
- [130:58]
B
Yeah, we were using it like, whatever. So she kind of uses it, whatever. So I talked to the kids about this and this is. This is. This is the thing. You got to talk to people. Like, when you're paying for things that other people are using, you got to check in from time to time. I know my son moved. He moved to Apple Music about either last year or the year before. And the reason he did was because they have really good. I don't know if it's. You know, he's deaf, right? So he. But he can hear with a cochlear implant. But there's something in Apple music. I don't know if it's live captioning or some capability into there that he loves and he's just switched to it. So he just used lyrics and they don't. Yeah, I don't remember what it was, but he's super he loves it. So I figured my daughter would be the holdout here again. And she goes, oh, I don't even use this anymore. She's like, I. I get this through my student thing for nothing. And I was like, oh, thanks for telling me. So I was like, all right, this is going. And then my wife's like, hold on a second. I'm like. She's like, I use Spotify. I'm like, no, you don't, but you're gonna use Apple Music. She's like, I have an Android phone. I'm like, welcome to my world, honey. It works. You'll be fine. Yeah, so I just switched her over. She's fine. That one's. That's, you know, whatever. So YouTube Premium is the thing that's emerged as what I would call, like, last service standing. This is just an entertainment space, but I don't know why this is so cheap for me. When I look this up, it says, this is for an individual thing. It's 16 bucks per month according to YouTube. I'm paying less than $11 per month. And I don't know why. I don't know if I was grandfathered in because I used to pay for YouTube Music Premium or. I have no idea. But if you ever watch YouTube without this and then you try the premium and you don't have ads and you can skip the sponsor segments and stuff, you will never want to use YouTube anymore.
- [132:39]
C
You'll never go back.
- [132:40]
B
Yeah, it is. It is the one. If I had kill everything. This is the thing I watch, and I watch it more than I think I watch anything. No, I definitely do. I watch YouTube more than anything.
- [132:48]
A
But don't you get YouTube music with that?
- [132:50]
B
Yes, and that's what I use for music.
- [132:52]
A
So you have a lot of music subscriptions?
- [132:55]
B
No, I used to have three. I used to have three. Spotify, the standalone one I got rid of. Apple Music is part of Apple One, which I'm not getting rid of, but I use it sometimes. But my wife now and my son use it. That's fine. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium to combine for me is 10.59amonth. I mean, it's like, I'm not getting rid of this.
- [133:15]
A
It's a must.
- [133:16]
B
And I. Look, I'll just tell you, for music, if you're a music lover, yes, they do not have Dolby Atmos sound. They don't have lossless audio. But what they do have is the entire YouTube collection of videos, which includes many songs that are no services other than there. And they work in audio playlists in YouTube Music. So you could have like a live song from a concert that's on YouTube. It's in a playlist of music. It's very. It's a unique capability and I love it. Like, I love YouTube music and how
- [133:46]
A
I have it works. See, I'm not a fan of it. I use it because I have Google devices and when I ask for an album, it almost always says, here's a YouTube playlist.
- [133:55]
C
Right.
- [133:55]
A
And it's not an album, it's somebody made a playlist. And that bugs the hell out of me. I do. I feel like I'm trapped in.
- [134:04]
B
I'm not sure why that is. This is like, like the dedicated YouTube music app.
- [134:08]
A
Yeah. It's not really like, it's not like the others getting albums.
- [134:14]
B
So many people I'll criticize Spotify and people like, I don't know what you're talking about. I love this thing. And it's like, yeah, I hear you. I, I hate it. I mean, I hate it so much. I, I do not want to use it. I don't. I. I hate it. But there's something about YouTube music that works for me. It just makes sense to me. I don't know why I, I have a hard time using Apple music in some ways because it's not as the same way. It's weird. Like, I know it doesn't make any sense.
- [134:38]
A
Spotify is probably the best. I hate to say it, I hate it.
- [134:41]
B
I'm not, I don't care.
- [134:42]
A
Just in terms of like getting the music you want, getting the radio station or the album.
- [134:48]
B
Look, this is. I actually, I think I'm rare for my age group. I'm always looking for new music, listening for new music.
- [134:55]
A
Don't you think that Discover Channel. Well, you don't have it anymore. I don't have it anymore. But at the time I thought, no, I don't care.
- [135:01]
B
But Spotify, Discovery, YouTube and Apple both do this as well. I think they're just. Apple is actually very good playlist for bands, for example. But if you're out in the world, depending on the phone, like a pixel that has that thing built in the home screen, which is wonderful. If you have an Apple device, you
- [135:16]
A
have a Shazam that says what the music is. Yeah.
- [135:18]
B
And so I kind of collect this stuff. We'll be in a restaurant, a bar, a. It could be an Uber, you know, this music playing. And I'm like, oh, what's this? And then, you know, every once in a while I'll add A bunch of songs to a play. I'll listen to them again because sometimes they don't fly. Right.
- [135:30]
A
That's why there's so much mariachi music on your playlist.
- [135:34]
B
Yeah, I'm not a big fan. So. Because you said that. Because, because you said that, I will just tell you. This is an embarrassing fact about me. I. I hate mariachi music. I am friends with people in a mariachi band and they are really nice people and they come by. They come by this bar we are at all the time. We always. It's great to see them. They came and sang on my birthday, for example. I really am not a fan.
- [136:02]
A
I love that big bass guitar that they play. I just love trumpets, the tight butt outfits. I just think in every way.
- [136:10]
B
I tried to. I. He didn't understand enough English for this joke to be funny for him. But I was like, you guys are like the opposite of Menudo. You can only do this when you get old enough, you know? And he was like, I don't. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, you're 80 years old. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So happy, man. So look, the stuff I just mentioned in that list, that's $94 a month that I got rid of. Like, that's astonishing.
- [136:33]
A
That's amazing.
- [136:34]
B
There's a whole other world out there, though, because there's also things like newspapers, which I pay for, some of which are work related. I gotta be careful here. There are Microsoft 365, consumer and business subscriptions. And also, well, the Google stuff, which I have to sort of rectify. I'll get there. And Game Pass Ultimate. Right. But the thing is, and Richard is the only one who will sort of understand this, I have all these friends who used to work at Microsoft who still work at Microsoft. So I get like entry into their kind of ability to buy those things less expensively sometimes. So I have racked up years of Microsoft 365 family, Microsoft 365 business, not basics. I think it's business standard or whatever. Game Pass Ultimate. These are things right now, me, I would not pay for, but I paid for them in much smaller increments, like smaller amounts and bought, you know, years out, you know, so they're just there and they're going to occur. Like I'm just, you know, my wife uses some of it. You know, I rarely use Xbox. Game Pass Ultimate. But when you add that stuff up, those three things, those Microsoft subscriptions, I mean, this is like 50 bucks a month just from. Just to Microsoft, you know, or it would be if I was paying the full price. I'm just lucky. I don't. So whatever. And then I'm not going to get into this day. I'm already, I'm running long. I got to be careful. But there's more to come here because obviously in some cases you'd be like, okay, I'm paying for three music services, I can get rid of one. Great, that's pretty simple. But how do you make up for. You don't have Netflix, you don't have Hulu. What do you do if you get rid of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal or whatever? And so I'm gonna. This will keep coming up, you know, next month or two. So we'll hit that when we hit it, I guess is the.
- [138:20]
C
It is definitely turn on the sports service when the curling events are on.
- [138:26]
B
Well, that's not what I would choose, but one. Yeah. So we don't pay for. We don't have live tv. Right. So one of the issues that this has been for years, right? So, so we have people over on New Year's Eve and we want to watch the ball drop or something. So my brother in law will bring over like a fire TV stick and he has his thing and it works fine. Or my son and daughter will be home over Thanksgiving, Christmas or whatever. Not for the whole duration, but they come for Thanksgiving and then leave and come back for Christmas. And it's like, well, Mark especially is like, well, I want to watch the basketball games on Christmas Day or the football games on Thanksgiving Day, whatever it might be. So it's like, like not every year, but often I will pay for like a month of two of YouTube Premium, which by the way is like a car payment. And. But I won't pay for it for the whole year because, you know, I wouldn't mind. I don't watch it. That's just wasted money. So we were already doing a little bit of this. There may be a thing, like I said that. And again, this is not a unique idea, but maybe there's some big show on Netflix. You're like, all right, we'll just pay for Netflix this month and we'll use it. Like, we'll watch that show. Yeah, we'll binge other things and then we'll get rid of it and we'll move over to whatever service, you know, so we'll see how that goes.
- [139:35]
C
Now then a new show, you know, new season of Earth the moon comes up. So you sign up for Apple tv, you binge it, and you shut it off again.
- [139:42]
B
Oh, yeah. So I. Well, I didn't mention Apple TV because it's part of Apple One and that's just gonna continue because it's part of it. But yeah, I don't. I wouldn't pay for Apple TV myself either. Apple TV plus, if that was a standalone thing, I. Yeah, we do watch it. You know, we use the Apple tv. I have an Apple TV device and we have whatever apps on it. And I have my NAS that has content on it. I can play that on the tv. I do that stuff. But the actual Apple. Well, I do, you know, like shrinking and, you know, Ted Lasso will come back and there's good shows. Earth to the Moon or what's it called? The problem Mankind. Yeah, there's great shows on there. But yeah, I don't have to give money every month, but I do because I'm a good Apple customer.
- [140:24]
A
You do anyway.
- [140:25]
B
I do. That's how I do things. The Epic will be considerably shorter. Sorry, I think I might have mentioned this recently anyway, but I have two markdown editors I go back and forth on all the time as the one I prefer the most, but IA Writer is one of the two. I had mentioned them recently or the past couple months because there were some changes there where they allowed you to buy the app directly from them, not just through an app store, which I think is kind of cool if you buy it on desktop. They brought the. Well, they did the 2.0 version on Windows, which is a big improvement. Still not quite as good as the Mac, but still a big deal. There's authorship on there now, meaning you can see who wrote what and color, whatever. If you're collaborating on document sites. I'll never use it, but kind of cool. And then they had separate search outline views and still do on Windows, actually, but now they've integrated those on the Mac. IPad and an iPad. I wrote in the notes. Mac, iPad and iPhone. And so this is, you know, depending on where you're at and where you work and where you do things. This is if you're going to move to markdown, which I do recommend. This is one of the two best apps, for sure.
- [141:40]
A
Well, it's time for our hydration break. Paul took all of the penalty minutes up, so we're just going to have to get right to Richard Campbell and run as radio.
- [141:53]
C
This week's run as is with Tanya Janka, otherwise known as she Hacks Purple. So, yeah, it's her, her handle on Twitter and other social medias. She's done a couple of great books, but she very much focused on helping developers do the right things as far as security concern. But this particular conversation was more aimed at the administrator, hence on Run as where we were talking about what administrators can do to help secure developers. So the black hats, especially with the new LLM tools, are getting good at targeting developers. You know, they're still running in very privileged account. Most developer tools need high privilege accounts just to operate and they're often touching secrets, getting into various vaults and things. They have access to high privilege accounts in the cloud for deployment. And CICD pipelines, while sort of essential to modern development, also have huge vulnerabilities. And the ability for the LLMs to parse data and then quickly create a response have meant a whole new class of attacks on developer pipelines. And so this was the conversation we focused on about dealing with how these supply chain attack, these different forms of supply chain attack are emerging, not just that they're hacking open source software and it's getting deployed, but rather that the pipelines themselves hold so many privileges that it's very easy for devs to make a mistake, that a phishing attempt against a dev account which can be successful often leads to high privilege access that can be moved on very quickly. And so we sort of work through various scenarios of how we can contend with these problems and help developers secure the process a bit more, lock a few more things down and just trying to make it harder for the bad guys to have success.
- [143:47]
A
Nice.
- [143:48]
C
Well, it's actually spun up a bunch of shows like over the next month you're going to see me revisit these topics of the role of LLMs in hacking.
- [143:56]
A
Oh yeah.
- [143:57]
C
Because it's just the environment is changing.
- [144:00]
A
We've been talking about it a lot on security now for sure, it's big.
- [144:03]
C
It's a big, big deal.
- [144:05]
A
Well, I'm glad that the cheering coming from Vancouver did not drown you out. You can now continue. Don't look at the T, don't look at the tv.
- [144:16]
C
What's the score? Do you know the score?
- [144:18]
A
What's the score? I know the score. I'm not going to tell you the score. I'm just going to say there are about.
- [144:23]
C
It's 5:1. Switzerland for 5:1.
- [144:26]
B
No, no, no, no, no, no.
- [144:28]
A
It's much closer. In fact, it might get closer still in a moment and.
- [144:32]
C
Oh.
- [144:33]
A
So I'm just going to say that there's about 20 minutes left and yeah, we're going to have time to watch the final moments of that game.
- [144:42]
B
That's weird. There's just about 20 minutes left in this podcast.
- [144:45]
A
The whiskey segment right now.
- [144:47]
C
Yeah, well, and I'm not going to rush this one, because I've been putting together a story which I'm going to actually use later, sort of on how Canadian whiskey has evolved, and in the process of doing that, realized there was this weird exception. And I happen to have had a drink of this this week, although I don't have the bottle with me. And it's Glen Breton, specifically the glen bletton rare 10. So we have to go to Nova Scotia. And Nova Scotia is one of the Atlantic provinces, also known as the. Originally the Maritime Provinces, along with New Brunswick and Newfoundland. There is a little isthmus that can. Between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the main part of Nova Scotia called the Isthmus of Genecto, that connects the two together. And then the third is Prince Edward Island. That's, you know, Anne of Green Gables. That's where she's from. Just north of Nova Scotia, which is actually connected to New Brunswick now via the very shiny Confederation Bridge, which only opened in 1997. Before that, you had to take a ferry. Cape Breton, specifically, is an island right adjacent to Nova Scotia, just on the northeast side. It's part of Nova Scotia now, connected via a thing called the Kenso Causeway, which also has a canal and so forth for ships to get through. But this, of course, is an ancient land. The Mi' Kmaq people have been there for millennia, and they called the island much more appropriately, Anuamaki, which means the Land of the Long Fog, because this is Atlantic Canada, right on the water, and it is foggy there a lot. It's like San Francisco. Yes, yes. This chunk of this. This is a seasonal island. The Micmacs would fish the coasts in the summertime and hunt inland in the wintertime. Although the Micmac people spread all across the Atlantic provinces, Labrador, Newfoundland, across Nova Scotia, down into what would be northeastern Maine as well. And they've been there for literally millennia. The Vikings didn't make it as far as Nova Scotia. Very famously. There's Lansdemeto, which is of northern Newfoundland. Around 1000 AD, they set up a site, and there's actually written documentation from the Vikings of that era. They didn't last because the native peoples that were there were tough and fought back. This great piece I read in one of the historical references, about a Viking describing an Inuit, AKA an Eskimo. These were the people that lived on seal primarily and had kayaks. And so the Viking was confused because it had the. He's found this upper body of a human wrapped in skins, but wearing a boat. And so. But it ends with. Poked it with a spear and it bled just like a person. It's like, gee, how do you make friends? Anyway, if you fast forward a bit, there's a famous fellow by the name of John Cabot, Englishman, who sailed a boat called the Matthew up the Atlantic coast in 1497. And he very likely went past Nova Scotia, but did not land. His official landing site is an area called called Cape Bonavista on Newfoundland, Although that is debated somewhat. He wasn't good at keeping records. He didn't do a lot of documentation, but he did in a letter, note that the waters in that area were, quote, teeming with cod, like cod, to the point where it was difficult to row through it. This is that area now known as the Grand Banks. And within a few years, French and Basque fishermen were working those banks. So food first. The French are the first to colonize the area in the 1600s. This is Samuel de Champlain, as in Lake Champlain, and Pierre Dugas, who initially settle in 16 oh a settlement in 1604 on a little island in the Bay of Fundy called Sainte Croix. They last a year. After a bad winter and a bunch of disease, they move over onto the land is now known as Nova Scotia. Into they called the town they established Port Royal, although today is known as Annapolis Royal. And we'll explain why. This is the beginning of the Acadians. Now, shortly after that, by 1608, Champlain goes down the St. Lawrence and establishes Quebec and really becomes the center of New France. And so Acadia is largely neglected. It's its own farming and fishing area. And then you. And the St. Lawrence Valley becomes the more important busy spot. There's just a lot more opportunity. There is a lot more land there. The access to the Great Lakes, that all became a big deal. So the Acadians are largely left to themselves, although they are interacting heavily with New England, because Maine's right there, you know, it's just not that far. And in fact, the English keep pushing up into that land. And in 1613, one Captain Samuel Argyle of Virginia burns Port Royal to the ground, which kicks off a bit of a conflict with the Acadians. In the middle of all of that, in 1621, a large group of Scottish colonists arrived and claim the region. And that's when they call it Nova Scotia, as in New Scotland, although The French are like, what? The what? And they, in a treaty called the Saint Germain and Lye in 1632, go, no, this is French land. Get out of there. But a few years later, during Cromwell's England in 1654, they seize Acadia and they hold it for 16 years, but don't colonize it because they're busy fighting their own fights, the civil war in England. And so with the treaty of Breda in 1667, it is French again. And the Acadians at this point are like, you all just do what you want to do. We just want to farm. Like, leave us alone. In 1690, what they call the King William's war and Queen Anne's war result in New England forces. So this is coming up from the colonies attacking Port Royal. The French and the Micmac are working side by side. In the French law, the Micmac are just subjects. They're part of the population. They're treated equally. And so the Micmac are very pro French, and they work to fight against New England quite successfully until finally the British roll major troops in it in 1710, take Port Royal once for all, rename it Annapolis Royal, which is its name today. And that ultimately results in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, where France cedes all of mainland Acadia today that we call New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to Britain. And that leaves these Acadians, who are French Catholics now under British Protestant rule. And the Micmacs aren't having any of it because the British don't consider them humans. They're just natives. And so they fight the British steadily. But the French being forced off the mainland part of Nova Scotia focus on Cape Breton, the island just to the north there, and they call it El Royal. And they also have what's now known as Prince Edward island at that time known as Ile St. John. St. John, and will later be known as St. John for the longest time before it becomes PEI. They build a town called Louisbourg in 1719, and they built a large fortress, which isn't completed till 1740, but is one of the most powerful fortresses in the area. This is the eastern side of Cape Breton. It has an excellent sheltered harbor with both the town and the fortress is an effective guard to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So it is supported by France, who's again, most of their activities are further west down the St. Lawrence in New France. And it becomes a major commercial fishing hub. In fact, it's competitive with Boston and Philadelphia at the time as the major ports on the east coast of the Americas. Now the Acadians are not happy that all of that mainland is. Is now controlled by England, although they're largely neglecting it. So some of them are hanging more in Cape Breton, but they're mostly resisting. And. And actually they played the trade game fairly well where they trade with both New England and Lebanon. While the French are saying, don't trade with the English, the English saying, don't trade with the French. So they just do both. This goes on for a few years until 1744, when war breaks out between England and France again. And this time the English come through. They take Lewisburg, although a few years later, the Treaty of El Chapelle lands Louisbourg back to France. And that's when the English get serious. They set up the city, the town of Halifax, which is on the main part of Nova Scotia. This is now the major city of Nova Scotia. To counter Leu Berg, now they bring in British troops, they set up a naval port. Lots of settlers flood into the area, and it's actually the Mi' Kmaq that start to resist. There's a priest called Father Latour, it's known as Father Latour's War, where they're actually actively resisting the British. This peaks in 1755 into what we call the great upheaval. This is the mass deportation of the Acadians. British military rolls into an Acadian village. They take control of the roads and bridges. They use the chur as assembly point. They require all families to gather for registration. That mostly means the men go in to do the registration. They then lock up the men and then round up the women and children, burn down the farms and the houses, destroy the dike system, seize livestock and or slaughter it, and then force march these families to be loaded onto cargo ships and dispersed. Many go to the thirteen colonies. Some actually end up. Virginia flatly refuses to receive any, and they end up diverting to England. Some go to France itself. Many end up in the Caribbean, Saint Dominique, Guadalupe, Martinique in Jamaica, and some just plain flee all the way to Quebec. But otherwise other locales in Newfoundland and Labrador. By 1758, Cape Breton and P.E.I. have fallen to the British as well. And this ultimately ends in the 1763 in the treaty of Paris, which seeds Maritime Provinces entirely from France, except for the two little islands, St. Pierre and Merton, off the coast of Newfoundland, who will be very important during US Prohibition, because that's France. And so you can export out of Canada just to these little islands. And then what you do after that doesn't matter to the Canadians. Fast forward a couple of years in 1764, Louisiana opens up to the Acadians, and a bunch of the Acadians that have been displaced in France and elsewhere come to Louisiana. This is the origin of the Cajuns. As the British have asserted control over Nova Scotia in a large way, they basically say, hey, if, you know, colonists are just rare, right, this is still a time of really low populations. And so they do offer that the Acadians can return to Nova Scotia if they declare an unconditional allegiance to the British Crown, but also can't go back to their original farms, but they can establish new ones, and a bunch do, because they know how good the land is, and they start to set up other towns in the area. Another big burst of colonization into Nova Scotia comes in 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, where the British Loyalists, you know, as opposed to the traitors, escape from the American colonies and move into the area. And so by 1784, Cape Breton and Nova Scotia Hull is functioning as its own colony, although they'll be unified in 1820. And in the midst of all of that, with the Industrial Revolution going on, coal is found on Cape Breton and a bunch of Scottish settlers who have been doing mining in Scotland, but rather not. Rather not be there anymore, actually immigrate to Nova Scotia. And so through the 1830s, you have a relatively prosperous time. The ports there are very good for building out ships. This is whaling time. There's lots of research, resource extraction going on, although productivity tapers off in the 1860s as more development is moving west. And the development of the railways drive things. And the terrain of Nova Scotia is not conducive to building railways very easily. So the power of the railways moving elsewhere means the money goes there. And so we get to 1867, which is the Confederation of Canada. And although there's much debate, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick do join right at the Confederation Point at 1867, where other proverbs provinces joined later, the latest being Newfoundland, just to the north, who doesn't actually join confederation till 1949. Now, what has this got to do with whiskey? Well, nothing, because the whiskey, it needs grain. And most of the grain that's being grown at that time is for food. And so most of the booze that's being made because it's British controlled is rum. They're bringing up molasses from the Caribbean and most of the distilleries operate out of Halifax, but they're making rum for the most part. And so you don't get a lot of whiskey industry there. Although further west where you grow more grain. And that's another story when we've told at times in and around Quebec and Toronto and Ontario is where you get all the grain growing that turns into whiskey. But that lands US to 1990 and this place called Glenora. So whiskey came and went. You know, it was popular coming out of the. Out of Prohibition did. And then World War II was an interruption. It did all right in the 50s, but in the 60s and 70s and even in the 80s it slows down a lot. And then there's a resurgence whiskey. And I've always argued that it was that great classic malt of Scotland moment. In 1988, this was United Distillers, which would eventually become Diageo, where they bundled up six whiskies that they owned. Glen Kinchy, Dalwinnie, Cragganmore, Oban, Tausker and Lagavula. And also ordered in sort of strength of flavor. Glen Kinschi being the mildest, the Lowland and Lagavulin being from. From Islay being the very peaty, strong one. And the expectation was the middle, the Cragganmore, the Speyside would be the hit. But it turned out that Lagavulin was the hit, that the very strong flavored and it sort of fed into the culture at the time. And suddenly single malt whiskey was a big deal again. And right at that time, a guy named Bruce Jardine in 1989 decides he wants to make single malt whiskey in Cape Breton. He thinks the conditions are much like Scotland. Cape Breton looks like the Highlands of Scotland. But he's also the first to talk about making single malts in North America, full stop. So he travels in Scotland to learn more about whiskey making and ends up setting up a relationship with Beaumore of all places, who ultimately train him and even equip him. They ship him out with a couple of ex Bowmore stills and mash duns back to Cape Breton. They even provide some whiskey. Early on. He does a blend with Beaumar in it. So the distillery is up and running in 1990, very small operation. He's got a limited amount of money. But now you got the real problem making whiskey, which is a distilling is the easy part. Waiting for it to mature is the hard part. And so Jardine tries to make a go of it. He sells a white dog called Kenlock Silver, although it doesn't do particularly well, and does do a blended with some Beaumore in it to try and create some other options. But by 1994, he's about out of money and makes a deal with a very well to do family in Cape Breton known as the McLean's. Specifically Lachlan McLean, who does buy Jardine's concept of making a great Canadian single malt. Jardine largely, you know, bows out at this point. It actually passes away in 1999. And by the way, I could not even find a photo of this guy, much less much of his history. But he figured if he passed away in 1999, he missed the Internet revolution for the most part. He just never was actually online. But when the McLean's take over, they recognize the tourist opportunity this is. And billionaires build out a big visitor center, a pub, even a set of chalets. There's a bit of a hotel complex there. So it's a, it's a destination as well as a place to make whiskey. And so by 2000, so roughly 10 years in, they start to produce a version of their whiskey they call Glen Breton Rare. And the whiskey, the Scottish Whiskey association freaks out because they always associate Glen with Scottish whiskey. That's not Canadian product. And you know, Glenora's response of course is the bottle is labeled very clearly product of Canada. So they actually, the SWA files suit in Canada and the Canadian Trademarks board rules in favor of Glenora. It's clearly a Canadian product. Glenn can't be an owned word. That's not a thing. The SWA does not give up. They actually go to the Federal Court of Canada who overturns the decision and basically tells Glenna they have to rebrand. Glenora countersues again, goes to the federal Appeals court in 2009, gets it overturned again in flavor of Glenora. SWA doesn't give up, goes to the Supreme Court of Canada and they refuse to hear it. And so it sticks. You can use the word Glenn. In fact, they respond to that by in 2010 releasing a bottle a 15 year old called the Battle of the Glen. But the other side of that whole battle was a huge amount of free marketing. This made the news everywhere of Scotland trying to defend the idea of making single malts. And it really established precedent that single malt is not just a Scottish thing. And we've already talked about the fact that single malt is a completely made up thing. It was made up by the Glenn Livitt guys in the 60s as a marketing strategy. It's got nothing to do with anything. That being said, Glen Breton Rare 10 is very much a Scottish whiskey. In fact, they use Scottish malt, they do a 60 hour fermentation in wooden washbacks. They have these two 5600 liter four size stills from Rothy's. They are the ex Bowmore stills they got back in the 90s. And they even build Scottish style rack houses, earth floors, wooden walls, barrel stacked horizontally. They age in American oak ax ex bourbon barrels. They also do some specialty barrelings including some ice wines which are very distinctive. They make a mainline production that looks like Scottish whiskey. A 10 year old, a 14 year old, a 19 year old and now a 21 year old. Gets pricey though. The Glen Breton 10 drinks like a spay. It's mild, it's sweet, it's fruity, and it's about $90 Canadian, so it's not that cheap and you can get it in the US for about 120 bucks. And that's all I got to say about that. With like two minutes to spend.
- [163:24]
A
You ended so roughly. I wasn't prepared.
- [163:27]
C
I just came in.
- [163:27]
A
Okay.
- [163:28]
C
I didn't want to run you out of time, friend.
- [163:30]
A
Glenn Breton, everybody.
- [163:32]
C
And you know, I have this whole story of the Canadian whiskey and like Glenn Breton doesn't fit into it because they've done their own thing. Yeah, they're just, well, funny. They're a funny character. But they literally were the first single malt in North America.
- [163:44]
A
Wow. Mr. Richard Campbell's done it again. Ladies and gentlemen, our hydration break is over and you may now resume your previously enjoyed broadcast. Whatever, thanks for playing. It looks like the game is almost over too. So we'll just, we'll end on this note before Richard bursts into tears and oh no, you know what, Canada's going on anyway, aren't they?
- [164:11]
C
They're going to go on anyway.
- [164:12]
B
You need a tie right to.
- [164:14]
C
Well, if they tied, they got to play their games in Canada. If they've lost now, they're going to play the games in the US and who wants that? Nobody wants that.
- [164:23]
A
Nobody wants.
- [164:24]
B
You stole my joke from me. But yes, that's a good point. Can we just play in Mexico?
- [164:29]
A
I mean.
- [164:30]
C
Yeah.
- [164:30]
A
Campbell is@runnersradio.com that's where you'll find his podcast run, his radio and Net Rocks. And yes, there's a new geek out episode of Net Rocks on data centers.
- [164:41]
C
Yeah. Did the data centers in space as a Net Rocks.
- [164:44]
B
I hope you said it as space in space.
- [164:46]
A
I think that's going to be great. I can't wait to listen to that. I was watching your NDC talk on AI that's up on YouTube now, so that's great. Everybody can see that. Paul thurat is@therot.com Become a Premium Member. You get all his books too. You can if you're already a premium member@thorat.com, you can go to leanpub.com and pick up a copy of the Field Guide to Windows 11 Windows Deinshidifying Windows. That's a bit of a word. And Windows Everywhere. A history of Windows through its coding frameworks. Together, Paul and Richard join us every Wednesday 11am Pacific 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC for Windows Weekly. You can watch us do it live if you're in the club, of course, in the club Twit, Discord, but also on X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik, YouTube and Twitch. Six different places you can watch live after the fact. On demand versions of the show are at our website. We have audio and video at Twitt TV MBW. The video also lives on a dedicated YouTube channel for Windows Weekly. But the easiest thing probably is subscribe. I know it's kind of old school, but there is a podcast client somewhere out there with your name on it. If you search for Windows Weekly, press the subscribe button.
- [166:02]
B
Especially if you made it with AI, then it could really have your name.
- [166:05]
A
It might actually literally have your name on it. Thank you Paul. Thank you Richard. Thank you to all our winners and our dozers and we will see you next Wednesday for Windows Weekly. Bye bye.
- [166:27]
B
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A
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C
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- [167:27]
B
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C
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B
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B
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C
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B
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B
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