WW 908: Twenty-Six Boxes of Napoli - Microsoft Ignite 2024, Half-Life 2 turns 20, "Agentic"

Summary

Windows Weekly (Episode WW 908 Summary)

Release Date: November 20, 2024

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1. Welcome Back and Episode Introduction

After a brief hiatus due to unforeseen circumstances, hosts Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell reunite with Leo Laporte to deliver Episode 908 of Windows Weekly. The episode is aptly titled "Twenty-Six Boxes of Napoli - Microsoft Ignite 2024, Half-Life 2 Turns 20, 'Agentic'," indicating a deep dive into recent developments at Microsoft Ignite 2024, a celebration of Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, and a focus on Microsoft's "agentic" AI initiatives.

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [00:00]: "We'll also talk about a big Xbox segment coming up. Some great new games coming to Xbox Game Pass and a couple of really old games coming back from the dead."

2. Microsoft Ignite 2024 Overview

The trio delves into the highlights from Microsoft Ignite 2024, emphasizing the company's significant push into artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft's branding of its AI initiatives as "agentic AI" suggests a move towards more autonomous and intelligent systems that can perform tasks on behalf of users.

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [00:43]: "We're glad you're back in Madeira Park, BC, just in time for the bomb cyclone."

3. Understanding Agentic AI

A substantial portion of the discussion revolves around Microsoft's "agentic AI." The term "agentic" implies that AI systems possess a degree of autonomy, enabling them to act on behalf of users without constant oversight. The hosts debate the implications, benefits, and potential risks associated with granting AI such autonomy.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [21:14]: "I always think I'm going to overreact. Like, it's a little. It's a little."

4. AI in Daily Operations and Business Applications

The conversation shifts to how agentic AI can transform business operations. Examples include automating financial transactions based on predefined criteria or managing complex data workflows. The hosts discuss the balance between automation efficiency and the potential loss of control or oversight.

Notable Quote:

Richard Campbell [25:43]: "You start to get into more sophisticated options there."

5. Security Enhancements in Windows 11

Security remains a paramount theme, with Microsoft introducing multiple enhancements in Windows 11. Features like Windows Hello, Essentials Security Services (ESS), and advanced BitLocker configurations are highlighted as steps towards fortifying the operating system against emerging threats.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [98:03]: "We have been talking for a long time now, a couple of years. We reference about what Microsoft is doing with AI."

6. Copilot Plus PC and AI Integration

Copilot Plus PC is introduced as Microsoft's initiative to integrate AI deeply into everyday computing tasks. This involves leveraging Microsoft's NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to run AI processes locally, enhancing performance and reducing reliance on cloud-based computations.

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [63:12]: "It's less a Chromebook experience."

7. Windows on ARM and New Hardware Developments

The hosts explore Windows on ARM, discussing its evolution and the challenges associated with driver compatibility and hardware optimization. Microsoft's introduction of new thin clients and cloud-based PCs is examined as part of its strategy to streamline Windows deployments and enhance security.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [86:20]: "There's a variety of ways to restore or reset or whatever it is."

8. Gaming Industry Insights: Half-Life 2 Anniversary and New Releases

Celebrating Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, the hosts reflect on its enduring legacy in the gaming community. They also preview upcoming titles making their way to Xbox Game Pass, including highly anticipated releases like Stalker 2, Avowed, and remastered classics, underscoring Microsoft's commitment to expanding its gaming ecosystem.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [159:59]: "Yes, it's 22% and above are considered spirit only up to 60% and anything over 60% is illegal in Norway to this day."

9. Future of Energy and Microsoft's Role

Richard Campbell introduces a segment on the future of energy, referencing Norway's advancements in renewable energy and Microsoft's potential influence in this sector. The discussion touches upon sustainable practices and how tech giants like Microsoft can drive positive environmental change.

Notable Quote:

Richard Campbell [209:35]: "How do they assess untrusted AI if you address that?"

10. Closing Thoughts and Community Engagement

As the episode wraps up, the hosts encourage listeners to engage with the Windows Weekly community through various platforms, including their Club Twit membership. They highlight upcoming events, community-driven segments, and the importance of listener support in sustaining the show's quality.

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [211:16]: "Switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that."

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Conclusion

Episode WW 908 of Windows Weekly offers an extensive exploration of Microsoft's latest ventures into AI, security enhancements in Windows 11, and exciting developments in the gaming industry. Through insightful discussions and expert analysis, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of where Microsoft is heading and what it means for both enterprise and consumer markets.

For those interested in the intersection of AI and everyday computing, as well as the future trajectory of gaming platforms, this episode serves as a valuable resource. The hosts’ ability to dissect complex topics and present them in an engaging manner ensures that both tech enthusiasts and casual listeners can glean meaningful insights.

Join the Conversation: Stay connected with the Windows Weekly community by subscribing to their podcast on your preferred platform and consider becoming a Club Twit member to access exclusive content and engage with like-minded tech aficionados.

Transcript

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theratz here. Richard Campbell's here. You know where they're not. Microsoft Ignite. We get the explanations. And what's going on at Ignite? It looks like AI is a big push. What a surprise. They call it agentic AI. We'll also talk about a big Xbox segment coming up. Some great new games coming to Xbox Game Pass and a couple of really old games coming back from the dead. It's all next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is twit.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 908, recorded November 20, 2024. 26 boxes of Monopoly. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we talk about everything. Microsoft and the entire crew is back. And it couldn't make me happier.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello.

[Paul Thurrott]

Richard Campbell. We missed you. Richard was gone for a couple of weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Who is this third man?

[Paul Thurrott]

First in Tunisia, where there was no Internet and then you didn't. You fell ill in Lithuania. Yes, you, you.

[Leo Laporte]

I was getting nervous.

[Richard Campbell]

You would not have wanted that show. It was grim.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I bet. Anyway, we're glad you're feeling better.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you're back in Madeira park, bc.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. In the storm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just in time for the bomb cyclone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which it's interesting, even though we are miles apart, we are sharing the same storm.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. I'm on the. I'm on the top edge of it and you're on the bottom edge of it. So there you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

And poor Olympia Washington is dabbing the.

[Richard Campbell]

Belly button, taking it hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, welcome back, Richard. We literally did miss you. It was.

[Richard Campbell]

I miss you guys too. It was really weird to not have that midweek conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I was telling Richard before the show began that basically my friends are the show. Other people I do the shows with, that's who I talk to you guys like six hours a day and that's enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

He's got time for friends after that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't need no one else. And actually, to be honest, I would should include like the club members in the chat room and all that because those are. Even though, in fact, somebody in there, Paul Holder, said, well, I consider you a friend, even though, you know, you probably don't. I said, paul, we've never met, but you are absolutely my friend because he and I are coding buddies. He's like a really hot shot coder and so I ask him all my coding questions. We were talking about that the other day where it's still probably the case that if you want. If you're looking for a gray beard in, you know, php.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not going to probably be in your community.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, not these days.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's going to be online. Paul Thurat is my gray beard when it comes to Delphi.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I think it was Mark Rozinovich or maybe Scott Hanselman said recently that they had talked to some expert in some coding, like, you know, Python or something, and they said, well, you're a. You're a PI. An expert in whatever this language is. And he said, I used to be, you know. Yeah. And. And that's the thing, you know, life goes on.

[Richard Campbell]

Languages change, too.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to. I used to dream in vcl, but I. That's a long time ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

They call them Pythonistas.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was a Pythonista long when it was 2.0. So I'm. I'm way out of the loop now.

[Richard Campbell]

As long as I got my copilot with me and I can spew out some Python that might.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, nowadays, copilot really is good at Python. Paul thurat [e-mail], richard'[e-mail] and of course, they are not. There's somewhere they're not right now, which is ignite.

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell? Actually, before we get to that, Richard missed two episodes. So what I'd like to do is go through.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, let's go through them all.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All of the notes and just make sure. Yeah. That we know where he's at. Because I feel like there were a couple of things in there especially. Actually, we may reference a few things you missed, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure. Hey, Make Net rocks. Episodes on Net Conf. Stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Announcement stuff in the can. So I'm pretty up to speed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no. I was more interested in. There were specific parts of each of the past two episodes where I was like, man, I really want to talk to Richard about this. Not this guy, you know, But. But no, no, because Richard specifically, I just, you know, with your background and everything, it was. I was super interested.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we should loop back on a couple of those things.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and then I had a whiskey pick the first week, which was a whiskey movie. A movie about whiskey. And then called Whiskey Galore. And then Paul had a lovely cocktail from Mexico City, the Salmancito, which we.

[Leo Laporte]

Learned was invented by a guy we know there. And he totally underplayed that when he described it to us. We took it as kind of a joke and then found out. My wife found out researching it that he actually invented the cocktail, which is pretty cool. It's a neat thing then.

[Paul Thurrott]

Richard, don't worry, we plugged Net rocks every week.

[Richard Campbell]

We did.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your latest episode was featured, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, and I listened to the episode where you were talking about Windows and ARM and it becoming a first class citizen, et cetera, et cetera, and Aria Henson. I was telling Leo and I just had this experience. We were flying home and I was rereading Stephen Snofsky's book. And he talks about me in the book. He references me in the book a few times. Right. So you get that weird experience. You're like, huh, you know, so I'm listening to the episode with the windows and arm, and you said something about me and how excited I was. Every time I opened the lid of my laptop, it just came on. And I said to Leo, I said, sometimes it's really weird being me or really interesting being me, you know, because I listen to this. Not because of, because I want to. Like, I'm interested in it. Like I, you know, it's not completely coincidental that I know you, but it is, you know, it's an interesting. You've been doing this thing for a long time, so now you're a co host here in the show and that's awesome. I get to see you every week. But, like, I would have listened to this regardless. You know, like, it was just. It was.

[Richard Campbell]

Sometimes my stories involve you these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, look, I am better or worse.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I understand listening to Richard's show, but why are you rereading Stephen Sinofsky's book? It seems like once through would been enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I have actually reread parts of it possibly a dozen times by this point.

[Paul Thurrott]

The part where your name is brought up.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no. And I know part of it is just therapy. I'm trying to get over that part of my life. But also, no, given the way Windows has gone, you know, it might have been a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember. I written this story about reliability in Windows. And actually it will come up today. Actually, we're going to talk about resiliency today, for example. But when you look at the state of Windows today, it hasn't gone great. And it's been rough and yeah, at the time, very critical of Windows 8 and all the stuff they were doing and everything. And I go back and reread and reread and reread, you know, the rationale. And I think to myself, you know, actually there was Some adult supervision there that we don't have today. And I.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, yeah, I just think Windows is in a weird place because it's not the center of the company anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, that's a big part of it. Yeah, for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a. It's a different. You've got the old timers who don't want to move and the new folks who wet drew a short.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not attracting talent there because the people who are aggressively looking to get ahead at Microsoft are going after those parts of the company that are top of mind like cloud and AI and all that. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You get the. Whatever that stuff is at the bottom of the coffee filter. That's the Windows team to do.

[Richard Campbell]

I think you know that the. It was Osterman who left the Windows team, went to Azure and I asked him about that and he said there's a couple of thousand 30 plus year folks still working in the Windows team. Interesting. And they're very hard to deal with because this is his quote. He says unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. So how do you motivate them?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I made the case just, I think it was yesterday actually that there's also two parts to this, to the Windows team. Like it's not really Windows team, but the groups that contribute to Windows, the groups that make Windows what it is. You know, there's that back end stuff. This has been true for a long time. Right. And so Jim Alchin days that was like the server group, you know, these days it's the Azure group. Those are the adults, these are the David Westin's, the, you know, the people who do the security stuff, the people who do the foundational work, et cetera. And then you get this kind of clown card doofuses that are throwing out new features all over the place and they're not testing them and they're causing reliability problems. And so, you know, our relationship with Windows can vary widely depending on what part of the company we're talking about. There are very, there's very deep, fundamentally strong security work being done in Windows through things like windows, hello, ess, etc. That is impressive. And then there are stupid icons on taskbars and doofus, you know, uis that like I don't even know what they're.

[Richard Campbell]

Doing anymore boxes and all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So those, that's the. It's like a person with a split personality. It's like a watching a loved one fall to dementia. But you have to keep Dealing with them. And sometimes there's a little burst of something that sounds correct. And most of the time it's, you know, they're calling you by the dog's name or something. So it's, you know, it's. It's a weird relationship. But yeah, that's. Anyway, this week on Paul's therapy, we're going to look at.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to say you're making friends on the Windows team.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. Who cares? Do you think I care about those people at all? They don't care about me and they don't care about people using Windows. So what's the difference? This is a different world. I could not care less about those idiots.

[Richard Campbell]

Why aren't you at Ignite? I know why I'm not at Ignite, but why aren't you at Ignite?

[Leo Laporte]

Because I could be in Mexico for one more week. And no, the big reason was they did not invite. They didn't invite the press until very late in the game and making it very expensive. And as the kind of calendar clicked by, I was like, yeah, I know. So I talked to my wife about it and said, maybe this just doesn't make sense. And then they sent out a little feeler email and said, hey, we're trying to figure out, like, who wants to go and everything, you know, and so I was like, yeah, maybe. And then they invited me and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going. It's just too late, you know, you should have done this in September. I would have booked this. Yeah, I would have booked this a long time ago. Like I did back in the day. It just gets really expensive. You know, I went to build, but they did the same thing. And it wasn't as bad, actually, but they did the same thing and it was expensive and it didn't have to be that expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

It's unnecessary expense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I just made that decision. And then, of course, because I'm me, I flew the day it opened. So, you know, I was. I always try to fly, like, on big Microsoft days, so that's prone to.

[Richard Campbell]

Booking hotels where I suspect they're going to want me early. And this canceling of it doesn't happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I thought about this, actually. I could have booked, you know, I could have booked some kind of a flight thing in advance, I guess. But you know what? I.

[Richard Campbell]

You only fight so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I tried.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, normally I would be doing podcasts from the event, but they decided they didn't want a podcasting space. And I'm like, do I want to find another gig or do I want to go home after? You know, this would. I would have flown from Lithuania to Chicago.

[Leo Laporte]

I was going to say, it's not like you haven't traveled enough.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's not like I've been stuck at home, you know, with nothing to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

To what do you ascribe this change in Microsoft's attitude? I mean, why wouldn't they want to have podcasts there?

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's a new leadership team for the Ignite show. There's been shuffling around and they've got a lot of learning to do. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there was. They didn't know this is what you did. They didn't have anything to do for a couple of years. And they all left.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And now there's a new group coming up, and they just don't know what they're doing effectively.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft is relearning how to do events, and so you got to have the conversations over again. So there's plenty of product teams that were reaching out to me, saying, hey, you're going to do the podcast. Right. Can we get this and this? So you're like, I happily forward that all on to them. It's like, if you want me, it takes a few weeks to set this up. Let's figure it out now. They didn't budget for it in advance, so there's only so much they can do. And it ended up being just not practical.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the irony for me, I'd have to go look at this is that I. And I flew yesterday. Right. So yesterday was a really busy travel day. But if I were to go back and look at what I got done and, you know, I've got Laurent writing news as well, is incredible. I mean, we probably published 12, 15 articles yesterday or something. I probably wrote five to seven myself. Two of them were premium articles. Like, it was. It was a good day.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't really need to be there anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, sometimes it's good to be in person, see people, you know, the only.

[Richard Campbell]

Way I got Woolsey back on the show was to see him at Build and Go, dude. Right. I know. And email to your blue in the face that there's certain actions you make when you're in person.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You make eye contact for one second. It's priceless. It's. No, it really is, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, it. Look, it's jail or, you know, superstardom. It could be. It's the spectrum, but it's. It can be very good. This is true of everything. You know, in person, meetings. When I was at the company I was at previously, we talked online every week and we got nothing done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then we would meet in New York for an afternoon and all of a sudden stuff happened, you know, and that's.

[Richard Campbell]

I remember hanging out in a hotel room with you for a day and laying out an entire years of editorial content. You could have batted that back and forth email for a year and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we did. We. We did for two years. Yeah. Did nothing. Yep. Nothing happened.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah. I mean, it's. Anyway, we're not there. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I have mixed feelings about it. I've already heard from a couple people who said, hey, you know, where are you?

[Richard Campbell]

I've got a bunch of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I actually wanted to see it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds like you're a little miffed in Microsoft for not doing right.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, I. Well, look, these two. These are two. The two issues I raised are separate. Right. There's the continual second class citizenship of Windows, which is a problem. You know, this is my. The center of my career. So that's, you know. Yeah. As far as a good night goes. It's not. I don't. That one's not personal to me. It's just. Yeah. I wish they had gotten their act together. If they had, I would have. My wife and I would have gone from Mexico to there to home. But you know what? It's busy. We have got. The three big holidays are coming up. My daughter's graduating from college soon. We got to go figure that out. There's gonna be a lot of driving and moving of things and whatever. We're busy. So, I mean, honestly, having a kind of a week of downtime between things is not so horrible. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, and Richard, I mean, I think his year speaks for itself. He can. Look, you know, you don't have to know. All you have to do is watch the show and you know, he's somewhere different. I don't know how he does it. I've said that many times. I mean, you travel a lot. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, I'd be. And again, I would be there if I. If I was doing the podcast junket thing. I would. I would have a good time and it would have been a very challenging to have done those two weeks abroad right before.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because you're wrangling a lot of podcasters. You see me play that game. Yes. Oh, yeah. It's enjoyable.

[Paul Thurrott]

So does it. You're not saying that it means this is a reflection of the kind of the end of the in person conference.

[Richard Campbell]

No, not at all. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm relearning how to do in person conferences.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Institution. Some way of preserving that institutional knowledge.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not how this came.

[Paul Thurrott]

Put it in loop or something?

[Leo Laporte]

No. The way that build went well enough that I thought, okay, here we go. They got it. You know, they. They waited longer after the pandemic, you know, ended than a lot of companies did. And it got weird after a while, you know, 2020, obviously, understand, 2021 got it. And then 2022, you're like, really? And then 2023, like, oh, come on, guys, are you serious? Like, what's happening here? You know, so they went a long time. Microsoft, these events will go through only a little bit of it. I mean, it's an explosion of information and they. I don't know, they could do a better job of figuring that stuff out, but they're figuring it out. So I think they'll get there. You know, it will come back eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it may not be there, but you're paying attention to it.

[Leo Laporte]

I sure am. Yep. So there's. There's a lot going on and I think this is something that's going to bleed into next week, maybe literally in this case, and then into the coming year. But, you know, a couple of things just to kind of level set this or whatever. You know, we've been talking for a long time now, a couple of years. We reference about what Microsoft is doing with AI. We reference the Stevie Batiste stuff. You know, Bill, not this past build, but the previous build. He talked about those three apples, east side, inside, outside. And now what we're seeing is something he did talk about. It was a year and a half ago, where he actually referred to inside. Is that the third one? Yeah, the inside ones. Right. As potentially. He said you could think of these things as agents. You know, they will become more intelligent.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it was outside. The third one is outside.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll go off and do things on your behalf in an autonomous way. Right. And that's literally what Microsoft is announcing or has announced now.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not alone. Like all of the movers and shakers in this space are all about agentic right now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. I don't like the word, but we're going to live with it. So, you know, it's kind of got it in there. It's like, what does it mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

What does it.

[Leo Laporte]

It means. So just real quick. So just to take a step back, Microsoft has been talking about and allowing developers and IT pros to create things that have been called agents or something like agents for some time. The thing that puts agents over the top in this era is the LLMs that they're going to run against, right. That you know, they've had all these different ways of doing this. But now thanks to Generative ar just at least we'll say LLM capabilities, they become much more interesting. So the way I, and I'm curious, maybe Richard will define this slightly differently, but to me all these things are online services that you configure to respond to certain events perhaps and to come back when something happens. So actually Leo, I referenced this last week, but when we were buying our apartment in Mexico City, we were playing that there's a term for this geo arbitrage, I think where we're paying in US dollars but we have to buy it in pesos. There's an exchange rate and that exchange rate goes up and down every day. So my wife went to some service and said alert me when the exchange rate goes over 20, like 20 to 1. 20.5 to 1 was the one she was looking for. And so every time that happened, she would transfer some amount of money into an account we had that was in pesos and we get a good exchange rate. And by her math, she believes we save somewhere between 5 and $10,000 doing this because she favorably played the exchange rate in the years since, the peso has done tremendously well. The dollar's done poorly and the exchange rate changed to 17 to 1. At one point I think it even went into 16 point something to 1. And so we don't care anymore. So we just go on with our lives. So right after the election, my wife all of a sudden got an alert on her phone. She looked down and said, hey, the Exchange rate is 20.5 to 1 again. It's the first time she's gotten that thing in three years. She's like, huh, the agent never stopped it. Never. That's. And it's just sitting out there doing this thing. It's like a simpler or an as simple example might be a Google flight alert. Like I would like to I'm going to go on some trip. I don't care when I go, but let me know when this particular flight falls under a certain dollar amount and at that point I will go book it. And so Google will send you an email or whatever, however they alert you. It's that sort of thing. But operating perhaps against an LLM or a set of LLMs. You can imagine in the Microsoft Graph Sense with Microsoft 365 you might be working against some kind of a corporate data set.

[Richard Campbell]

I would also say softer metrics. Like she's looking at a particular exchange rate from a particular source, not across all possible sources. And also she's setting the thresholds herself. She's saying this is the number I care about as opposed to give me the optimal number.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this isn't like AI. You do that with if this, then that sure.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but it is AI. I'm being overly simplistic. My examples are pre AI examples.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is still agentic, would you say? Or does agentic imply AI?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, agentic as a branding term is explicitly AI.

[Richard Campbell]

AI is a marketing term designed to leave people of their money. Generally speaking, AI is what you call it when it doesn't work. As soon as it does work it gets a new name. Right? It becomes large language models or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've had forever since the von Neumann architecture, which is a deterministic code where you say, periodically poll this data source. If this number goes up, do that. That's not AI, that's a step by step deterministic program.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I poisoned the poll by being.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm just saying. But, but it is important because I do think AI does something different. It's a little more non deterministic. We can't, we're not really sure what it's doing. We know how it's doing it, but we don't know exactly what's going on in its little coding brain. It's not as simple as that. So when Microsoft says agentic, presumably they're talking not about deterministic programming.

[Leo Laporte]

I do compare it though to the if then, then that type thing because I think for. But for a different reason because conceptually I think people can hit like my wife's thing with the exchange rate or Google Play thing. It's very simple. It's a simple concept. A non technical normal person could be like, yeah, no, I completely understand why I would want to do this. The if then, then that stuff can get complex. Like it can get into an area where a lot of people might look at that and say, yeah, I can see the value in this, you know, power automate.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now you're coding though, right?

[Richard Campbell]

But now you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, now we're talking about something that's a little complex and it's outside of my. And it's possible that some of this agentic stuff may fall into that category by which I Mean, Microsoft will provide some simple examples of things that work, you know, that you could look at and say, yeah, okay, no, that makes sense. I like this. But then there are going to be these more complex things you can build using their tools. They have tools for non programmers like Copilot Studio and then they have the Visual Studio type stuff that is for developers. AI Studio, Yeah, AI Studio, yeah. That gets, you know, that can get complicated. Right. So I don't know, I feel like I always reference Stephen Petich. Right. I mean, he's my guiding light here in so many ways. But I always think in terms of things like orchestration. Right. This is something I talk about again and again when he talked about this type of thing. And again, this, I think was a year and a half ago. I don't think this was this past year, I think it was 18 months ago. Ish. He was talking about, remember he used the term a copilot of copilots.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Which is some kind of nirdvana thing, I guess, for like, you know, AI and the Microsoft graph and all that kind of stuff. But the idea is that AI is going to be the orchestrator and what it's orchestrating are these online services that are up in the cloud and then apps that you use as the user. And it's doing this, you have to give it permission and all that. I know people, privacy, people are going to freak out when you start talking about this stuff. But you give it permission, just like you might have given Cortana or whatever permission because it's your personal assistant. It has to know about your schedule and has to have access to your data. The stuff that Cortana might have done was pretty straightforward. Hey, you have a meeting. The stuff that AI might do, potentially, right. If this, if they pull this off, it's going to be a little more complex, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, the big thing if you talk about the automation side would have been that it would have done the exchange for you. Right. That it might have even fired off the email to negotiate a raid.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you start to get into more sophisticated options there.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, therein lies the question. If I have a bot of some kind that says, you know, normally we just say, give me an alert if an airfare is a good price, as opposed to, hey, I need to travel somewhere in this range to these locations, buy them. When you find the breast rate, just do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, there's an element of trust there that's. I think it's a bridge too. Far for a lot of people, for sure. But in my little world, I see a lot of pushback from people who don't want Copilot specifically, whatever that might be. Copilot. And that confuses me, not because I think it's so useful and why wouldn't you want it? But because Copilot is not in your face. Copilot is the thing that you can turn off. Well, unless you hit the stupid key all the time like I do, then it's in your face. But okay, but forget, you know, forget about that. Or you use Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever it might be, or Outlook, right? You can use Copilot to improve your writing, to help you create a spreadsheet or whatever it might be, but you don't have to, right? The thing about the agenda stuff is that depending on your organization, in this case, because right now we're speaking specifically to commercial customers, but this will come to consumers too, is that this may be working on your company's behalf and it's just going to happen. There's an unavoidability aspect to agents that I think will alarm those people who already were alarmed by Copilot to a whole new degree. And I am not a conspiracy theory. Whatever. I certainly have my pet peeves and all that kind of stuff. But like I said, I look at Copilot and I think, well, whatever. It's good, bad and different, but I don't have to use it if I don't want it. I do worry that the agentic capabilities. Richard, what was that? They came up with a service that would rate you as an employee's usage of internal resources and whether or not you were spending enough time in meetings.

[Richard Campbell]

Viva learn.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, VIVA learn. Right. So that kind of. That's an agentic capability, right? In a way.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it's. There's a whole area, especially in the email marketing side of things, or in marketing in general, called in Prescriptive Analytics. Before LLMs became hip, we were already doing this and the prescriptive analytics was looking at variations on tickle emails. So you've been to the site, maybe you throw some stuff in the cart, you haven't bought anything. When's the right time for me to send you an email to sort of prompt you to come back? What's the language in it? So we'd write a bunch of variations. The tool would look at the response rate and tune itself. That's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Yeah, yeah, it's cool, but it's also scary.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it's super.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We're immediately in the uncanny valley of software. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's algorithmic. It's the same thing Tick Tock does. You know, it's just observing behavior and adjusting for that behavior.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's where you.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what the Terminator does too. You know, like.

[Richard Campbell]

And then it shoots you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Then it kills you. It keeps going until it finally kills you. That's that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I mean getting away from the marketing side of things, I watched a prescriptive analytic models for deciding when to service steam turbines.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, see that's good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Then it was based useful when the way you know, when's the part going to wear out, the thing's actually going to fail versus when's the maximum utilization. Like it was all these balancing act. There was also a prescriptive model for when to evacuate ahead of wildfires, knowing that evacuations cause injuries and death themselves. So if do you evacuate earlier when it's less urgent even though you're incurring more costs to decrease arm or do you evacuate later? And so a lot of these models just analyze all the data together on it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean what you. I'm sorry, you know, it's again, I just said I'm not conspiracy theory guy, blah blah, blah, whatever. But I always, I mean like grew up reading Asimov, you know, the rules of robotics, et cetera, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

Which by the way science fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, I understand, but that you went. But you. And this is what colors all of our views of this stuff. But it also I think will be pertinent in a moment or something like HAL9000 in 2001 where it gets these two conflicting commands and then suddenly it's better for the mission if it has to kill one of the astronauts to get to the next.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, it had decided to kill all of the astronauts was the best way to get a successful outcome to the mission.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there you go. So in the human view, HAL went insane. But in its view, or in the view completely rational. It was just logical.

[Richard Campbell]

If you make a whole universe into paperclips, it's like this was the mission. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No. So in other words, in the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Has ever made a mistake?

[Leo Laporte]

Something like the example you gave where we're looking at like we want to. We can't prevent forest fires, but we want to make sure that we get out in front of these things as.

[Richard Campbell]

Quickly as possible, minimize harm.

[Leo Laporte]

We launch the planes, minimize harm, et cetera. The first thing they're going to do is eliminate you the Human being from this process. Because you're the problem, you're the slowness, you're the.

[Richard Campbell]

If you burned all the houses down in advance, you don't have to evacuate it out. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I mean, that's okay. These are all nightmare scenarios of poorly designed.

[Leo Laporte]

But not all use Windows every day. Of course they're nightmare scenarios of poorly designed software. That's the point. This is the company making the software. I mean. Yes, let's be clear.

[Richard Campbell]

They're making tools so that you can make these.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, of course. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not going to make the paper clips. They're going to let you make the paper clips.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, again, I don't want to come off as kind of a nut job about this, but so many times I see people in our industry kind of overreacting, overreacting, overreacting. And I look at this stuff and I'm like, I think I'm going to overreact. Like, it's a little.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is what people do, talk about AI safety and where some people were worried about AI. I think that's not unreasonable. And really it comes down to who do you trust to create this and who do you trust? Okay, not Microsoft. Do you trust OpenAI? Do you trust Anthropic? Do you trust Meta? Who do you trust?

[Richard Campbell]

You get that Microsoft's punting on this. They're not creating it, they're just giving you the tools that you can create it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but they trust, trust you.

[Leo Laporte]

You're telling me that you wouldn't use Bing Forest Fighter Service to do what you just described? Like, I. Look, I think every one of those companies you mentioned is chaotically evil. So it's kind of hard to like, who do I trust?

[Paul Thurrott]

A new fundamental question is Big Tech, do we trust it and should it be trusted? And what they really should seem to be doing is becoming more and more rapacious and more and more jitified. And then maybe you don't want to trust them with your AI.

[Richard Campbell]

I think most of these tech companies are fairly panicked at the prospect of not winning this current race.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

And so.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so they're throwing protections out the window.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

As fast as they can.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so, you know, one of the things Microsoft talked about a lot this week, I'm not going to get this term right, but maybe I am going to get it right. Let's see if I can find it. The human intervention that, yeah, they call it Human in the Loop. So there's an approval.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a military term.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course it is, because that's where this is headed. That's my point. It's going to be literally terminated robot. But again, it's hard to imagine that this process doesn't eventually determine that the human in the loop is the problem. So we have these things that are being automated that we're. Possibly Jobs that people did. Okay, we're eliminating those jobs. I think we all understand that. So now we get this one guy in a lab coat or whatever, in some kind of a tower, you know, saying yay or nay to these things, making sure that the logic is sound or whatever. But, I mean, isn't he the problem now?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like, it's like literally the.

[Leo Laporte]

Terminator plot, you know, it's going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Be spread across a lot of people, all trying to make those decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is, I mean, honestly the fundamental question of our time, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, I mean, look, it's logical that a service that would act on your behalf is the. Is a next step beyond. We have this capability where you can bring up a prompt or whatever interface and say, I would like this thing. You know, make me this thing, or help me with this thing, or summarize this, whatever it is. Like, that's fine. But that's a very manual process. It's also kind of a weird throwback that we're suddenly typing again in a world which, you know, we've moved on to graphical user interfaces, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, eventually it should be a voice interface for all of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. But here we are doing this thing. I still. I did this morning. I typed in a prompt to get a pretty picture, you know, that's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

The end of the world, is it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. But the next prompt's gonna be like, let's end, like, now make the world look like this picture. And maybe that is the end of the world. I mean, like, I. You know, I. Well, or worse yet, I mean, so we talk about. I love that we. I love all the terminology of AI like hallucinations. Hilarious, right? We have this fun new word. Not a good word. We used to just say. Just call it what it is, a bug, you know, or whatever. A logical mistake. Whatever. A training. A literal bug got into the training data and now everything is colored wrong, you know, whatever it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, more. It's more like it's something that the engine made up. I don't think it's a bug in the training.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, but it's making up based on its input. Like, in other words, if you're going to train the data on the Internet and then you ask it something for like an objective fact, you know, what is one plus one? And it's like, you know, there are 11,000 different answers to this. So we're going to have to, you know, deterministically decide which of these is the most accurate.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but if, but, but a common hallucination would be who is Paul Thurrott? Paul thurat died in 1984.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

That the, the question is where did it, where did it get that? I think the reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, clearly that one came from Reddit and then it was. No, I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or, or Wikipedia, where anyone from anything. Yeah, that's literally just putting two words together that it doesn't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So like a year ago or whatever in the past year when you talk to someone, you know, normal non technical about AI or you'll see these warnings everywhere you run the chat, GPT or whatever it says, hey, just so you know, it's not always right. You should check your, Check the facts, you know, and everyone's like, okay. And no one does, you know, and legal documents go out, policy changes, you know, like.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's going to become. I think you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

But now it's going to automated.

[Paul Thurrott]

Check the facts.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's going to be automated. Now you're telling me this human in the loop potentially will be checking this after the fact.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

What is he standing over the smoldering remains of like civilization? He's like, hey, I found the bug. It's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, where's that undo button?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know if you're going to laugh when you find out what it was. Hello? Anybody here?

[Paul Thurrott]

This does take me back to a conversation I've been having since the very earliest days of, of, you know, open AI a couple of years ago, which is AI is fine. Don't give it agency. Not agentic, but don't give it agency.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know those words like don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Give it the nuclear codes, don't give it weapons, don't give it things that have agency in the real world. And that's exactly what we're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, or could do.

[Leo Laporte]

We.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody's actually done this. And this again, I meant I mentioned the military reference because that was a very specific.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ukraine is doing it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. This is specifically what the Defense Department said they wouldn't do. Right. Is that in the end a person still makes us that they wouldn't go.

[Leo Laporte]

To Laos But I mean, you know, I mean, like what?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. And you could. And you can still question it because certainly the software is framing up the view so that the person making a decision only sees, you know, one option.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the other thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

And some poor grunt who's in a double wide trailer in Austin is going to say yes or no based on the information the AI gives it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm saying. Imagine it seemed to become smart enough that it's like, look, we're not. We're going to pretend this guy's still in a loop. We're going to feed him bogus data so that we get the answer we think is correct, and then we're just going to do the thing we would have done if we didn't have this shackle to begin with.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you think that anywhere in the world, maybe Ukraine AIs are making kill decisions?

[Richard Campbell]

Not. Not officially. Now, that being said, right, there was a case in the UN specifically about a drone carrying a 40 millimeter grenade with an image recognizer. See, so that doesn't mean Ukraine's deploying it, just that this product existed with an image recognizer. Yeah. So it recognizes a particular. It's tracking for a particular face. When it sees that, it charges towards it and explode.

[Leo Laporte]

So you understand this is the reason that Microsoft stopped selling facial recognition technology, the police, because it was biased toward people of color.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's why Google engineers rose up. When Project Maven came along for Google, they didn't want to be doing that kind of work. But I think those days are. They look great.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so to take it out of the apocalypse just slightly and look at it maybe from Microsoft's perspective, especially from, you know, like office productivity. Right? What they're really, when you think about it, like, just forget about the AI, the scary stuff, the Terminator robot that is literally going to kill you in your sleep this week. But if you just forget about that for a second, it's really about efficiency, right? You know, the automation, office automation has been with us since the days of AT&T talking about paperless offices that we still haven't achieved, by the way. You know, this is. What are the, what are the things that are hard for people to accomplish? How can we help them get over that? How can we help them get by that? And, you know, you can look at those positively or negatively. There's all, you know, in the same way that I talk about, you know, these services that create images. And I'm not hiring a graphics artist or a Painter or whatever it is to make these images. I'm using AI. So I guess there's a job there that's kind of gone away. But for me, you know, this is more efficient, cost effective, etc. Etc. You know, what, what are the doldrums that what we used to call a knowledge worker, you know, faces in a day or you come in, in the morning, you know, like, God, I. Richard might remember Outlook 98, 2000, one of the versions, way a million years ago, started giving you this kind of daily view. You know, you'd log into the app and it was like, here's what your day is going to look like. It was always terrible, right? It was all these meetings and whatever, but you would have this debut or whatever, my day or whatever they called it. And you know, people, I think use teams like that, kind of a dashboard, but this is the type of thing where it's kind of an advanced version of that. It's like, we'll use AI to say, look, these are the most important emails like that you got overnight. Like, you need to go, go do this one first. Or, you know, you're meeting with a person from whatever team, and you met with this person 17 months ago, his first kid's name is this. And you talked about this and you know, that kind of helpful, you know, like you have a little piece like the eyes we're springing here.

[Richard Campbell]

And you already get the Viva emails, if you're using Office365, saying, hey, you wrote an email yesterday saying you would do this for this person by the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you?

[Richard Campbell]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now they'll be like, we know you didn't do it. We can tell you you didn't do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So asking rhetorically, asking for a friend.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Which is that right? Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you did.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's. That's what I want to hear from an AI. I want to hear an AI say, I'm just asking questions, just asking, just asking questions.

[Paul Thurrott]

People tell me, I hear, yep. According to people in the know, you have not done their job.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the opposite of not Clink. What was like this Schultz on? I know nothing. But he's like, I see everything I see. You know, I hear everything I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And we're starting to have these bots sit in the team's calls now for exactly that reason. Interesting. They keep better notes and they do. When we say, okay, well, I'll take that on. It's writing the summaries and saying, you agreed to these things. You know, I'LL play you back the transcript if you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Just in the middle of a meeting, it'll be like, I think Paul's playing Call of Duty. I don't think he's actually paying attention.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we agree, though, that these are very useful tools that can be really huge and in business.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, potentially. Sure, of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they have some potential risk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Would you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I advocate against them for that reason.

[Richard Campbell]

I think, you know, if it's. We take risks all the time for potential benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

We drive down the highway at 60 miles an hour and just pray that the other guy's not gonna turn into.

[Leo Laporte]

Our lane because we. I just gave this. I gave a talk and I kind of mentioned this story and I talk told the story again in the podcast. But, you know, I go back to that cloud computing thing and the Exchange administrator freaking out because, like, you're telling me that my final act as Exchange administrator is going to be handing over the reins to my company's email to Microsoft. And the answer is yes. You know, the world has evolved and you haven't. And by the way, your company does not exist for email infrastructure. What are you talking about? You're not in a place where you can make a good decision for your company because you're worried about your job. And all you've been doing for the past 10 years is every other Exchange version. You've been doing a migration and that you sort of thought you were just going to ride out your whole career doing this, but the world changed.

[Richard Campbell]

But the joke is that there's still a role for the administrator on that. It's just doing more valuable things than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he's still involved with email. That's sort of the point. Yes, you may or may not have a role at this company. I guess we'll see. But it's up to you to make yourself valuable and well.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's a whole bunch of stuff you weren't getting around to that was more preventative. Right. You've never set the rules around monitoring for harassment via email. You've never bothered with box management because you've been too busy doing the day in, day out, crashing in the surf or keeping a mailbox running.

[Leo Laporte]

The positive spin here is that instead of being reactive now, which is the big story with it, right, you're going to now be able to be proactive. You're going to get to those things like AI, if it works correctly and works well, will automate those things that for you, were drudgery and time consuming and prevented you from doing the things.

[Richard Campbell]

That I've seen Microsoft use line a bunch of time. Removing the toil from the work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Right, yep. So that you are eventually it's going to be the removing you from the work. But yeah, yeah, the toilet.

[Richard Campbell]

That's always the implication, Paul. Except there's no evidence it's actually true. Right. Like the reality is there's higher and higher level work that wasn't gotten to. I don't know anybody in it that's gotten to the bottom of the to do list. In fact they couldn't get out the third item.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not disagreeing. Listen. In fact I would just say personally though I am aware of this. It's very easy to fall into this. It sounds true. Trap. You know there's probably a term for this but. And I, even though I am well aware of that and I kind of try to preach against it and think for yourself and all that kind of stuff. Yes. But I feel, you know, I feel like with AI I've been pretty clear headed so far. It's definitely been all over the map because AI happened so quick and. But I look at this thing and I'm like okay, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, for me I've done very well.

[Richard Campbell]

With science fiction tropes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, all the way back to the Luddites after they smashed the machinery. It was rebuilt and all of those folks ended up being supervisors running higher. Automation clothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And clothing did.

[Richard Campbell]

Price dropped worldwide.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right, right, right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean that's what actually happened is that the automation made it possible for the market to become many times larger. Yes. Many travel agents lost their job when we put travel online. But the travel industry grew by orders of magnitude. It employees four more people and good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Travel agents still have a job.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but good humans, you know, it used to be a good.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you said to a younger person especially or I keep saying normal person, I realize that's vaguely insulting but I'm including myself in the abnormal part of that list. That there are people who would sit at a desk and type way on a computer and book things for you. They'd be like what is this?

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you do.

[Leo Laporte]

You're describing like what is this? You know, like it doesn't make any sense.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's only, that's only 20 years and it's already irrational.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well then, but then again 100 years ago something like that didn't exist. There was no such.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean you're going to fly through the air.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, well, and just the notion of traveling for fun. Like I would, I would travel because my people were being killed and I had to get out of here. Like that was the only reason I would ever move.

[Richard Campbell]

Traveling for a better future.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Traveling my life, traveling.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, we're talking a post World War II thing, basically. I mean, like, yeah, this notion that you might, you're doing this for fun. You're not invading the company in the country. You say you're, you're going to go there and eat and drink and stuff and then you're getting back curious and you're coming back. Yeah, exactly. What are you doing? Yeah, that's. And you're taking pictures. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff there.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just. Can we take a quick break? Because we're getting, of course, long in the tooth, as one says, as we do, and we have lots more to talk about, but you are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell reunited. And it feels so good.

[Leo Laporte]

So good. Oh, boy. Without the bad wine.

[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

No problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

No problem. Oh, and by the way, Threat Locker works for Max too. So your entire network can be protected with Threat Locker. Get unprecedented visibility and control of your cybersecurity quickly, easily and cost effectively. And I mean it. When I went out and priced Threat Locker I was blown away because I assumed, oh no, this is going to cost. No, it's really affordable. Anybody can afford this. Everybody should use it. Threat Locker's zero trust end point protection platform offers a unified approach to protecting users, devices and networks against the exploitation of zero day vulnerabilities. Get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Visit threat locker.com that's threatlocker.com I had a great conversation with these guys. I was blown away and just. I mean look at the reviews, look at what people say about Threat Locker and you'll see this is what you need. Threat locker.com we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And you support us. Of course. If they ask, tell them I heard.

[Leo Laporte]

It on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you Threat Locker. I really like this AI conversation. I don't mean to truncate it, but I think it is very important. And when you're going on about agentic stuff, it's important to understand what that we're gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

The word agentic is gonna come up a lot this year. It's just. You might as well just rip the scab. It's happening. Yeah, I agree. This is the start of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Excellent. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no apologies necessary. Thank you. What else is going on?

[Richard Campbell]

New hardware.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got to send you that Snapdragon thing. I still haven't. I have to go down to the UPS store.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no worries, no worries. Yeah. So that box was so successful. Microsoft's doing it again.

[Paul Thurrott]

No 200 very happy users.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So what they've announced and are releasing is not until next year. I don't think it's coming out until the spring. Is a what is basically a net PC. Remember what were those thin PCs?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Oracle offered them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they had like Sun Microsystem talked this up. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The network is the computer or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they were onto something. It was just. They were about 20 years too early on that one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and by the way, can I point out, Paul, for years I've been saying this is what Microsoft should do, that the best, most secure way to offer Windows is in the cloud on a thin client, which they have.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean to tell me that my last act as Windows administrator is going to be handing over Windows?

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, I mean, yes, if they priced it better. Now, the client's not expensive, Right. It's just the monthly fee for Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. And that varies wildly depending on the resources you have in that cloud PC and the type, the capabilities, etc.

[Richard Campbell]

But it doesn't cost much when you're not using it, like for intermittent use. It's a good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we do that. Yeah, we use that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Our editors were working on Premiere in the cloud using us. They would spin up Windows when they need it and they would spin it down. As long as they turned it off, it wouldn't cost us anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

If you forget about it over the. For a couple of weeks, you get a bill and you're really sad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So leave it on. To those of us in the sort of what is now like the client, you know, Windows community or whatever. We look at this, we think, could I have one of these please? With like a mini statement though, that.

[Paul Thurrott]

One of the reasons it's hardened is it doesn't offer win 32.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, it doesn't really do much locally. It's a very stripped down version of Windows that's just designed to do the connectivity stuff and some basic.

[Paul Thurrott]

But even in the cloud, do you have. You don't have win 32 in the cloud either.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you do. I get.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there's some unspecified intel processor in this thing. It's probably like a celeron.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, they said a custom os. Is it a Windows OS or just.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Windows. Yeah, it's a stripped down version of Windows. It's probably Windows 10X. You know, they had to do something with it. It's probably Edge.

[Paul Thurrott]

All you need is Edge, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's a web app. No, I don't. It's. It's unclear, but it has, you know, a couple ports and, you know, whatever. It's just the basics, but it's a cute little box. I still, I'm intrigued that Leo actually Had a really good real world example there. Because I still, I wonder about this from an IT perspective how compelling this could be.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I've certainly talked to some shops that have been all in this for years. Right. Like they use virtual desktop going all the way back to Zen with Citrix.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So that they just don't have the machines on board. And this was often when we had remote offices where they're going to be online anyway. So the latency is unavoidable. The bigger thing was control over data. I watched whole dev teams work this way where the code never went to the destination machine. It was all executing central repository somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Now for this to make back in the day we had terminal services like he says, Xen Citrix.

[Richard Campbell]

Now you have Azure Virtual desktop and Windows 365.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, that's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And yeah, so the issues would be security, privacy. Because if you're uploading, you know, important secret code, you don't want it. Somebody on somebody's cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft could probably reassure generally is the customer doesn't want the user to have the code.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm keeping it in the cloud because it's actually safer there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Safer there. But it's all look, if you could play Diablo over the network, latency shouldn't be too much.

[Leo Laporte]

I played Call of Duty online over the network, anything is possible. So yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Depends on the quality connection.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, quality of connection. Which most businesses probably have a pretty high speed connection.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I suppose if your needs are minimal, which a lot of people's are and like Richard said, if you only need it sometimes even better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well the question is how minimal is this? How, how much do you give up by doing this? I mean in theory it could have.

[Leo Laporte]

No, in theory it could be anything. That's the point. Like in theory you could be running against a box that is more powerful than anything you'd have at your own desk. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You're also no longer upgrading those devices. Right. Like here I am on a two year theory.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's part of the. You need to tell me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean I always thought that this is the best answer Microsoft could offer to the security issues because it's always up to date, it's always patched.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Microsoft has secured their own infrastructure perfectly well over the past year alone. I mean I wouldn't worry about anything, everything's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they'd have to reassure people that the network operate the network operation centers were.

[Leo Laporte]

The first hurdle here is that this is in the cloud. This is not something that's in your cloud. It's not in the private cloud. This is in Microsoft's Microsoft cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

And let's face it, they've had better uptime than you did.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's not my. I 100% think it's a great idea. I don't mean it like that. I mean that for some organizations, some people, some whatever that. But that's the untenable part of it. It's like, well, hold on a second. This isn't in our own. Whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're already using Azure. Like, that's already true, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm not. Again, I'm not actually disputing it. This is the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That said, if I was responsible for a company infrastructure like this, I would have a separate backup source, which I even have for my own M365. Right. My synology backs up my M365 instances onto a drive here. Just because. So if I lost access to M365 for whatever reason, I at least have a copy of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Okay. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's sort of a reverse way of thinking. Like I want to work in the cloud, so it doesn't matter where I go and what device it works, but I also want to copy elsewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

So if I was on a submarine. Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. I've done this scenario with Jeff Snow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He's like, let me make up the stupidest possible example.

[Richard Campbell]

We did this for. We did this scenario for a ship off the coast of Gabon during the ebola crisis in 2014.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Where we did. The undersea cables going into the Western Africa were just not fast enough. And so they moved a ship with a couple of racks worth of gear in, and it was basically a localized Azure node to support the healthcare professionals that were fighting the emulsion.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's like Azure ARC before there was Azure arc, essentially. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it was a way we had. We had a better sell signal coming off that ship onto the. Into the city in Cote Ivory than they had normally. And we weren't depending on any of those things. Right. And then. And then every so often it would synchronize.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Well, I mean, I mentioned the exchange story because it's so relevant to everything, but it's. Yeah, this is the same type of thing. I mean, where Windows security and updating and whatever else is not the point of your business. You know, I just do for a living people. Yeah. We want them to sign in, securely authenticate and get work done and then go back to their lives. And you're not shipping hardware around the world. You're not configuring laptops. And then hope you know, the same.

[Richard Campbell]

Way you change that Exchange server, that exchange administrator's life, you're going to change the desktop sys admin's life too. Right now he's on a pro. You know, he's taking care of 1500 seats in a mid size organization. He's shifted so that every year he's replacing 25% of those machines under lease. And so that's 300 something machines that he handles every year to get redeployed with a team of folks. I put these thin PCs in. I don't have to standardize the machine. You can run different VMs as you need and they get upgraded all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so you've got this little device, 350 bucks or whatever it is, obviously keyboard, mouse and some kind of a screen.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually you don't even need that. I mean, you could run this off an iPad if you had to. I mean, right? People do that software. Yeah, of course. And okay. I mean it's interesting. I think connectivity has gotten to the point where this is possible.

[Richard Campbell]

When you're dealing with 20 millisecond symmetrical gigabit fiber, that's as long as you maintain the bandwidth, you'll be all right. As the number of seats goes up, it gets more challenging.

[Leo Laporte]

Just don't do it.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a great device to send home. They're not going to do anything else with it. Right. You're going to configure that device so it can only communicate with the company's instances.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

The kids aren't going to play on it. There's going to be a very little porn on that device.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet you could play Doom on it. But. Yeah, no, fair enough. No, you're right, you're right. Okay. No, that's cool. And Microsoft said, by the way, there will be more of these types of devices. I could imagine hybrid, not just from Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a reference device.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean there'll be more. Right? I mean, and that we can get.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't we already have such devices?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the thin PC movement's old, like it's been around a long time. But this is a new wave and the ARM hardware is especially good for this. But also the cloud is bigger.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not Intel.

[Leo Laporte]

This is it also. Well, it eliminates. Well, this one is I think is intel, isn't it? I believe. I think this one is. But, but this is a good point because actually you could make it out of An Arduino.

[Paul Thurrott]

It doesn't really need.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. It could be a Raspberry five. Right, exactly. And you could have this thing that's super efficient and silent. And if it is arm, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues anymore because you're running everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love how they show it driving two giant screens.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's to reassure you that, you know, you're not. The user experience isn't going to change. Really.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they've been, you know, the dev box stuff that Microsoft does for Visual Studio developers where you're kind of hitting. You're potentially hitting this incredibly powerful computer up in the cloud and you could have a very thin and light laptop. You could have a Mac. You know, it doesn't matter.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's better than that. If you're only compiling once a day, you can run a light instance while you're coding and then give me more cpu. It's time to compile. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Or actually you push it off, you push it through.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean this is the. Yeah. This is the initial promise of cloud computing. It's infrastructure when you need it and you're not paying for and when you're not using it, etc.

[Richard Campbell]

Instead of me sending 1500 dollars laptops out to my employees to work from home, I'm sending a $300 head unit. That's not good for anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's okay. Yeah, no, that's a good argument. I like it. Yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's. I mean, I'm strictly thinking from a system mins perspective. I don't know that a consumer wants this. Although this is the machine you want a grandparent to have. Just because they can't break it, really, they should.

[Leo Laporte]

They could call it Web tv.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, yeah, okay, I'm coming around to it. I'll say, you know Azure virtual machines and then they did Windows 365. I was like, I don't, I don't quite. I mean, obviously there are reasons, there are certain reasons. I didn't see it as kind of a mainstream thing, but actually using my own words against me, which is probably smart. Thinking back to that exchange guy, it's the same equation, right? At some point, this is the problem. We're spending too much on the people and the hardware and the maintenance and upkeep and blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And of Windows in this case and Windows PCs. And that is not what the point of this business is. Right. It's. Yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a great side. I've done a bunch of run ads is on avd, on Azure Virtual Desktop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The subtle thing you don't get until you really start using this is that when the user logs off, like that instance is actually dismantled so that when you start it back up again, it literally rebuilds it. You get a fresh copy of Windows each time. There is no.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sort of like Windows Sandbox does something similar, except there's a state that you get back here, you're connecting to your data, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's kind of a kiosk effect.

[Leo Laporte]

And it just.

[Richard Campbell]

You were saying nothing's going to change. There's a big thing that's going to change.

[Leo Laporte]

This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's less a Chromebook experience.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But you still get to run that one weird cranky win32 app that you need. Except now it lives in a sandbox in the cloud with an administrator making sure it doesn't get out of hand. You don't have to make it run on everybody's machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, they said that these are Copilot plus too. Right? Okay, that's so weird.

[Leo Laporte]

That's weird. But okay, that's fine. I mean, that's fine. Yeah, because it makes sense to run AI locally in the data center that is also hosting the cloud AI that is too expensive to run. Because. Okay, I can't do the math on that. But look, this is when it was Terry Morrison. This is the event. They announced the Surface laptop. They did. Microsoft did an education event one spring, so 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, and he's walking around with a US thumb key. And the idea was USB thumb key that, you know, you have a lab in this case of students and we need to reset these things between classes. And here's this goofy kind of sneaker Net way to do this. This is something I dealt with in the 1990s. I worked at a computer in a. A lab at a school.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And same. Same situation. They were older, obviously. They were, you know, big honking desktop computers running Word Perfect and things like that. But the idea was that you would reboot and it would run a script and it would wipe things out and bring things back. And the next students would come in. That would take many minutes, but they would come in, in the next class, whenever that was, and they would have a fresh computer. Everything was backed the way it was supposed to be. That's still a concern. I mean, this is, you know, and now we can do this in the cloud and it's clean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And here, let's imagine you're running classes in a day. You've got four classes that day of 30 kids each.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You pre run them all. So all those 120 VMs are already ready to go. Right. And as one group of kids finishes and logs out, you destroy them. They don't need to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it happens automatically.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're not waiting for them to start up. They're already ready. So when the next kids sit down, they light up. That's the great thing about the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't have to work hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Even just a basic productivity work or whatever. That experience is kind of windows rot, where the thing slows down over time. You get wonkiness. This is one thing you have to admit as a Windows user. One day you'll run an app that runs every day and it doesn't start right. Or something happens or it stops connecting to the webcam or whatever it is. This is a way to. This is an extreme way, but isn't a way just to get around that.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the kiosk effect. You get back to the starting state every day. You turn it on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, all right, all right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I just think. I mean, again, I'm thinking totally enterprise, because I think that's why you keep me around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's what this is for. That's the audience.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this could be a good consumer.

[Leo Laporte]

Experience, too, I think. Look, one of the things we're going to talk about in a few minutes is some of the Windows security innovations, for lack of a better term, that they discussed this week at Ignite and very much focused on commercial customers. Right. Businesses, education, government, et cetera. But a lot of this stuff is also coming to consumers and will eventually come to consumers. And that's kind of the point. When you look at something like the security baseline of a Copilot plus PC, it's astronomically in a different class than a normal computer. And there are things that take long periods of time. That's something I just wrote about this in the context of copilot plus PCs. TPMs were kind of invented in the timeframe from Longhorn. When they were looking at the time was like, what do you do? Like, what is the point of this? And now they're just standard equipment. The switch, even just like 64 bits, started with XP, went probably mainstream, maybe Windows 8, Windows 10, somewhere in there. And now it's the only platform for Windows. So we don't even do 32 bit anymore. So sometimes these things take a long time. But yeah, this stuff will. Yeah, this stuff is absolutely going to come down to consumers. Yeah. And then, I don't know, I feel like for a lot of people it's going to be software. But when the time comes to upgrade to a new computer and people might be like, well, maybe this is when I go to a Mac or a Chromebook. What Microsoft might be selling or PC makers maybe would be a. Well, here's a. You know, you had a pretty good experience with this IdeaPad or whatever it was. How about you buy an IdeaPad thin client and you know, you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or whatever we're calling it now, and you get access to this thing. That's kind of awesome. Up in the cloud, maybe. And by the way, it's always going to be safe and clean and work great, you know. Yeah, maybe I could see it, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And when it does go out, it goes out for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So taking the day off.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole world's taking the day off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a thing on the extreme other end of this spectrum. So we have the copilot plus PC. Right. And so these are the PCs that have these additional hardware requirements instead. You know, not that anyone would buy such a thing, but you could buy a. Or you could make a 4 gigabyte RAM Windows 11 computer. I guess that would be stupid, but you could slow storage, et cetera, et cetera. Copilot plus species, 16 gig minimum. I think it's 256 on the Ram NPU. We all know the stuff, you know, really modern. It's all the latest chip sets and all that kind of stuff. Those things launched on Snapdragon back in June without that major new feature, recall and not a lot else to show for it in the AI sense. And so since then, Microsoft's been expanding the platform to AMD and Intel, obviously, but also adding new functionality. So they announced some new features for these computers, I think, back in September, October, I don't remember September. October. Somewhere in there none of it has appeared. But they're talking that up more now during Ignite as well, like click to do. You know, it's one of the big ones or. And also recall, by the way. Right. So recall has been delayed multiple times. I enjoyed every time they talk about recall and talk about all the new features that they're adding. And I can point to the original documents and say, are these really new features? You know, we'll see, but whatever. You know, we're going to talk about Windows in a minute, but there's some deep architectural stuff going on in Windows for security especially. But not just security, but in addition to the clown carve stupidity features that we talk about every week, there's actual like computer science occurring too. So you know, there's a little bit, we get, we get a little bit of both. But yeah, I don't, I don't know what to think of any of this AI stuff I keep. And by AI stuff I want to be clear. I mean local AI stuff running against the npu. I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem in many ways.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, no, and it's a panic, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We need an implementation of these LLMs for information workers. That really makes a difference.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It has to run on device, it has to require them to buy a new computer. It's very important. That's a big part of it. And I, but I keep coming back.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean even the most, by far the most successful LLM right now is GitHub Copilot. And you don't need to run it locally. That's not a thing. But it's got a utilization like it's almost a justification for the stack for a very small sector of the world.

[Leo Laporte]

It would run, it would probably run great locally. I mean, honestly, I mean, you know, especially if you were doing something very specific. I'm working in a specific language in a specific framework.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't think you care because you're online anyway. You've got to be interacting with GitHub anyway. You know, that's your normal workflow. What's the difference?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't think the customer cares about running locally. I really don't. I think Microsoft cares about it, but I don't think the customer cares.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the thing customers will care about will be these specific features that improve their life and they just won't understand that it's because it's running locally. That's the problem with it. So if you edit video, for example, I mean, obviously you need a bunch of horsepower and graphics capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. There's a, there's a growing list of capabilities that run off an MPU that are frankly rather amazing and, but I'm talking about a pretty small audience there. So when you talk about mom pop and you know, the, you know, whoever, these people are kind of non tactical and you're like, all right, well what's in Windows or whatever in Copilot plus PC that's going to mean anything to them?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't think they.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm like, geez.

[Richard Campbell]

They just want it to work where it runs. And so do the point you're going to make a pricing difference. The cloud version costs more than the local. For a small group of folks, that's going to matter. Most people if you charge it all, they're not going to use it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, for a Snapdragon computer, the big thing to me is the efficiency and performance and all that stuff and the battery life. And I, you know, I tweeted about this yesterday. It's not a joke. We got on a plane, it was four, four and a half hour flight. But one of the things they told us up front is like, the first half of the plane doesn't have power. Sorry, you're not going to charge your devices. And the people next to us were freaking out. They literally like were handing their phones off to the flight attendants who could bring them back to the back of the plane and charge them for them. So I was like, no problem. I have a copilot plus PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Boop.

[Leo Laporte]

Open it up. Charged my wife's phone and my phone and ran this thing the entire flight and got a bunch of work done and had 55% battery life.

[Paul Thurrott]

They should put you in. That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and it was. That's life changing now. Did I do a single local AI anything during that flight? No. Not even one. Right. I didn't. That didn't matter in the slightest. Had I, it would have been super efficient. But I just don't. There's nothing there that's compelling. So there. I honestly, the only compelling thing they've ever announced is recall. And that's the one thing they keep, you know, delaying. And I'm like, I, you know, but I think, I don't know that this will actually be. Actually, most of this probably won't be local. In fact, it definitely won't be. But tied to the agentic stuff and to the expansion of copilot capabilities in Microsoft 365, they're going to be changing the Windows UI a little bit to accommodate these things. And of course the apps themselves are going to change as well. But. But there's a bunch of new capabilities coming across Microsoft 365 that will run across the cloud. That will run across the cloud. But I was talking to Brad this morning. He was telling me, he's like, there's something weird going on with Windows 11 because I think it's like the beta channel. They changed the way things are rendered in the taskbar. All of a sudden out of nowhere, they never announced anything. And I said, yeah, I think it's because they're using it on stage at Ignite to show off these new Microsoft 3 CAPE 365 capabilities that run off a little page or whatever they call it in the taskbar. And they needed something to run it against and so they skipped the canary channel. They just went right to beta. And that's happening. Right? That's part of the clown car stuff, I guess. It's like we're just rushing to kind of meet the needs of whatever group or whatever. So, yeah, new AI capabilities for Copilot Plus PC and Copilot Actions is the name of the thing I'm referring to, by the way. Sorry, I didn't say that these are cloud based capabilities, But I think Microsoft 365 is going to be the bigger benefactor from this stuff. Or I should say users of Microsoft 365. I'm not saying there aren't any examples. It's fun removing a background from an image in paint or whatever. It's good, it's a good capability. I like it. But I think the big advances are going to come across or come through, you know, the applications we actually use to get work done. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you know, whatever. So I think that's the bigger space or canvas or whatever for this stuff. So anyway, I need to digest this stuff a lot. Still more, I should say. So I suspect we'll probably talk about more of this stuff next week.

[Richard Campbell]

We're still very much in the announcement phase of this too. Yeah, this is the dragging on wave two. Like we're still, you know. You know what I miss at a keynote at Ignite is a, you know, Columbia Sportswear or the case study. The company up there saying, hey, we've been using this for the past three months and here's the benefits we've had. Like it's been a while since we've seen that and I haven't seen it at all for AI technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's an unspoken role at any Microsoft keynote that the best part of it is some company that is not Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Showing up with their own kind of unique brand of, you know, marketing and whatever it is they do for a living. And all of a sudden, wow, they're really interesting. And it kind of snaps you out of this, this boring bubble story about.

[Richard Campbell]

What you could do here, doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's always been the case. That's why, like, you know, when they brought up the Rock, you know, to talk about the Xbox, or they brought out some drill sergeant one time who was awesome. Or like the. What's the. I can't think of. I don't know, clothing brands was like Laurent something or whatever the name of that company was, was really interesting. They did that NASA thing that kind of blew up in their face right before the pandemic, unfortunately. But that stuff is fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

That industrial light and magic that came up with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is always interesting, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you could have some Microsoft guy drawn on and on about nothing. I don't know. Like, these are the options.

[Richard Campbell]

And the bigger thing to me is what's the implication when that group is on the stage doing that is like, we've been using this for months and here's our success story. Not. Hey, they just thought of this, right? That's right. And it's not even.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this was a cool thing. It was one of the things about mixed reality that was actually pretty good. There was a good story there where they would bring in car designers and say, you know, we get the guy making the car. Instead of like having an elephant sized lump of clay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We're gonna. He's gonna design it with a hololens and then he's gonna bring other people into the studio and they're gonna walk around in a three in real time, in real space, but with mixed reality headsets on and look at it. And they could open the car door and they could look at the, you know, how things lined up and they could see it in 3D space. That's amazing. Now it's just kind of a small audience, which is kind of the problem. But still from the outside, you would look at that, be like, wow, that's awesome. You know, and it gets your mind working a little bit. Like, well, how could we apply what they did here elsewhere, you know, or maybe to what we're doing at work or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Show us the wins. We need some wins.

[Paul Thurrott]

As an elephant sized piece of clay myself. Yes, I really.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a, there's a almond flavored candy that they sell, the kids sell on the street in Mexico. And I refer to it as the. The best tasting clay I've ever had. It has the, it has the consistency of the, the grout that you put between.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, is it a little gritty?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like. What do you call. Yeah, it's gritty. And it's literally like compressed wet sand. It's like halva.

[Richard Campbell]

Yum.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds like halva.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on one second. Stephanie, what's that candy called that I called clay? Marzipan, I guess. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Marzipan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's Delmen flavored clay. Like, this is the best almond flavored clay I've ever had.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Marzipan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's in. There was a town in France when I was a kid that we went to that was like Marzipan City. And even the gas stations would have marzipan sculptures because it sounds like the.

[Leo Laporte]

Name of a place. I'm pretty sure it's the name of a city on the, on the water in Mexico somewhere. Marzipan. Mexico City. It's. It's built on clay. It's perfect.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love marzipan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Winters there are fantastic. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, let's take a little break and we shall continue. We're going to get to Windows 11. It's funny, the minute the show ended last week, Microsoft put Windows on ARM on an ISO and Paul sent me a note saying, it happened again.

[Leo Laporte]

Start recording. We can talk. Let's do another show.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll get to that in just a minute. Paul Thurat is here. He's actually back home in [e-mail] also back home in Madeira Park, British Columbia, Richard Campbell. We are glad to have them both back home. Our show today brought to you by US Cloud. I had never heard of US Cloud and I talked to these guys and I went, wow, more people ought to know about you. They're the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. So yeah, it's not really about the cloud, it's about support. But it's like, like Microsoft support. Better, faster and cheaper. Pretty good, right? US Cloud is the global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. A lot of big businesses switch to US Cloud because they can save 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified support. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 300 and 65 days a year. They respond faster and they resolve tickets quicker for clients all around the world. But you're always talking to real humans in the US and your data stays in the US and so for a lot of companies, that's very important. And the engineers are the best in the business. US Cloud really works hard to get the top. They pay them well, they give them great benefits to get the best engineers out there. So when you call, when you say, I got a problem, you're going to talk to an Expert level engineer with an average of 14.9 years. That's for Break Fix or DSE. There are, as I said, 100% domestic so your data never leaves the US. Oh, and here's another thing they do that I really like. I don't think Microsoft offers this. Financially backed SLAs on response time. They're giving you a guarantee. Initial ticket responses average under four minutes. When, when the house is, when your network is down, your hair is on fire. You don't want to wait any longer than you have to. Four minutes. The cavalry is on the way. In 2023 last year they, they talked to their clients. 94% of US Cloud's clients said they had saved 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Classified. Now I, when I talked to these guys, I said that's great, but really you should focus on the fact that it's better support. It's not just less expensive. From Fortune 500 companies, large health systems, major financial institutions, and yes, federal agencies, US cloud ensures vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. I'm talking the biggest brands. Caterpillar uses US Cloud, HP, Aflac uses US Cloud. Dun Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank, even, and this might be the best endorsement of all. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. I saw an interview with a director of Information technology with a great quote. He said, and within an hour US Cloud responded with I want to say four engineers. So they not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice. You should make the right choice. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. Their ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance, it's a strategic imperative that drives operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. They adhere to these standards not because they have to, because it fosters trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. It attracts investment and ensures long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. And they are succeeding. What a great company. US Cloud. Book a call today to find out how much your team can save. Again with the saving. It's not just you're saving money. Better Microsoft support for less. Oh, it's faster too. Uscloud.com uscloud.com book a call today. Better, faster Microsoft support for less. How about that? We'll Put that all together in one. Uscloud.com we thank them so much for supporting the show. You support us when if they ask you, you say, hey, I saw it on Windows Weekly that those guys really, they told me to call and I did. USCloud.com thank you for your support US Cloud. All right, it's time to talk about Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I figured we get to it eventually. Yeah. As Leo mentioned, I. Right after the show concluded last week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because we were saying, why isn't there an ISO for Windows on is for.

[Leo Laporte]

Months, you know, so sometime the past month or so. I think probably when 24H2 was released, they put a little note on the download page. Hey, it's coming. You know, we promise.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what Aria said too, on the show. It's like, don't worry, it's coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. It's unclear what took so long. I mean, if you go back. Well, I mean to the original. There's never been a downloadable ISO other than through the Insider program for Windows 10 or 11 on ARM. And there was never any for Windows RT. Right. Of course that required new hardware. Why would there be? But you know, this is becoming more mainstream. This is kind of necessary. There's a. This part of that conversation you were talking about with Aria on your show is that ARM devices have always been a little different than x86, x64 devices in the sense that the. I kind of. I don't know what to call it. It's like the support stack for these things is more integrated. You know, PCMaker ship this thing that is kind of a. It's a thing, you know, and I know it's serviced over time, but. But if you were to try to do a bare metal install of this, you run into these issues where you have to have all the correct drivers and you can't go to hp.com and download ARM drivers. Really. Right. It's still kind of a weird problem. I think that's part of it. Yep. So there's a big difference.

[Richard Campbell]

There's also a general push by Microsoft to just build the drivers for everybody. Right. Like they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. Quality control thing. And that has factored into it.

[Richard Campbell]

Imagine you have a chance to reset this. This nightmare of the driver problem.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a. There are a variety of ways to restore or reset or whatever it is. Repair a running install of Windows on a PC. And if you have an ARM based device, especially a new Snapdragon X based whatever, you should avail yourself of all of those things before you Ever try this?

[Richard Campbell]

That thing already has the driver set in it, right? Like that's the main thing that's built for your machine.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. If your PC maker offers you a recovery image of some kind that you can use to create a bootable recovery disk, which Microsoft does, by the way, for its ARM based Surface devices, you should use that, you know, because you could run into problems. One of the interesting things that Microsoft advises is something I've actually seen many, many times, which is you take an x64 computer of whatever kind and you're like, I want to do a clean install this. And by clean install, I mean like an actual clean install. I want to make sure there's no way bare metal, this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Phone home.

[Leo Laporte]

Phone's home to HP or Lenovo, whoever it is. Yeah, I want, I want Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

I want all my crap work gone. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, Yep. And then you run the installer and what you find is that the mouse doesn't work. So you have to use the keyboard to pad around and do that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't connect to a network because network stack doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Those drivers aren't there. Right. So I have no problem moving around with a keyboard. I have, I'm. I've gotten very good at the disk setup tool and setup.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Using it with the keyboard. Right. No problem there. But I've often had to attach a USB C to Ethernet adapter to an Ethernet cable and plug that thing into the box.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

To get that to work, use another machine.

[Richard Campbell]

The load drivers on a USB key to stick in the machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Now that part you can't do with arm, but the plugging into Ethernet, Microsoft recommends it. Right. If you run into this problem. So I guess the. Here's the good news. The no caveat ways in which you can use this ISO are to install Windows 11 on ARM in a VM, which you can only do on an ARM based PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you have a Mac and Leo brought this up last week when you were gone. But. But for some reason you're stuck on 2223 H2 using parallels or whatever. Typically Parallels, but also other fusion, whatever you might be using, download the ISO and just run Setup from there and just do an Upgrade, you know, 24H story. You don't have to worry about the drivers because it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, because I am on 22H2 as we talk.

[Leo Laporte]

Just use the straight up ISO. Okay. There is no media creation tool from Microsoft that works with the Windows 11 Arn Arm. You know, there's no. Installation assistant.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't make a usb?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Could you use Rufus or something to do it? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Does Rufus support it? I haven't tried that yet. So I just got home. So that's one of the things I'm going to look at. I'll try it. I'll try it. When you use Microsoft's downloadable Surface. What's the term? I guess restore image, whatever they call it, you actually use the restore. I'm using the wrong terms here, I'm sorry. The recovery drive, there's a recovery drive wizard that creates a recovery USB drive. Right. In Windows you can use that and then you overwrite with the Surface specific stuff, boot with that thing, it has the drivers, et cetera, et cetera. So that's actually the better option for that kind of computer. Yeah. I mean, could you create like a raw. I don't actually. I think you could. Right. It's just an ISO. I mean, I don't see any reason why you couldn't. I haven't tried it, so that's one thing I haven't tried. But. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't. You could use this on an older pre Snapdragon X or Snapdragon Elite, whatever the actual name of that thing is. PC to just kind of upgrade in place. If you're not getting the upgrade through Windows Update, like that should work. You don't have to worry about drivers in that case. But as a kind of pure restoration kind of utility, it's not quite there, you know, in the sense that it won't work for everyone and it's not the type of thing you want to take the chance on. Like, we'll see what happens. Like, no, because if you screw this thing up, you, you know, you're going to have to go back to the PC maker and say, hey, could you, could you fix this for me? You know, you don't want to be careful with it, but if you have a Windows 11 on ARM device and want to run Hyper V and put a VM in there, this will work for that. If you have, like I said, parallels on a Mac, no problem. It's better than using that UUP dump site because it's official, it is from Microsoft, but it may not have all the drivers you have to get online. If you can get online with the Ethernet cable, then you can go into Windows Update and that should get you the drivers you need. Right. That's how that works. So that's true on x64 as well. But at Least it's here. I don't mean to say there are caveats, but there's just more to know, that's all. Just be smart about it and know all the options you have. If you are actually having issues. There are existing options. Everyone knows about their Windows recovery environment that reset this PC functionality. But there's also new stuff. I think it's new to 24H2. If you go into the recovery options and settings, there's an option called Fix Problems with the Windows Update and it actually reinstalls Windows without impacting your apps, your files or your settings. And that's true of apps you've downloaded from the web. That's the first time they've offered something like that. Right. A lot of their restore tools in the past were like, well, we'll keep the store apps, but you're going to have to go reinstall Chrome and Office and all this stuff. This actually keeps that. So if you're doing this for restore reasons, just avail yourself of the other tools first. This should be a last ditch answer. Like, don't. Don't say like I have a. Like a new whatever, you know, Copilot plus PC Snapdragon. I just want to have a really clean install. So I'm going to like. Yeah, I'd be careful with that. I wouldn't. I just uninstall the things you don't want instead. That's a better approach, but at least it's there. So yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I did find some blog posts from folks who figured out too. You can use Rufus.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Bill upset. But the main thing they said was because all drivers are slipstream, you need. The smart thing to do is to take the WoA drivers and put them on the USB key with.

[Leo Laporte]

How do they get them though? Like get them out of the computer itself? Like.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're talking about the generic, the generalized woas from Microsoft. There are sets up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Like the class drivers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So you take all of them, you put them on the USB key as well.

[Leo Laporte]

See. Why aren't those on there? They should be.

[Richard Campbell]

So. But they're not. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so if you add those then it will, as it's setting up, find them and slip stream them in.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to remember where I saw this. So.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's. And that is an ARM EUFY boot. So that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's good. I mean that's good. So I don't remember.

[Richard Campbell]

Your mileage will vary. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Good luck. I'm trying to remember why I ran into this. I don't remember, but one of the issues I've kind of questioned in the past about copilot plus PCs on Snapdragon is they ship with 20 something slms right on the disk. So I was always curious, you know, when they make this ISO available, is it going to be 10 gigabytes or 20 gig? It's not. It's just a 5.1, you know, normal size. And that means that those things will have to download as you need them. And I actually saw this one time and this is what I'm. I can't remember where I saw this, but imagine you are running a Copilot plus PC. Maybe you just did the clean install with this thing and you go into Paint and you use the image. What's the one that's only on Copilot Plus? Whatever the feature, it doesn't matter. Use some feature in Paint or Photos or whatever that's unique to Copilot PC. So it shows. The feature shows up and you click on it and it says, you don't have the LLM you need for this. And it actually downloads it then.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So this thing, I don't know if there's some facility in the system where it will do this automatically in the background if you're not doing anything. But I do know and I just, I can't, I can't remember how I ran into this. But if you run into an on demand or you run into a feature that needs an LLM and it's. Or an SLM and it's not on the disk, it will download it. It will actually tell you, like, give us a minute, we have to download this thing. So that's how they're doing it. I think it's the answer to that.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's just that you need the basics. Like the default ARM configuration doesn't even have a display driver. It has no network. So you can install it, but then you can do nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you can do nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

You can do nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Which by the way, was what you did with Windows rt. So it's like going back in time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, I feel like the reality, of course, when you're an OEM who builds your own machines is this is the base install of Windows. It comes with nothing. And then you actually build out your driver set for your machine.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know why they would have shipped it like this. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The reason this is confusing is that the base configuration in Windows and ARM with Snapdragon X is virtually identical for all of these computers now, they all have their own things for sure. I mean, I don't mean to downplay that, but one of the things that's astonishing about these computers is how the same they all are. Right, Right. So it seems like the. I'll just call it class driver because I'm not really sure how they do it on an arm, but like the class driver for the keyboard, the trackpad, the screen, the whatever, networking would be the biggest one. Really. Not the biggest one, but one of the topics, top whatever five or eight. Why aren't those in there? I don't understand that. Like I.

[Richard Campbell]

That's absolutely. Everybody would need.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that surprises me. So maybe this evolves over time. I don't. There are reasons for sure, but I, you know, they're quiet about. They never even announced that they did it. They just put it up one day, you know, so whatever. It's better than nothing. For sure. It's certainly better. I mean, my God, we've been waiting for this for years. So it's good that they did.

[Paul Thurrott]

So where did they put it? I'm looking and I don't see.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you Google download Windows 11.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean I've got Windows 11 website page.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there are three or four. Scroll down, go down now, ladies and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul. No, no, it's teaches me how to use a computer. This will be great. There you go, right there. So it says download Windows 11 disk image ISO.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a bold link, it says Windows 11 ISOs for ARM64 devices are here. It's in the next section down.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ah, yes, available here. Ah, there's a link.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a four letter link in that page.

[Paul Thurrott]

It says here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm surprised you didn't see it. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then it has all that stuff before, but I'm not going to worry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. And what the nice thing about Parallels is I don't need it on a USB key.

[Richard Campbell]

I can do it from the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You just run it right up there. You just mount it and run setup. Yep. So you have to choose language. You could. Yeah, you'll get it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And actually since we did, let me skip ahead just for a second because this is ARM related and I don't know why I didn't put these next to each other. Google some months ago announced they would bring Google Drive to Windows 11 on ARM and now they have. So it's in beta. I just put it on I put it on my Surface laptop. I think it was the morning I flew home, actually. So it would have been yesterday. It feels like a million years ago. But. But assuming I'm gonna. I'll use it for, you know, some number of days, but I. I had switched temporarily back to OneDrive because this was not available. Assuming all goes well so far, it's been great. Yeah, I'll go back to Google Drive because it's better. But yeah, I've been waiting. This is my only significant. Actually, I think it's my only software incompatibility issue with Windows 1111 on ARM to date. So, yeah, problem solved. So that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. The big message for Windows at Ignite is not these new copilot features. It's not. Whatever. It's security. Because I don't know if you got the memo on this, but security is job one at Microsoft now and it's the priority. It's weird because they really push the AI thing. You would think it might be AI, but it's not a security. And they were talking security around the cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I don't see a lot of conversation about security in Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

There is. There's a whole thing. There's a. And so you're familiar with the Secure Future initiative? Yes, they have one just for Windows now. They announced this because. Of course. So I wrote this in the notes, I wrote this in my article. But I want everyone listening or watching this podcast. I want you to close your eyes for a second and just think. When I say the words Microsoft Windows to you, what are the first things that come to mind? Now it's going to be a range. Some of it's going to be unprintable. But I'm guessing that what no one thought of was security or resiliency or anything like that. I'm guessing no one thought that. Which is interesting because that's what Microsoft seems to think is top of mind for most people that use Windows. I think Windows is the result of a lot of inertia, especially with businesses. But. But to be fair to them, like I said earlier, I think I said this up front in the show. Yeah, I did. There are two halves to the equation when it comes to Windows. There's no singular team, really. Right. There's the architecture side, which is in Azure, and then there's the clown car, as I call it. The stuff that they throw features out like an ape throwing its feces at people at the zoo. So the security side's actually. It's pretty solid. Right. And there's a bunch of stuff in Windows 11 now and there's a bunch of stuff coming that is actually really exciting. And one of the things I've talked about a bunch and I really think people don't understand this is the Windows hello ESS stuff that's in Copilot PC. So we talk about how they raise the bar on the system requirements, but they also raise the bar on the security requirements to a degree that is actually kind of off the charts. And this will become the baseline for Windows security going forward for all computers. Right. It takes time. You have to transition the whole customer base over to these newer computers that have this kind of stuff. But it's an exciting, it is an exciting change. And for businesses, they've announced a bunch of specific features that I think most people don't know about. Some are new, so that explains that. But I mean some of them have been around for a while, like Windows hello ess, which I think PC makers had never really rolled out because it's super expensive. Customers didn't understand it, no one was really asking for it. It's a very stringent set of requirements. But now this is getting added into the mix. I went back and looked this up. I had this vague idea that this might be true. But Microsoft announced their Secure Future initiative, the new version of Trustworthy Computing, late last year. Two weeks later, Russian hackers broke into their infrastructure and started a two month long escapade that they still to this day have not fully admitted to Microsoft. And so May came and build and they were like, all right, we're going to re announce this. Like we never did it in the first place because people probably don't think we're serious about it. So they sort of pretended they were saying it for the first time. And then two months later, a month and a half later, crowdstrike happened, right? So now it's November again and we're like, all right, so listen, we're really serious about security. We're doing this again. And it is worth looking at the stuff that they're doing to secure Windows. There's some very interesting things coming on. I'm super curious both you, Leo and Richard, what you think about this one, because this blows my mind. I saw that in Windows 24H2 that Microsoft was enabling. They call it BitLocker sometimes, sometimes they call it full or they just call it Device Encryption. It's because the branding on it's different depending on what kind of version of Windows you have. It's just full disk encryption is what it is, but whatever they said, they're enabling it by default on all computers, all PCs. And I'm like, oh, well, that's kind of interesting given that you've been doing that for like five or seven years already. What does that mean? Right. And so in later versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, they enable disk device encryption of BitLocker when you sign into a Microsoft account or to a Microsoft work or school account. And the reason they do it then is because when you do that, they can save the recovery key up to your OneDrive. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have Windows 11 Pro or better, you can go into the BitLocker control panel and you can enable it manually if you sign in with like a local account. Right. So you can do that, but you have to save the recovery key first. You can't save it to the disk you're encrypting. Right. It has to go somewhere else. But. But once you save it, they will let you then encrypt the disk. So I was like, well, how would they possibly enable it automatically in all computers? Because they still allow people to sign in with these older account types. And the answer is they don't. So I don't know what they were talking about. Like it can't be activated until you back up that recovery key. So I wasn't sure what that meant. But in a coming version of Windows first, for businesses that are using Enterprise Edition, they're going to enable. This blows my mind. A folder based encryption capability that. Sorry, it's tied to folder backup in some way. So it's like desktop documents, pictures folders by default, but I guess you can add other folders. I'm like, okay. And you have to sign in with Windows hello to or authenticate with Windows hello to get into those folders as an admin. Interesting. But the disk is already encrypted. I'm curious, what is this? They literally refer to it as double encryption.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And that reads like a joke.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's twice as good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's twice as good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like double secret probation, only different.

[Leo Laporte]

I often like, this is the type of joke I make. I'll say something like, my password is 1234, but I'm going to make it 1234 because now it's 64 bit, so it's way more secure. It's a joke, right? It's stupid. That's what this reads like. It's not a joke. They're actually doing this. They call it double double encryption.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it helps how I don't it's because it's two encryptions. Come on, man. It's twice as good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's more encryptions.

[Leo Laporte]

It might be exponentially as good. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, hot patch is great. This is the ability to install security patches without requiring a reboot.

[Richard Campbell]

How many times have we heard that one?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. There's stuff like that. There's a feature that's been in Windows 11 for a couple of years now called Smart App Control. So if you're running Windows 11, go look for it. It's hilarious. Run Windows Security. I'm actually going to do it on this computer. I'm curious what it says because I think I already know what it's going to say. But Windows Security and then you go to app and Browser Control and it will say smart App Control. It's one of the things. So you go into SETT and on most people's computers by this point it will be all grayed out and it's off. That's how it works. There's nothing you can do to turn this on. So when you get a new computer or you reset a computer, Windows App Control or Smart App Control goes into evaluation mode and it will sit there and learn about the apps you use. And if it can be turned on, it will actually automatically turn itself on, which by the way, I've never seen that once, so I don't know what to tell you about. But you can turn it on manually if you do it quick. It has to be within the first week or so of using a new computer. Once you turn it on, it uses AI to evaluate the behavior of apps that you've just installed. And if it sees weird behavior, it will actually prevent you from running that app. When it does that, you will of course turn it off. And when you do, you can never re enable it. Now technically you can re enable it if you know the registry things to change. But there's no UI for re enabling it. And so for businesses they're adding a. I think it's just called App Control for business probably or something. They're adding a policy based way for IT admins to force that on users essentially. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It should just be group policy.

[Leo Laporte]

It should just. Yeah, so I was told, yeah earlier this year that this was going to be enabled by default. So it would not be in evaluation mode, but it would just be on in default. In 24H2 it's not. So this is one of those things I've looked at a bunch and it's not the behavior's not changed, but it is something that's been in Windows 11, I want to say, for at least two years. It's kind of experimental in a sense. It literally is an evaluation mode by default. But if you're.

[Richard Campbell]

So is this like in Canary? Like, where is it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's unstable. You can do it right now. Run Windows Security, the app, you know, it's like a dashboard. And then go to the. I think it's called App. I just did it. I'm sorry, I just lost it. App and Browser Control, I think. Yeah, App and Browser Control. And then the first link in there is Smart App Control. And if you go into settings, like I said, if you've been running Windows 11 for a while, this thing's off and there's nothing you can do. Right. But if you've reinstalled Windows or new computer, you can actually enable. It's in evaluation mode by default, but you can enable it and it will protect you against untrusted apps and drivers, I guess is the way to kind of put it.

[Richard Campbell]

How do they assess untrusted AI if you address that?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know why you're questioning this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's weird to me you would.

[Leo Laporte]

Even ask that question. Yeah, I mean, my experience with this so far is that I've never found a good way to demo it. I've never found a good example of something I could definitely run where it would be like, oh, yeah, no, this is not good. And then it just kind of, you know. You know, I enable it and I never have any problems. Right. But if you run into a problem, you can turn it off and then. But I do know if you do turn it off, you can never turn it back on. Not using the standard ui.

[Richard Campbell]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good stuff. There is a new, modern version of Windows. Hello. From a user experience that's coming where they explicitly mention the passkey stuff they've been using under the covers for the past year or so. Yeah, about a year. Which is cool. Right? And so sometime in the past month, Microsoft talked about how they're expanding passkey support in Windows. That's going to get nice. So that stuff's cool. Like that's happening or it will be happening soon. That's cool. I'm trying to think what. Oh, here's the big one, actually, this is the big one. So starting with Windows xp, to my memory, Microsoft simplified the types of user types you could have or. Well, it's really permission types, really. But there are administrator Users and standard users. Right. We've had this since Windows xp, rather than having different, you know, different, more granular control over that kind of stuff. So administrator, standard user. It's sort of like Windows SKUs. Like that was the same time where they introduced the Home sku, right, to the NT product line. So we had Home and Professional. And so Microsoft kind of sits back and they look at all the features and they're like, all right, this one's going to be in Home and also Pro, this one's only going to be in Pro. Right. Like you make these kind of decisions and so they made the same decisions with permissions. Right. Like administrator class users will be able to do certain things that standard users can't. Right. And so the way Windows has worked ever since is that if you need to, as a standard user, do something you can't do, you could escalate and send, basically you would send a notification to an administrator class user who could approve it for you. Or, or if you knew the administrator class user's username and password, you could enter that information then and bypass the block and go do it. So this system's not great. Fair enough. So I don't know if this. Let me think about this. Is this Windows? I think this is straight across Windows. So it's probably Windows Pro and Enterprise. But in the, like, the managed versions of Windows, they're going to allow you to authenticate against Windows. Hello. To allow things to happen as an administrator. So in other words, we're recognizing that most people set up a computer and they're administrators. Right. But they're going to run as a standard user most of the time. And when they need to do something, yes, some action, some task, whatever it is that requires administrative privileges, they're going to have a temporary administrator token created that occurs when they authenticate with Windows low. So hopefully it's facial recognition or thumbprint. It could be a pin. And then as soon as that thing's done, you're back to standard user.

[Richard Campbell]

Mean the thing that Linux has done for forever.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? I feel like Microsoft invented this. And I don't know why you have.

[Richard Campbell]

Anybody would talk any other way.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm sure that, I'm sure that it's. Look, it's a good idea, wherever it came from, if that is how. Yeah, that sounds right, like it's like a visual, like a GUI version of Sudo, I guess maybe is the way to think of it. Windows Slow base Sudo. Yeah, so. So it's a good idea. I mean, for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Just getting people to not operate routinely in with admin privileges.

[Leo Laporte]

This has been the dream forever. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it's like with one shop where they had a script for every admin account. With a moment you were running an admin account, there was a red flashing light.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. It's just like, it's only when you went down to a domain account that you didn't have that problem. Although now folks complain about power of domain accounts, but, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Right. People who care about security have, have tried this. Right. You're out there, you're going to hear this go, yep, I did this. You, you, you create an administrative class accounts because you have to. The first one you sign into with the computer hat is an administrator and then you're like, all right, but that's just there for me to approve things. So now I'm going to create a standard user account that I'm going to use.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm going to, every time something happens, I'll just enter the, the authentic, you know, whatever I need to authenticate against the administrative account.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then use that for about 15 seconds. And you're like, no, screw this. This is a pain in the ass. Yeah. It's like, it's horrible. So no one does it. And yeah. So this is there 25 years later, like, all right, maybe we solve this. Maybe this is it. This sounds good to me. A lot of the security stuff they're doing in Windows 11 right now is relying on this Windows hello based authentication.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think it's smart. I think this is, I think that's a good idea. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, and it's just, it's partly to do with Windows. Like, the login process has such an extensive impact that the only really way to do it had been to log all the way out to log back in. There was a UAC escalation, but it's only if you trigger uac. So it only works in certain circumstances where you can temporarily use it in minimum privilege to apply that UAC constraint.

[Leo Laporte]

Uac. I think I was wrong about this, but I always compared UAC to that third brake light. They added the cars in 1986 or whatever year. I remember they did that. And I, and I, you know, okay, why are we adding an extra brake light? And it's like, well, people will notice this and they'll like, they'll see the brake lights better, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm like, yeah, then they'll just get used to it and they'll ignore it. You Know, and I actually seem to ignore. But, you know, the third brake light has persisted, so maybe it works. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Once you put a rule in place.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you see this? A24H2 is installing good things coming your way.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait till he loses his keyboard and mouse capabilities. But.

[Paul Thurrott]

The good news is the emulator handles all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. I don't have to worry about that. Anyway, I feel like people don't pay attention to UAC anymore. I think that's part of the problem. Right. I don't think most people do what I do, but I know that if you hit tab three times and hit enter, it gets rid of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't tell people that.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I'm sorry, but I'm like, tap, tap, tap, enter. That's what I do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Doesn't it sometimes ask for your password?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Oh, uac. No, it will. So actually, this just came up when Richard was gone. So in the Insider program somewhere, they're updating UAC to, I think, avoid the thing I just described similarly to, like, a 2fa app. Like, sometimes it will give you a number. Sometimes it'll give the number on the other side. Sometimes you have to, you know, it does something.

[Richard Campbell]

A little hater is playing that game.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they're trying to get rid of the, you know, thing.

[Richard Campbell]

I do know the pattern.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they're tap, tap, tap, enter.

[Leo Laporte]

They're doing that with.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I love. I love the way authenticator says, you know, look. Look at the requester for the number. Look at me for the number.

[Leo Laporte]

It keeps showing.

[Richard Campbell]

Type the number in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Yeah, I do like that, actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Were you being sarcastic or do you actually appreciate it?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I really do appreciate it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It makes you think.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think. No, it's a little extraordinary. It's different every time. That's absurd.

[Paul Thurrott]

Brake light.

[Richard Campbell]

But it also, you know, it's the fourth brake light.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the fourth break.

[Richard Campbell]

I've talked to an administrator who they talking to whose account was under attack. And while the account was under attack, the guy approved an authentication that wasn't him, like, while he was on the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're like, stop. This freaking thing is always asking me stuff like, yeah, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

And the whole thing with the authenticator numbers is you have to be both sides because you need to be able to see the number.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. So. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't believe he just did that. It was right in front of me, like, while I was there. He had to.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what it's like being a human being.

[Richard Campbell]

You're flawed.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why AI is going to take us out. I can't wait. It's only a matter of time.

[Richard Campbell]

The AI will wait. Presents A wizard where you can go next. Next. Next. Done.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like, hey, co pilot, how do I, like, just get rid of UAC props altogether? Is that a thing? Could I do that?

[Richard Campbell]

Would you like the end of Civilization Wizard? I can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to. But you can do it. But there's a UAC prompt. I'm just, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're just going to have to hit.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, just authenticate with Windows. Hello. And we're good. There's been a bunch of stuff through the Windows Insider program since we last spoke, including one that just happened today. Most of it is not particularly interesting. They're getting rid of the beta channel for Windows 10, which is hilarious because they just started it up again in June. But whatever, who cares?

[Richard Campbell]

Windows 10 was over.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I guess it is again. So there's a bunch of just. I don't even care about most of this stuff, honestly. But the big one, the one that people are going to want to pay attention to, came out last week, I think, after the show, as always, last week's show, which is a new release preview channel build of Windows 11, which has a lot of additional things, which means it's almost certainly coming out on patch Tuesday in December. So if you look at this list, you get an idea that this was supposed to be 24H4 and they didn't quite make the final cut. Right. For the initial release. It includes some things we've seen before, like the Android sharing capabilities from File Explorer and on the desktop up there's like that Start menu thing where if you have your Android setup and phone link, it pops up in a weird little regurgitated side panel thing. System tray updates, where it's like the shortened form of the clock now, which they showed like six months ago. Jump lists in the start menu. It's a bunch of little things, just a bunch of them. So I think this to me is like, okay, this is what we really wanted to do for 24H2, so. So I'm guessing here kind of, but I think this is going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Do they stop going at 24H2 at some point? Can it be 25H1? Can't it?

[Leo Laporte]

So, all right, I'm fascinated you just said that because this is not in the notes, but it's November. A couple weeks ago, Google announced that they Were going to change the schedule for Android. Right. They've always released toward the end of the year. They kind of finalize it in August usually, and then it goes out of new devices like later in the year. Now for them, what that meant was typically in August, I'm sorry, in October, they would release new Pixel devices and it would have that version of Android. They would usually be the first ones. Right. And then it would go out to others, you know, Samsung would follow in January, whatever they claim because of their third party OEMs, which I read as. Because Samsung, the only one that matters, that they want to change the schedule so that they release this thing by the middle of the year. So in the second quarter. And so Android 16 is going to have this shortened schedule where all the behavior changes that you see in the UI will occur in probably, you know, May or June, something like that. Android 16 will come out. And they said they're doing it because of these partners. Right. Samsung, Samsung, who increasingly is releasing their best and most important products in automation in August. Right. Which is the folding devices.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This past year, actually last year and then again this year, they tried to move this timeline up, they tried to ship it early. They missed last year, they missed this year by two months. They didn't even come close. So they announced new Pixels in August. They did all their pixels in August, just like Samsung does for folding phones with last year's Android. Nice. So if you thought Microsoft was stupid, they're right there and now. But now they've started up this thing. So I think, honestly I look at this and I think, yeah, this is the right time to do it. You want to hit the end of the year stuff, you want to hit back to school, you want to hit holiday, whatever. Why wouldn't Microsoft do the same thing? Right. They sort of half did it last year. They released 24H2 first for Snapdragon. Right. In June.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But then they waited until November or October. Sorry. And now I guess sort of December for the full version.

[Richard Campbell]

We're playing with that idea that there's a six month exclusivity and we don't really know when it ends.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't want to give them ideas. I definitely don't want to go back to our system where they do two major releases every year. But I actually do think that the second quarter of the year is the better time for that major release. I think that is the better time. Interesting you just said that because that's that to me, like, why not have a 25H1.

[Richard Campbell]

Why not? Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And then go to 26H1. Like skip the H2. Forget H2. Who cares about H2?

[Richard Campbell]

Do it in the first half of the year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

In which case you're already late. It's November. H1 is upon us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Anyway, that's. That would be my recommendation.

[Richard Campbell]

I just really never want to say 24H2 ever again. That's what I'm looking forward to.

[Leo Laporte]

I. 24H2 is. I don't remember if you missed this or not, but has been easily the buggiest, most unreliable version they've ever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh God, I just installed it. Knock that off.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but they have cute icons in the context menu. It's nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember when it said, you know, great things are in waiting for you?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I believed it. See, I'm on 24H2. That was the ISO I downloaded, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. Let me look. I'm gonna look at mine. I think you're on the. Oh, I actually have a newer. But you might. So you should go to Windows updated. But you have a newer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, I haven't done the monthly.

[Richard Campbell]

Updates because you updated now you'll need to update.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. You might want to just join the insider program, Leo.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I've learned my lesson.

[Leo Laporte]

And then just real quick, this is just semi related because earnings never end. Lenovo, the world's biggest maker of computers had significant double digit gains, profit and revenue year over year.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Oddly not from PCs necessarily like they're. Revenues from PC sales only went up 3% year over year. However, they did predict that for full year 2025, which for them is. When is their fiscal year? I can't remember exactly. It might be the next. We might be in the first quarter now will be significantly better PC sales. So they've actually upped their prediction for PC revenue growth for the coming year. So I think it was 5 to 10%. Now it's 10 to 15%. So they're talking like we pretty much guarantee it's going to be double digit PC growth in the coming year, which is kind of amazing. And they credit two things for the AI PCs because they kind of have to, but Also that Windows 11 replacement cycle which we've been talking about for years but has to happen eventually. And with Windows 10 exiting mainstream support, not mainstream support, to support. I guess unless you pay for the extended support stuff in October, next year probably, probably will start happening.

[Richard Campbell]

So it wasn't the PCs that gave them double digit growth. What was it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was. It Wasn't cars, it wasn't Iot. It wasn't smart devices. No, it was data center.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So everyone even like companies that are just not big players in this market, like AMD kind of falls in this category in an even bigger way. Even though they're nothing really, a lot of their growth is coming from that part of the business. Lenovo has been trying to diversify beyond the PC for a long, long time and they obviously have a phone business, et cetera, but you were gone for this. But AMD announced layoffs and they're actually laying off people in their PC and gaming divisions to focus on AI in the data center, which they see as a major growth area for them. They are not five. That's not fair. I was gonna say 5%, but it, it's some, I can't remember how small they are compared revenue wise to Nvidia, but it's somewhere in that, it's somewhere in that area. It's very small compared to Nvidia. But for them, you know, the PC has a, has a very definitive, you know, size to it. It's not like if they go gangbusters, they're not going to be a much bigger company than they are now. But if they can make some growth happen in the data center with AI, that's a huge growth potential.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Lenovo never broke up like HP did. Right. So they still have both sides of that kind of fence. Like I think Dell. Yeah, Dell does as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okey dokey. Maybe we do a little breaky wiki here. And then I know you want more AI, so you're going to get more AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're going to smack you with it.

[Paul Thurrott]

You've been asking for it, now you're gonna get it. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, you are listening, dear Winder and Dozer winner and dozers to Windows Weekly. This show brought to you today, as it always has been, literally by Cash Fly. How many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cashfly at Cache. Actually, in the early days of the show, Paul remembers this. Back when we were in audio, it was like brought to you by AOL Radio for a while and brought to you by BitTorrent for a while. We were suffering, to be honest. We just didn't have the bandwidth to give you the shows you want. And when we moved to video, it was even worse. Fortunately, Cash Fly to the rescue. For over 20 years, Cash Fly has held a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And now Cash Flies better prepared for the holidays. Yes, Cash Fly gets ready for the holidays better prepared than ever before. Cash Fly is the only CDN built for throughput, ultra low latency video streaming, delivering video with less than a second latency to over a million concurrent users. Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster. And as you're playing with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. If you've got a site or anywhere with images on it, you'll love Cashfly's mobile Content Optimization, which gives you automatic and simple image optimization just like that, so your site loads faster and looks better no matter what size screen you're on. The thing we really appreciate about Cash Fly, we didn't know at the time, you know, bandwidth was very spiky. We didn't, we didn't want to pay for like the maximum bandwidth we'd ever use. It went up and down some, some days there was hardly any. So they offered us flexible month to month billing so we could figure that out as long as we needed. And they'll offer that to you too by the way. Plus, once you understand, you know what your needs are, you could get discounts for fixed terms. The point was for us and for you to design your contract when you switch. They're very flexible. A couple of big announcements. They wanted me to talk about managed object storage. Cashflow is a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels. The hardware, get this, this is so cool. It's entirely based on NVMe, so it's going to be better suited to users with large numbers of small objects. It's completely S3 compatible, of course, and it will easily integrate into your cash fly MOS, into S3 or any other tool set you've designed. And here's the best part. There are no egress or ingress costs, no zero egress or ingress costs, just a flat volume fee. And they've just added a new pop in Austria's capital city, Vienna. So let's all go have some soccer toured. Central Europe will see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. That's one of the things Cashflow does so well by putting a server closer to you, closer to your customers. For us, it means no matter where in the world you're downloading our shows, you're downloading from a server that's nearby. So it's fast. They've also added some new reseller features to the portal. You can now be classified as a reseller and have Numerous full accounts under your reseller account. This is great for MSPs, each of which can operate independently, but the billing is all centralized. Cash fly. We love Cash Fly Rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. And you can do something we. I think we were. It must have been an early beta of this because we've been doing this for a long time. You can shield your site content in the cloud. We upload to cashfly so there's 100% cash hit ratio. There's no cash misses. I love that feature. They call it SOS. You might want to try that. Cashflies Elite Managed Packages give you the VIP treatment. I know we've always gotten great treatment from our dedicated account manager. He or she will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24. 7 Support when you need it. Look, you owe it to yourself. Learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] Twitter. You need me to spell it for you? That's Cashfly at C A C H e f l y.com twit thank you cashfly. Thank you for all you've done for us over. How long has it been, Lisa? It's been 15 years. Something like that. Yeah. A long time back. We go to the now refreshed Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell.

[Leo Laporte]

Do we have an audio only live stream of this show?

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, actually least let me since.

[Leo Laporte]

Our season someone asked on Twitter. I'm not asking.

[Paul Thurrott]

We want this. We used to. We used to be on tunein and because we now stream on eight different platforms we've been constrained. One of the platforms could be the audio stream but we wanted to get it to YouTube and Twitch and Discord and TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook and X and Kick. That's eight and we. So I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean you could listen to the audio like I. You know.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but people want. I know what they want. We used to have a. You could just listen. Have an audio stream. A live audio stream. It was@TWIT AM. Check if it's there or not. I think we're working on getting it back.

[Leo Laporte]

We.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Look, I want to have it back. But remember the thing that has changed? We used to do 24. 7 streaming, right? So when we would do reruns and stuff, we don't do that anymore. So it won't be that you just turn it on and leave it on all day and all night. As much as you might want, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

I like to sleep to It. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think Twit AM might still work. If it doesn't. Russell's working on that. We're gonna. So I apologize. I know it's been down since the studio closed.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not something I. I've thought about. I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm glad you asked because actually I've been getting some email from people and I do want to tell people that. Yeah. Also, I should mention we're working on a best of for this show. As long as we're talking business. So if you have some ideas of moments of great rage on Paul's part.

[Richard Campbell]

Or.

[Paul Thurrott]

A comment that you enjoyed or whatever, we're looking for those clips. Anything that happened in the year 2024, go to TWiT TV. Best of the more information you give us, the easier it will be for our editors. But anything that you remember that you'd like to see in the end of year best of which is coming up in not too long, believe it or not, about a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, now back to the AI and antitrust and more, the section you've all been waiting for.

[Leo Laporte]

There's actually no AI in here that I can think of. Well, I guess it factors into this a little bit. So, according to a report in Bloomberg, the DOJ in the ninth states that are arrayed against Google in its losing search antitrust case in the United States are going to recommend or have recommended to the judge because he gave him various choices that Google sell off Chrome as part of its remedy. There's a lot more to this. They looked at selling off Android. They looked at selling off the advertising business. They are apparently also going to require them to make various changes to Android and the App Store, et cetera, et cetera. But the big one, of course, is this Chrome thing. And the reaction to this has been entertaining to me. I'm not 100% sure personally this is.

[Richard Campbell]

The right thing to do or it's generating revenue. How do you make a business out of a product you give away?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because it's the distribution vehicle.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't disagree. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's the theory. Yeah. No, I know. I don't know. It's hard not to look back at the Microsoft thing, you know. Remember when Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust violations late?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They were going to separate Microsoft into the OS company and the application company. That was the. Yeah. And this is not as dramatic as that.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's still, you know, it's kind of interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it sounds like table stakes in a consent decree Negotiation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing we can 100% guarantee is there will be no more of these special deals. Right. So the 20 whatever billion that they pay Apple every year. Going away. Yeah, the thing that keeps Mozilla in business. Going away. Sorry. Mozilla.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you do have a new administration too, so it'll be interesting to see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Although the new administration hates Google, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't. No one seems to remember this and I'm going to include myself in this list. This lawsuit was actually brought under the Trump administration so. Yeah, so actually.

[Richard Campbell]

And he's still been running through.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's the point. It's been going on so long.

[Leo Laporte]

Administration continued it and then yeah, government moves years off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Whatever remedy.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you think is selling Chrome though? I mean I don't even know how you sell Chrome. It's an open source project.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well that's the thing. Like how much could this. I think the three of us could afford to buy Chrome. Like I like what is. Like Chrome is a standalone business. Like what is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Analyst said it was worth like 20 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Please, for what.

[Richard Campbell]

How are you going to.

[Leo Laporte]

I was told the super site for Windows was worth a million dollars. When I tried to take it back. Like I. Yeah, sure it is. But I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Who would buy it and why would they buy it?

[Leo Laporte]

What man would want her. No, it's just. Yeah, no, yeah, it would be. Well, but Microsoft. There's no way Microsoft could. Microsoft. There's no way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No way. I honestly, I think the one company that makes sense here is Mozilla.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Mozilla.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't have. Well, I'm trying to stay in the industry. It will be some horrible sales force. Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, terrible Amazon. But it won't Amazon.

[Paul Thurrott]

This isn't going to happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Like I said, I think this is table stakes in a consent decree ocean.

[Leo Laporte]

I think what happens is some form of behavioral change where they can no longer tie their.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you say there'll be spankings?

[Leo Laporte]

Spankings. They will be. Do not make me make you go in a timeout. I will do it. I'm going to Blair Witch. You get up against me.

[Richard Campbell]

No safe words here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't have an opinion.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's hard to understand how it would even work because Chrome is based on an open source project called Chromium, which admittedly is mostly Google employees, but it is not owned by Google.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft uses Chromium for Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

It's roughly comparable to Android, when you think about it. So Android aosp. But the thing that people want is what we call Android and that's the Google Play, Google Maps, Gmail, and you pay for that. Right. And so that's obviously not true of Chrome, but Chrome, Google makes money through their advertising engine and by the way, all the built in tracking. Right. And so when Microsoft made Edge, the big promise was we're going to give you Chrome but without all the Google terribleness. Fair enough. They did it, but they added their own terribleness. Right. And so instead of getting tracked by Google, you get tracked by Microsoft. So is that better? Maybe, but I don't know, it's kind of a thin line.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Bloomberg's, whether how intelligent Bloomberg is or not, said it's worth $20 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

$20 billion. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I don't again what people will actually pay. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's all you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I don't understand really what, what selling it even means.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know, it's bizarre. It's bizarre.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like selling Linux. You can't sell Linux.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the real reason that they're talking about basing Chrome OS and Android now. You know, I don't know, I. It's very.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, actually what they're talking about is porting Chrome OS to Android to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, but yeah, so now it's, it's, it's basically Chrome on top of some thin Linux.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean the whole thing doesn't matter what happens to Chromebooks, what happens to Chrome. I don't, I don't, it doesn't make sense. This is a judge who apparently, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T know, to me it's fascinating actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Judge is doj, I should say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we didn't get to see what might have happened to Microsoft. Right. Because that fell apart. But it's, there's going to be some. You know, when you hear about breaking up Google, it sounds super dramatic, but what it really means is there are parts of the company that are going to maybe, maybe could get sliced off. To me it seems like the advertising business should be the thing like that Google becomes a tech.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they'll do that too.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's what I mean, it feeds.

[Paul Thurrott]

Into the advertising business because they gather.

[Leo Laporte]

Information about you make these technology products they're actually making, they're doing pretty good. I mean it's not a top five big tech company. But Google Cloud, whatever paid services have hardware, et cetera, that's a business.

[Richard Campbell]

The argument would be the Google Cloud and the Google Suite would Be better off being away from the ad business, because right now they're all hampered by anything that impairs ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that was the thing, like when Microsoft was going to split up into the two businesses. There was talk of like, well, now Microsoft will put out Office or whatever that company's called, will put out Office on Linux. Because now they're not constrained by these competitive demands that the, the broader company at that time had.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. But that already, that did happen to Microsoft once the Azure was their focus, suddenly there was Office for iOS and Android.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. Right. Different.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you know, that's exactly what happened. Yeah, but first you had to make the operating system not the focus of the company.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. So advertising is the focus of that, of this company, Google, majority of the business right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's why they wanted to sell. Cause what they're saying is sell the Chrome and Android.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you prevent the. You prevent.

[Paul Thurrott]

They gather data for your ad base.

[Leo Laporte]

How are you distributing your abuse? Right. You're doing it through these unfair deals you have with Apple, et cetera. Right. Worth tens of billions of dollars. You're doing it through, honestly, through Android as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cory Doctorow points out that selling Chrome actually will have the exact opposite effect. He says no company that buys Chrome, any company that buys Chrome will know it only has a couple of years before Google will be permitted to create a new browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Just create a new browser? Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this company, whoever buys it, would be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome as possible. So it could make Chrome worse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's why. But by the way, I didn't read that, and I don't mean to say that's why I. But that's why I think, like, Mozilla would be the best possible outcome here in a way. Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't have $20 billion, I can tell you. They're barely.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, of course they don't. No. But they could get a loan. No, it's, it's. No, it's people. For example, like one of the things I've said about Xbox is like, look, they want to get out of hardware. Maybe there's a model where the Xbox console could become something that they license and allow hardware makers to make. Right. There could be multiple consoles or whatever these devices are. And then people say, well, hold on a second. Like, if Microsoft can't make money making this, how could these other companies make money? Well, Microsoft doesn't make money making PCs either, but these Companies do. So smaller companies that just focus on this one thing, that have maybe smaller margins, whatever, can make a go of this thing. And so I think in this world, a company like Mozilla could take this product and without all that advertising nonsense, it would be a small business.

[Paul Thurrott]

They could do that today if they wanted to take Chromium.

[Richard Campbell]

If that would have worked, it would have done it. With Mozilla.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's ungoogled Chrome that people can use.

[Leo Laporte]

But Chrome had their finger on the scale the whole time because Chrome was paying to play or Google was paying to play. That's the point. Google, look, I don't want to understate. They made a good browser too, but the problem is they also abused it. There was stuff going on behind the covers that is bad for consumers. So Mozilla got kind of pushed, pushed aside because Google has infinite money they can pay to make sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it's hysterical that people are even.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because it's all going to go away January 20th. You might as well just throw everything up in the air.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think this one's going to. I don't think this one is.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but we don't know what shape it will take.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it'll change. You know, the funny thing is it's not worth $20 billion. It costs more than $20 billion, right? Well, Google spends billions. How much Chrome getting. Getting Chrome placed in front of everybody. That's true. It's a cat sync, not a revenue.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's an interesting point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but when Google pays Apple for, you know, what it was, 20, 22 billion bucks a year, they're making 40, 60, whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they're making that revenue.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you have an ad business tied to it with that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how they're making the revenues in the ad business.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. That's what I mean. Yeah. That's why it's not really worth $20 billion. Because when you strip away the revenue that it makes from.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just a nutty. It's a nutty request from the doj.

[Leo Laporte]

To be honest and I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Honest, I think nobody gets a way.

[Richard Campbell]

To try and negotiate a consent decree.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that, you know, I understand. I think what seems to be happening right now in Washington is the current administration is trying as best it can to get whatever it can in the next two months, whether it's started by the previous administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yes, I do. I. Yeah, but what do you think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Elon Musk's going to say about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe X could buy it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think. No, I think you're not wrong. The relationship with the tech billionaires and the incoming administration is not small.

[Leo Laporte]

Not at all. That's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

And Sundar Pichai has very much been kissing up to the new administration.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to just the ring, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Know, like I would if I were him.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not exactly a tech bro, but I, you know, he wear a bandana or something. He could get in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's funny because J. It's so confusing. J.D. vance loves Lina Khan and thinks. Yes, that's funny because he's praised her publicly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

He thinks that big. So there is this kind of b. Bipartisan consensus that big tech's bad for different reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there is definitely a target on big Tech. But it's. I think that we know that the Trump administration is pretty transactional, so it's really going to come down to how.

[Leo Laporte]

Great term, by the way. And it's accurate. Okay. Yeah. I'm just sort of. To me, it's interesting. I don't, I don't actually have a strong opinion about it. I don't. I don't. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think it's a remedy.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what. I think Richard's on to something. I think as a regulator, it's sort of like, you know, when you're playing a football game, final seconds of the game, a team is on the verge of potentially scoring a touchdown, but it's fourth down, down, and they. They're trying to get the other team to come off sides and it doesn't work. And you call a timeout and you just kick, you know, and like, what they're trying to do is like, maybe we can force them to the table and say, look, you've. I guess you're going to go for this nuclear option. Okay, sorry. Our mistake. Let's make some concessions because the better outcome here is behavioral concessions that come from Google, that the government agrees to the courts or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop. Although I guess you've already. You've also. I mean, you've been found guilty. It's kind of too late for this. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. It's fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

Paying for Chrome placement would not actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Be the real problem itself. There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but it kills Mozilla.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. I know, but you. I. But see, everyone says that, and you're right, but that's not. Look, if your business is being propped up by what is essentially.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe you should be killed.

[Leo Laporte]

Killed. Yeah, maybe you should be killed. Yeah, maybe you should be allowed. No offense, but I mean, I, I love what Mozilla stands for. They've made a lot of mistakes. And if your business is literally predicated on the world's worst company feeding you money every week to keep you alive so they can point to you and say, hey, look, we have competition. It's not a business. You know, sorry. I mean, I'm sorry, but that's not a reason to allow the abuse of this company to continue. It just isn't. It's. I'm sorry. You know, I love Mozilla. I wish.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, we need. Because we need the diversity.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want. And we, we need more of that kind of company too. I mean, but they, I, you know, this is not working, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Richard, you missed the whole.conf thing. I know. Idea.

[Richard Campbell]

I feel like people are quite annoyed that I wasn't there to host a session too, because I was in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, maybe this is something. I got to talk to you about this. So I have so much I want to talk about, but the union guys.

[Paul Thurrott]

Have a 20 hour show.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know. So I got to move on. I'm going to move on. So we're just in now. UNO platform, which I've kind of ignored for a long time, is sort of a WPF replacement by cross platform. So inherently interesting. They have a. There's a lot of hot reload in the industry right now, but they also have what they call hut. I think they call it hut design, which is horrible. But basically you have a designer and code and you can update the design in real time and it refreshes on the.

[Richard Campbell]

So it depends on hot reload, which is a. NET capability.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's very, very interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

So the UNO guys are taking on a really hard problem because these relativistic UX approaches where you just dynamically build, they're really hard to build a designer for.

[Leo Laporte]

And so, yeah, so for people who don't. People, people who aren't programmers will probably remember classic Visual Basic. Well, anything canvas a form, you would drag controls onto it, you would double click the control and you would write a little bit of code to handle that event. And it was awesome. It was fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Still true today, right in Studio 2022, you can make a WinForms client and you will get the designer, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the successor to that stuff, Microsoft got C with Anders Heilsberg and they did Windows forms. It was probably roughly 2,000, whatever it was. And then for the. Net Wave or whatever, they did Avalon, which became wpf. And they've had that. And that's been kind of brought back from the dead. Like, I've been working in WPF this past year, right? We've talked about this a lot. There's a bunch of.

[Richard Campbell]

They've made some attempts at a designer for wpf.

[Leo Laporte]

They have, but that's where it's falling apart. So if you like, this is where I just looked at this today. In fact, I was working on this before the show. There's a lot more information about the updates they did for WPF and Net9 and videos from. Net conf. So I've been watching that stuff. There's some new capabilities they never talked about anywhere else. They've done a horrible job of communicating what they've done. There's more work to be done that will occur in net 10. But in WPF today, if you bring up an existing new project, whatever, in Visual Studio, what you get is a wireframe view of the UI in the XAML designer. If you go to winui, which is the most modern, whatever version, you do not get a Visual Designer. Microsoft has basically given up on this. So there was a time period where they. Remember, they had Expression and Blend and whatever they were doing over time. But Microsoft, you asked, and Uno has. They asked, they said, are you going to do this? Like, no, we're done. We're not even going to try anymore. So the reason they made Platform Studios is because Microsoft's not going to address this problem. So it is a very real problem, because complicated apps, like professional, not the stupid things I make, but like, you know, like apps that, like a company would make is a team of people involved and you have programmers obviously writing code and then. But you also have designers working in things like Figma and nevertheless shall meet. And so I talked to these guys this past week. It was kind of interesting because I'm sort of vaguely aware of this stuff. But today, if you create a design of an app in Figma or whatever, whatever app you might use, and then you hand it off to the developers, I said, well, surely this must export to XAML or whatever. They're like, no, they literally look at a picture and they recreate it in code.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like, Figma definitely generates C and xaml.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it does, yeah. I think it does do C markup. But the problem is it's not like a live view.

[Richard Campbell]

It is literally like, it's definitely a Stage, you design your hands and you spit it out. And now you embed it in your app.

[Leo Laporte]

So Uno is basically given or made this capability to take a Figma design and in real time do a hot refresh into a code based version of it. So that as you maybe remotely even like and cross platform or looking at this app with multiple people, someone could say, hey, I think we should move the button up 3 inches or whatever it is, is. They can do it in Figma and it comes up in the code. It's like this is, it's like, it's kind of. It's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and addresses the bigger problem here, which is I need us to work on a tablet as well as a widescreen.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's. That's right. It's also called.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the media query effect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it will work on web, it'll work on Android, it works on iOS, et cetera. So that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's compelling and it's long overdue in some respects.

[Leo Laporte]

I need to talk to you about that. We're going to talk and. Seriously, dude, not done. Can we, could we just make. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I don't mean to pester you and like live on a podcast, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Wouldn't be the first time. Can we talk?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I go away for two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Yeah, I know. It was like the critical two weeks too.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, oh, I'm just, I'm laughing at you. Messaged me a couple of times. You're gonna make it this week. But Kev messaged me too, so I'm like, somebody's been missing me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think I just want to go on record, I did not send you any emails.

[Richard Campbell]

You did not, Leo. And I'm a little sad. I know where the love is.

[Paul Thurrott]

I thought, gosh, I wish.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, the first week you missed, I tell my wife this story too. Like, I talked about the guy. I almost said the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was written by Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams, Sorry. Yep, yep. So he, like, a lot like Stephen Fry was like this in the early 2000s, had a tech block and then of course, sadly passed away. But he had this tech assistant who worked with him and he kept the thing going for a little while. And at the time, what had just happened was like Mac OS X Tiger had come out. I remember he said he had written in this blog, like, you know, Douglas would have loved Mac OS 10. Tiger. Douglas would have got tiger. And I don't remember what the topic was, it was two weeks ago. But I said to Leo, I'm like, Richard would have got this. Like, I know. No, I know. But you were gone. And I was like, like I wanted to talk to him about this and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gone but not forgotten. Richard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Danny Haraway.

[Leo Laporte]

I got to talk to you, Matt. Okay, so Xbox we've had, we've had, we've had our week weeks. We've had our less than exciting weeks. We've had our really big weeks actually this year it's been kind of interesting. This is a big one. Like, this is a big week for like games, you know, Xbox and other ways. Phil Spencer gave another interview and as Phil Spencer does, he just starts talking about stuff. He's like, you know, and I have to think at some point someone, and there's only really one person higher up than him at Microsoft, come to think of it, will say, hey dude, shut up. You know. But he kind of talked about how, hey, you know, the hardware is not the future. That said, we do think about portable Xbox something, something, and we're working on it. And I'm not saying it's coming out anytime soon, but this is an area I've kind of speculated a little bit about whether this thing might be like a Steam Deck type thing like PC based or the future could be this ARM based thing which we know they were working on. We don't know what came of it. We'll see. But he actually talked about it. It's like, dude, what are you doing? It's crazy. Like you've got stuff to sell and you're just talking about something else. And he also talked about this. The mobile app game stores they want to make on iOS and Android and those in the US that's been delayed because the Google stuff has been pushed back and they're going to obviously appeal. And I said we'll see what happens. But it's inevitable that Microsoft and others will put their app stores on these platforms.

[Richard Campbell]

But it also is necessary, right? Like in the end, Microsoft owns the game studios. They're going to make the games for all the existing platforms. Like why would you make an Xbox portable when there already is a Steam deck and all of your games run on it and you will make money every time a game gets installed on it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that. Right. So the next story is about this new ad that Microsoft put out that is freaking people out, even though they've been talking about this for two years. But this notion that Xbox is Not the console only. It is in fact the console is, you know, remember when like Steve Jobs got up on stage one time and he said, hey, the Mac used to be the center of the ecosystem. Now the Mac is out here and this is other stuff. And the other stuff was, you know, mobile devices, you know, iPhone especially. This is that moment for Xbox. Like we made a go with this. It's been 20 years, it hasn't really gone great for us. But now we own all these game studios and they sell cross platform. We're going to bring more of our stuff to those game studios. And one of the things that Phil Spencer alluded to was this notion of like, you know, the next Xbox, the next Halo, it's going to be on PlayStation. I mean, come on now, the way you react to that. Not you, Richard, but anyone is kind of telling, right? For the hardcore kind of Xbox guys, they don't want to hear that. Like they get freaked out.

[Richard Campbell]

I like my tribe. Don't mess with my tribe.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the thing though. I've played Call of Duty a lot and Call of Duty improved dramatically when they made multiplayer cross platform. They first did it console to console, PlayStation, Xbox together. It dramatically expanded the audience. Right? Way better. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the network effect is a bigger benefit, more players.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you also have PC users in there and by the way, you also have cloud streaming guys in there. So you could have a guy like literally in a game, you could have a guy on an Xbox with a controller, guy on a PlayStation with a controller, guy on a PC with a controller, guy in an iPad with a controller. He's doing it through cloud gaming. And why not?

[Richard Campbell]

Why do you care?

[Leo Laporte]

So tied to your question earlier, why? I think part of it is they want the hardware thing that they do to be ARM based and because it's efficient for all the reasons we know. But that the Xbox hardware, whatever it might be, will be sort of like a. It's a PC based platform with one exception. Every place or Xbox console has been a PC, essentially PC hard.

[Richard Campbell]

Except for the 360.

[Leo Laporte]

Except for the 360. Right. Which is PowerPC. So I feel like the next one, they want it to be arm and now they'll offer, they can offer this. You know, this didn't work.

[Richard Campbell]

Million dollars developing an ARM based Xbox that you're going to make no money on. You basically sell it for cost, right? Unless you have a hardware flaw, in which case it's going to cost you.

[Leo Laporte]

That they could farm out to hardware makers, right? That's Part of my. That's just a thing I invented.

[Richard Campbell]

But you still have the basic problem of there's no point in improving the machine right now and giving it more performance when the studios cannot fully utilize them as they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like the real inflection point. The reason there's no PlayStation 6 is that the studios are screaming, don't give us more compute. We can't use it.

[Leo Laporte]

We can't even. Exactly. We can't take advantage of the thing. We have.

[Richard Campbell]

No. You know, it costs too much.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. But if you consolidate.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like this.

[Leo Laporte]

So. But here's the. Part of the problem right now is you have mobile, which is two discrete platforms. You have desktop, which is one, but two if you include Mac, and three if you include Linux platforms, you have Xbox or console, Sorry, which is three discrete platforms. So, you know, I know we went down this path.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really.

[Richard Campbell]

It didn't go great. You know, Nintendo lives on its own. It's its own game games.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can't ignore that market. They have won again this generation by far. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Nintendo got off the hardware race 10 years ago and they've been running ever since.

[Leo Laporte]

Worked out pretty well for them. Yeah, exactly. Which is why I sort of wonder about this notion of Xbox hardware thanks to AI based in this Qualcomm or ARM hardware. Upscaling and all this stuff where you could have like this thing that honestly could not run this stuff very well. But because it does upscaling, it looks great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it was run efficiently.

[Paul Thurrott]

So much compute.

[Richard Campbell]

I can afford to not actually fix the game. Just do it dynamic.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't worry about it. Exactly. I feel like it's still back to.

[Richard Campbell]

The problem of it. Why do I need to build a new piece of hardware?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because I think the plan here would be a singular platform that would run across what we think of as console and PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it would just make it easier on developers to create app or games that would run across platforms.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we are in stasis right now. While Generative AI penetrates the game development market.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And while I, you know, maybe ARM is not. Well, I feel like ARM is there. But actually the weakest part of the Qualicon platform is the graphics. And we just don't see native games.

[Richard Campbell]

Running on army going to be relevant until we actually can utilize it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I. You said stasis. Great word. I think of it as like a holding pattern. It's like, are we ready yet? Nope. Are we ready yet?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope.

[Richard Campbell]

We're waiting for A title to come out that utilizes generative AI to cut the cost of development more than in half, I would say by 60, 70%.

[Leo Laporte]

Dear CO Pilot, could you make a version of Halo that doesn't suck?

[Richard Campbell]

Get rid of having to pre generate all those backgrounds, get rid of having to generate all those scripts. Get rid of the most expensive parts of making a game that cost hundreds of people.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so this also has not gone well and this is a little down the list, but I would just mention that yesterday. No, today. Today, I think it was today. No, yesterday. I don't know what's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

Time is relative.

[Leo Laporte]

I just flew back from Mexico mode. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrived, right? So this is the world inside of the game. Like it's insane and part of it. But part of this is the science experiment where in previous versions of the game, as you downloaded these world expansion packs, they would get all the high res assets and whatever. So, you know, you'd fly over Paris, it would look amazing. It looked like Paris. It wouldn't look like some blob, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

You would have to download all those things. Yeah. To your computer or to your console. Now that stuff is going to be streamed from Azure. And so they're actually, this is the step toward this thing you're talking about where they're not necessarily generating new content on the fly, which I think is what you mean really. But they're also not even allowing you. Even if you said, look, I got a two terabyte hard drive, I don't care, like download it, like, nope, that stuff is coming from Azure. We're going to stream it it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so we have our first example of what I would call kind of a hybrid game, you know, hybrid. This is hybrid cloud on prem, I guess. But day one did not go great, by the way. I guess there were a lot of problems getting online and performance was terrible. But you know, give it a second. I mean, we'll see. I think it'll be okay eventually. But yeah, I think this is the. They're going to look at this and say, all right, well what about the next Halo? What about the next Gears? What about the next Call of Duty?

[Richard Campbell]

I think a lot of PMs are struggling mightily because they're looking at their budgets and looking at the risk and they're worried they're going to get totally scooped. You spend 150 million trying to develop a peer one, a tier one game and somebody does it for 50 million and it doesn't matter what happens. After that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Yeah. This is the Netflixization of games. The, you know, we're gonna have Ryan Reynolds or whomever, and I pay him a lot of money and we're going to make this piece of garbage that's all GRE green screen and then never actually go to Europe or whatever it is. Right. Like, you know, but. But why not? I mean, and games have gotten too expensive to make and too time consuming to make, frankly. And the stakes are so high that if you screw this up, like you have a version of only a dozen.

[Richard Campbell]

Billion dollar games a year. Only.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, like. And yeah, there's hundreds of games made.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

It's so you. It's why we keep retreading the same ideas over and over again. Why there's yet another Call of Duty. Because that one will make a bill Million.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. I hate that Call of Duty was the inspiration for the Marvel Universe, but God damn it anyway. Okay. Is that true?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you just make.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I mean. No, but in the sense that like, not really. I mean, not literally, but you can see the progression, right? Not literally, but yeah. Call of Duty is not that terrible. So this is actually. This has been an awesome month for Game Pass. I mentioned flight Sim. That's if you have game. You get flight sim standard and you get that on PC. The latest consoles, X and S get it on Game Pass ultimate and PC. Game Pass. You get it on game streaming if you have Ultimate. Right. So you can kind of play that one. I haven't yet played it. Like I said, just flew home. But I think today or Tomorrow, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, that game that takes place in Chernobyl. Right. We've been waiting on this thing for 15 years. Is available if it is tomorrow. Well, as you. You watch or listen, this will be out, but if it hasn't come out yet, you can actually preload this PC or console. So get it going. Because seriously, it's like 100 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it going to be really great?

[Richard Campbell]

Huge.

[Leo Laporte]

150. It's supposed to be very, very. It looks beautiful. We'll see. I am definitely going to play this one. I have preloaded it. I did take the time to do that today.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you're wandering around Chernobyl.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, actually it comes out today. I'm sorry. Yeah, November 20th. So that's happening. Dark Descent is coming at the end of the month. This has been a good one. So there's been some good stuff. Yeah, big one. These are big games. Flight Simulator outside of Activision Blizzard is. And Call Of Duty is arguably the biggest Microsoft studio game of the year. I would say, like, this is. It's big. And I don't just mean on disk. I mean, like, it's a big.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, not physically. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a big title for Microsoft, so that's a good one.

[Richard Campbell]

Discount you speak of.

[Leo Laporte]

Not. Yes, Avowed. Which is eagerly anticipated. Is it Blizzard? No, Obsidian game.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm gonna play the Starker Stalker 2 video.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's beautiful looking.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's made in Ukraine. Did you notice that?

[Richard Campbell]

That's where Chernobyl is.

[Leo Laporte]

A month or so ago I mentioned this, but there's a documentary about the making of this game that's for free. YouTube, wherever, go watch this. It's incredible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Looks a little like Half Life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Has that feeling a little bit about.

[Leo Laporte]

That in a second, too.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all about the radiation. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Perimeter cage. Perhaps.

[Paul Thurrott]

All the Zone really needs is our compassion. No, it's a video game. There's no compassion. Looks just like Half Life.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks a little bit like Call of Duty, too, until, well, of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything FPS looks like FPS.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's all going to look like Call of Duty soon. That's all.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be Call of Duty all the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

All the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks really, really, really good. So for you Xbox holdouts, you goons.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft has a message for you.

[Richard Campbell]

This, for.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Paul Thurrott]

These are all different Xboxes, including an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, this is just common sense. This is what they were talking about for two years. We're going to meet you where you are, right? Your game. You buy into this thing, whatever it is, a subscription, or purchase games, whatever, and your games will be available, like where you are. To me, this is common sense. And then you read headlines, you're like, oh, Microsoft doesn't even know what an Xbox is. It's like, guys, you got to start paying attention a little bit here.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is an Xbox is, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, it's not an Xbox, but it is a place where you can play Xbox games, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

And, well, it brings into the question of, like, what does it mean to say it's an Xbox and Xbox is wherever you play Xbox games.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but when. When. When Apple introduced the iPhone and they said there's an ipod in there, where people like, oh, yeah, but what does it mean, you know, an ipod? Like, I mean, guys like the world of like, you know, and in this case, I don't know if you paid attention, but they didn't really win the console war, so it makes perfect sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

They might have won the game wars.

[Leo Laporte]

The people who are the most offended by this are the ones who will benefit by it the most. Because your investment in Xbox continues. Right. Like it. You know what I mean? It brings it to more places. Like this is what you should want.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

All restaurants and all games are Call of Duty. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. This is a Taco Bell. This is also a Taco Bell.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a picture of a bathroom in like a rest area. This is also a Taco Bell.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty soon we have to talk about the three shells.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one of the. I don't remember when. One of the earliest things I remember that Richard said was you were joking about. What's that place? Arby's. You said it's like meat.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's an aptist description.

[Leo Laporte]

Meat. It's sort of like meat Microsoft does have. Or Blizzard, which is part of. Is it Blizzard? Yeah, Blizzard has an Xbox console exclusive coming. Or actually I think it's coming on PC too actually called Avowed. So that's coming in February. So you have that to look forward to. And then we have this crazy set of. I keep mentioning this like this notion of games being remastered or games just being upsized automatically and suddenly becoming replayable again. So Warcraft 1 and 2 remasters are I think available now, celebrating the 20th anniversary of that franchise. Warcraft 3 Reforged 2.0 is also available. Days ago Valve announced celebration of the 20th anniversary of Half Life 2. Yeah, a year ago.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't believe it's 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. So a year ago was the really very old. Yeah, the 25th anniversary of the original Half Life I think was last year, about a year ago now. This game was so revolutionary when it came out. It's like it was given to us by aliens. If you look at Half Life and then look at Half Life 2, that leap does not make sense. That game still looks great now. And by the way, I would make. In fact I will make the case that this might literally be the greatest video game ever created ever. And it is still debate. Yeah, I know it's an unwinnable debate in many ways, but it's whatever you're wherever you land on that it's in the top five. I mean it's right there. It is as influential as anything ID software ever made.

[Richard Campbell]

It's impact on your company, gaming industry. Like the way games are made.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they completely effed it up and they did Episode one two and not three and then not Half Life Three and I could murder because they never left this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

But they got, they started making money on online games and suddenly those games they did left for dead to make.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, no, it makes me crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

But back to the same mantra, like, it's just like it's too expensive to make games.

[Leo Laporte]

The, the sale's over. But over the weekend this game was available for free, which they've done a couple times on Steam. It's cheap. I mean, if you want to buy this right now, it's probably 10, it's five or $10. It's nothing. It's still worth playing. It's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a really great story.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so much incredible. It's awesome. It's been updated so it looks awesome on modern computers. Yada, yada yada, it's got all that stuff. And they've integrated the two episodes into the main app, ui, whatever. It's just goddamn, it's so good. Separately, completely unrelated, but still related. GOG.com, gOG, which used to be called Good Old Gamers, announced a sort of like game preservation effort. And they have Some, I think 20 something games that are classic games that they certify run perfectly well in modern computers and look great and they'll keep updated, blah, blah, blah. There's no DRM and all that stuff. Separate from that, basically a group of game enthusiasts released the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament, both which by the way, just as I just like another one. Some of the greatest games ever made. Yeah, Unreal, primarily for single player. Unreal Tournament solely for multiplayer, was so frenetic and fast and amazing. And this is the one where, remember this one, it was always like First Blood. It was awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

They had all different game types like Carry the Flag and whatever. Awesome. And then they did a bunch of sequels. 2002, three, four, whatever. My son and I played these games endlessly. These games are available for free. They work fine on modern computers. They're owned by Epic Games and these releases were not by Epic Games. But people asked, they said, yep, we don't care, go for it.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

They let them out. It's good to go. Yep, it's awesome. So this is, it's, it's video game history. I'm not saying I, I'm actually not saying that Unreal is necessarily playable, but actually a lot like the original Half Life, I guess. And I'm trying to think what else. It's like Duke Nukem is like this a little bit. The first episode of this, the first part especially, is amazing. You wake up in a prison, the door is open, you don't know what's going on. You can get out and there's an alien race and bad things happen. But awesome game. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So a lot of really neat stuff happening, setting.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, some of this is nostalgic. Some of it is just. We have excess compute. Let's do something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And. And look, when it comes To Half Life 2 especially, I would say. Yeah. Nostalgia. It's also. Right now, it's awesome to play this game.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great story.

[Richard Campbell]

In the end, it's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it brings back the most important point about gaming, which is it's the game, not the technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Although the. That's the thing. It. Yeah, absolutely. 100% it. The. The world is so immersive in your introduction. You know, you arrive on the train and you go through the process and someone grabs you and you think you're going to get beaten up. It's your buddy and whatever happens. But it's. The introduction to the world is so perfect that by the time you step out into the, you know, the square and the thing comes up and takes your picture and. And the thing walks by, you're like, how is this not a movie? How is this not a Netflix series?

[Richard Campbell]

I brought this up the other day about Half Life two because Half Life was all inside a building, right? It was your standard Wolfenstein scroller. FPS scroller. And then the whole trick with Half Life 2 was you started out in a building and then you went out the door.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's not just. It's like the wizard of Oz where it just opens up and you happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Directly into a derived Soviet brutalism landscape.

[Leo Laporte]

It is so perfect. I literally, to this day, like, I've done this everywhere in Europe. I did it with. The last time I went back to Boston, I was standing on the subway platform at the T with my friends and they did a little announcement and it was Half Life two to me. And I'm like, yeah. Civil in obedience will not be tolerated. Please proceed to the processing facility. Like it. You. It impacted me so much that I hear things in the real world and it sounds. And it's Half Life, too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's such a good.

[Leo Laporte]

So. By the way, take the time, go watch the. The documentary about this. It's incredible the way. And sure enough, like, the guys who designed the game went to these abandoned Train stations and wherever else in east. In Europe. And they were like. And I'm like, yeah, no, obviously you did. It's. It's perfect. So anyway, it's awesome. Okay, sorry. And then Sony has something called the PlayStation Portal. So PlayStation Portal is not actually a portable gaming device per se, but it's a way to stream games or whatever. So now they allow you to stream PS plus games through this device, which I know as I say you're like, wait, you couldn't do this before?

[Richard Campbell]

What was the point of this?

[Leo Laporte]

But now you can sort. So yeah, now there's. I think there's. I don't know what the. I don't, I'm not sure the number of games. I want to say there's over 100 games. So if you have like PlayStation plus is their version of what used to be Xbox. Game Pass, you know, now Game Pass. Right. So I think they have different tiers. They have, you know, different. I'm not really as much into that, but they have expanded this so PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and I think Windows PC. I think there's an app for it as well. You can play a bunch of their games over this service. So obviously of interest, but not like of the Half Life two level quality of interest. So anyway, some good stuff. So yeah, this has been a good week for games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like this is a good week for gaming.

[Leo Laporte]

Might be the best week this entire year. I mean, other than all the layoffs and studio closures. I mean, aside from that, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to be a game developer. But it's fun to be a gamer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I want to play Stalker 2 now. I have to check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I, I, like I said, I pre loaded it. I'm gonna check.

[Richard Campbell]

That game is pretty dark, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it looks dark.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it looks beautiful though, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm still, I still play a game I started playing in Covid. I can't stop Valheim.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Valheim. Okay. What's he gonna say?

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well what's. They've been smart. They released it Pre release for 20 bucks and then every year or so they had another buy on.

[Leo Laporte]

So you. Do you still play this on some giant IT screen?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, my 55 inch OLED.

[Leo Laporte]

You bet.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've tried playing it on smaller screens and it's not. No, I need to be a Viking. I need to live as a Viking.

[Leo Laporte]

Literally sit there and like, like furs and whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, yeah. I have a wolf.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you gnarring on a turkey leg? What are you doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

You're like actually Locks. Meat is the meat. You really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're locks. That's the, that's what you're going to dip in Richard's drink later.

[Paul Thurrott]

We will get to Richard's drink in a bit. And the tips and picks of the week, the back of the book is just around the corner. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell and our show today brought to you by our good, our good, good listeners, the good people at Club Twit. We love you, Club Twitters and we thank you. If you're listening and you're not a member, I would love to invite you to join. We met, we keep it pretty affordable. It's only a 20 bucks a month, which is nice. You don't. Did I say 20? Yeah, it's only 10 bucks a month. No, it's not that. It's only $7 a month.

[Leo Laporte]

How much would you pay?

[Paul Thurrott]

How do they get away with it? Many podcasts, you'd get one show for $7. But no, you get them all. You get ad free versions of every show we do. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a community of, you know, it's a self selected community of smart, interesting people who love technology. So it's a great place to hang. You also get to watch shows that we don't put out in public like Micah's Crafting Corner. We've got the Chris Marquardt photo show coming up in a little bit. Stacy's Book Club, another coffee clatch with Mark Prince. That's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to do a coffee tasting so that should be really interesting. All those are just, you know, benefits. But the real reason you join the club, I hope, is to support what you do. If, what we do. If you, if you like our shows, if you think the shows are worthwhile, if you like our hosts, by the way, I don't get any of the money. Not, not $1 goes into my pocket. It goes to Paul and Richard and John. Ashley and Kevin King are producers and Benito Gonzalez. It takes a big team to do this. It supports them, keeps the lights on. We've cut back as much as we could. We shut down the studio. We're doing what we can, but we really want to keep doing the content because I think that's what really we bring to the table. That's unique. If you like it and appreciate it and you listen, join the club. Seven bucks a month, that's all. It keeps it going. One that's the key. Twit, TV Club, Twitter. Scan that QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Twit, TV Club, Twitter. A couple of good things I should mention. Two weeks free. So you could try before you buy if you want. And when you join you will get a code that you could post on your socials and everywhere else. And everybody who uses that code to join gets you a free month. So seven. Did I say seven bucks a month? It could be free forever if you have enough friends. Twit, TV club, Twit. Thank you in advance, we really appreciate it. It's time for the back of the book and I think now would be a good time to introduce a man, a Myth, a legend, Mr. Paul Thuratz. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the big differences maybe between the Xbox series X and s in the PlayStation 5 is that Sony went with just normal M2 slots for storage. Like so. If you want to add more storage, it's actually pretty straightforward. Microsoft went with more of a traditional looking cartridge thing, kind of proprietary, whatever. It's still an SSD obviously, but haven't had too many options for storage and they've been pretty expensive and they still are. But right now the middle tier, Weston Digital storage module, which is 1 TB is a pretty good price for this kind of thing, like better than Apple prices. Right. So typically I think the 512 is about 75 bucks. The one terabyte is maybe 130, 140 somewhere in there. And then two terabytes is. We don't want to talk about that. But the two lower end ones are on sale at Amazon and best.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is physical storage, not cloud storage.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a plug in little.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I have one in my. Yeah, but you have to buy the one that's specifically for it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. You can't just buy anything. So the Western digital version, the 1 terabyte is 1 is 99 bucks. It's usually 160 actually. So that's a good deal. That's actually a pretty significant price cut. So if you need, especially on an S, if you like. I do like the initial S, I think it was 512 gigabytes. This is a pretty good upgrade. So if you've been kind of holding off on that, this is the time and I'm not going to spend too much time on this. But Microsoft has announced their Black Friday deals across Xbox, Surface, et cetera, et cetera. So getting to that time of year, aren't we? Yeah, getting.

[Paul Thurrott]

You already had Thanksgiving, right, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

We do it in October. Like civilized.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So do you have Black Friday in October as well, or.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Listen, I'm pretty sure you guys put gummy bears in your stuffing. And I don't to hear about this.

[Paul Thurrott]

But November 29th is the year all the Canadians come over the border to shop at Costco.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy. It's a tradition to use Amazon. We do have a family member who's us who's coming up next week. So we'll do Thanksgiving. Oh, there you go with him. Oh, it's just an excuse to eat.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to bring. I'm bringing Thanksgiving to Mexico. This is. I've talked to. I'm like, I. I think Mexicans would love Thanksgiving. I think they would love the food aspect of it. I think they would love the food, but also just the whole family vibe of it. The point of it is not.

[Richard Campbell]

You've never people so into family to you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I mean. Like, I've been telling so many people, like, like, they're all curious about. They know about it, you know, but.

[Richard Campbell]

That and arguing politics, which is a very keen thing in the Mexican. Oh, no, wait, that's wrong. The best drunken uncles. That's what they do. Drunk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. That's actually one thing people there just kind of open about. They're like, who did you vote for? And I'm like, excuse me. Like, I don't know. I don't know if I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, whenever I'm in a foreign country, I just announced I didn't vote for him.

[Leo Laporte]

I just said, we were in France one year. So this back was like George W. Bush time frame and this guy in a market we had never been to. And I think we only went the one time. It was this random guy said, if I ask you a question, I said, sherry. He said, do you support George W. Bush? I'm like, oh, that guy's an idiot. And he says. He goes, let me. He goes, I don't understand. He goes, I. Every American I ask. Yeah. Who voted for answers the same way, like, how did this guy become president? I'm like, you're not going to meet anyone who voted for him in your country. Those people don't travel.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't.

[Leo Laporte]

They, you know, like, yeah. So, yeah, people are intrigued.

[Paul Thurrott]

Surrender monkeys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Anyway, meantime, some. Some time ago, a month ago or so, OpenAI finally released their initial early version of their ChatGPT app for Windows, which was Like a little bit of a middle finger, honestly, because the Mac version had been available for a while, the iPhone version had been available for.

[Paul Thurrott]

A while, not I always just use on the web.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty sure those Apple didn't invest $13 billion in OpenAI. I'd have to look it up. But anyway, I think it's more about.

[Richard Campbell]

Dev resources than it has to do with.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know, but seriously, like. But anyway, I guess it's gotten a lot better. So there's an updated version of it. It's freely. It's now available to everyone who uses Chat GPT. You don't have to have a paying subscription like he used to before. It works.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's kind of cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it's available, but actually they've also updated the Windows. I'm sorry, the Mac version. And I think this is the, this is an interesting peek at the future. So the way they're billing it is that it integrates with certain apps that you have installed on the Mac. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean? But actually they're all developer apps. So it's Visual Studio code, xcode Terminal Backup.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it'll notice you have Xcode and say, hey, you want me to fill this in?

[Leo Laporte]

So it'd be like a pair. Yeah, that's very interesting. So I think obviously that will come to Windows eventually, but I also think that will expand out to other apps. Right. And so I think, you know, if you've been kind of like, eh, you know, like chat or Copilot, who cares? Like maybe this is kind of an interesting thing. And then now it's time. Of course, last week or whenever it was. Microsoft now allows you to remap the copilot key. I mean, I guess one thing you could do is remap it to ChatGPT. You radical leftist.

[Richard Campbell]

You troublemaker.

[Leo Laporte]

And then just briefly, Stardoc released their first 1.0 version of desktop GPT. And this is their same thing. Prompt opens up in the middle screen. But the big thing, there's two big things there is that they let you connect to multiple or different LLMs. So it's not just tied to a single thing. And so you can pick whichever one you want for certain tasks. But they also have this kind of template capability which I look at as sort of a, like a scripting capability. So you can write these templates that run against specific LLMs so that you're always, you're doing kind of a manual orchestrator kind of a thing. So this is a perk of Object desktop. So if you're already paying for that, you get this for free. It's worth checking out, I don't think. Yeah, no, you can't. You can't actually buy it separately. So you have to have object desktop and then just real quick. Arc Search is now available on Android, right? So it was open beta for about six weeks now. It's broadly available. And the big thing here is it's not like a straight up web browser, but it's more like a kind of a front end to search. So you can do straight. You can just do a search and it will go to Google search or whatever you configure. But the big thing is their browse for me capability where they generate. Use generative AI to create like a nice presentation of something. So when you have a question like who is. Fill in the blank this person or what is. What is a latte? Or whatever, it's a nice presentation.

[Richard Campbell]

What is latte?

[Leo Laporte]

What is it? Which is a question I often ask at Dunkin Donuts when I order a latte and they say, would you like some sugar with that? And I'm like, excuse me, I said I would like a latte. Do you not know what a latte is?

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you not know what Duncan is?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because, you know, I just see where you. I feel like if I wanted sugar in this, I would have asked you for that. But that's a.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that he has strong opinions about this.

[Leo Laporte]

I think things mean things and, you know, I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is where.

[Richard Campbell]

This is where you go wrong right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's. That's probably true.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Yes. I'm sorry. From Duncan, Donuts perspective is real quick. The reason they do it is because they make a latte for someone and then they go, there's no sugar in this. They're like, yeah, you didn't ask for sugar.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Didn't you order a latte?

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's one. You ordered a latte. Latte does not have sugar. This is our work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Put sugar in a latte. But it is not a request.

[Leo Laporte]

You could, but then you really thinking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Frappuccino is what I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Can I just.

[Richard Campbell]

Frappuccino? Just code language for milkshake. For adult. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Grown up. It's like milkshake. Can I have six different forms of sugar in a glass? Yes. We actually have a name for that.

[Paul Thurrott]

How many pumps would you like?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, would you like. You've been asked that question. Something is going on.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd like the large Frappuccino and a shot of insulin.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything. I'm walking out the door, right? There'll be no pumping.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like it. You're a coffee, Pierce. Do you get good coffee in Mexico?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so sad you asked me this. So I spent. So there is good coffee in Mexico, but we spent 20 years doing home swaps in Europe, and every. With one exception, I think they all had, like, those little espresso machines. Right? Right. I wanted one of these for 20 years. And I begged my wife, and she said, no, these things are an ecological disaster. We're not doing this. Blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know. You know, she's smart. So we got to Mexico, and I was like, listen, listen, I want to get a Nespresso thing. Can we just get an espresso? And she's like, all right, screw it. Yes, we can get an espresso. I hate it. I hate it so much.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not good coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good coffee. So we went through every single. They're all, like, city names and stuff. There's a kaleidoscope of colors. We went through every single one of them, and we only found one. I like. It's Milan. I think it all comes from the same Keurig. I know. It's the stupidest thing. So we go and buy. We have to get more. And we bring the capsules back, but, you know, it's Mexico. They throw them in the trash, and then they're like, like, what would you like? We're like. We were like, 36 boxes of Milan. And they're like, you don't want it? I'm like, no, just Milan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just the one flavor.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate it so much. Funny, I wanted one for salad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get a bambino. Get a Breville bambino. You can make real espresso.

[Leo Laporte]

But what would I be like if I was happy, Leo? You don't want me content.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, that's true. It's better.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's better. I got to be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

Better?

[Paul Thurrott]

You're miserable.

[Leo Laporte]

Better.

[Richard Campbell]

You're mistaken.

[Leo Laporte]

Miserable. Yeah, but you're right. No, you're right. There's better coffee. But.

[Paul Thurrott]

But there. And I'm sure you can go out and get good coffee out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, there's fantastic. But one of the highest rated coffee shops in the entire city is, like, two seconds from our. It's stupid.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mexico is the home of coffee and chocolate. I mean, there's really good stuff there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, enough of this guy. Paul Richard Campbell has Some stuff to tell us. Let's start with Runners Radio Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, my friend Dan Mallet, who I got to get face to face with at NDC Porto, which was a few weeks back and got to chat a little bit about how we test databases. So this was really getting into the development practice of continuous integration to continuous deployment, which is normal with your application, but it's a little trickier with databases because you can't just throw the database away and rebuild it. You kind of need to keep the data. But there's better and better tooling to make it more feasible to actually validate that your updates to databases aren't going to break anything. And so we got into a conversation around, you could write this code yourself to test your database, but there's again, you want a framework to make it simpler and that framework is called T SQL T, although there are some others. We also talked about DBFIT as basically a mechanism for getting into that process of, okay, this next version of SAP needs these changes to the database. These are validated add deployment as part of the pipeline so that the whole thing get fixed together and treats the database changes the same way it treats a version of the application. So great conversation and great to sort of press against DBAs that are more on the administrative side to say there are ways to build your databases the same way that developers are building the app.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now, one thing we always miss, I mean, we miss your genial presence, your knowledge, of course, of enterprise and really.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S the alcoholism, let's face it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So one of my friends, Glenn, who is from Norway, dropped this on me last week, Halvedsen. And you know, it's funny, we talk about Vikings all the time, right. When you think about Norway, you think about Vikings, right. And, and in the whole these conversations about Scottish whiskey, you know, they, we have the Treaty of Perth and how the Hebrides were controlled by the Vikings, like all that sort of thing. You kind of think, why, why don't those guys make whiskey? Because they really don't. It's very rare to to run across. In fact, there's only a handful of whiskey distilleries in Norway. Norway is well on the west side, northwest corner of Europe, as it was described. To me, the rock in Norway is the stuff the ice couldn't crush. It was fully covered during the ice age, which is a plus and a minus. It means their mountains are very pointy, they were thoroughly scoured. But also that all that pulverizing of the rock turned into great silts. So their valleys are full of excellent soils. And so as the ice retreated at the end of the ice Age age and humans sort of populated the area, by the time wheat makes it up there, somewhere around 8,000 BC or so, it grows incredibly well. And by the, by the Neolithic era when agriculturally starts, it's barley. Barley is dominant again. Why aren't they got good water? They got great conditions, they even have oak trees. Why aren't these folks making whiskey? Why aren't they as keen as the Scots were? Now it's not like there hasn't been alcohol in Norway going all the way back to Tacitus, the Roman historian, who was of questionable quality in his writings. He's talking about in thousand A.D. how much feasting is an important part of the Germanians of the Scandinavian people at that time, that they don't make decisions about having a big feast and they drink copiously while they do that. That. Now one of the big parts of that is that written language wasn't a big part of early Norwegian culture. And so you had feasts so that everybody was there because you needed witnesses for any agreements, because you don't have a written form of any of that. But when you really get into distillation, which remember when we talked on the Irish that the first still sort of show up in the 15th century. Well they arrive in Norway then too. And that's when Norway gets its definitive alcohol. Initially made with grains. We know it today as aquavit. And so this is a high, a multi distilled grain based product. Although they switch potato when the potato shows up, which won't be for a while yet. But flavored with caraway because if you flavored with juniper it'd be gin or genever, depending on your Dutch or your English. And of course by the 1750s, when the potatoes come from the new world world because it grows, it can make more alcohol per acre. They use potato for that. They do. There are some versions of akavit that are aged in oak barrels. There is a species of oak up there, the querulous robust, which is a very sturdy oak. It's great for making ships when you want to go raiding around the world. Then they did make barrels from it as well. But by the when the wave of aquavit mass production really comes on because of the potatoes, you start to see the first laws passed in Norway to manage the production of alcohol. So 1757 there's already laws in place limiting who can make the alcohol, who can sell it, importations are control. And that has a lash back in the early 1800s where they lift a lot of strictures because the landowners who are now growing even more grain, want a right to distill for no other reason than they have excess grain. They don't want it to spoil. So making it into alcohol is a way to preserve that. And so, and if you're producing it, you can sell it. And if 20, 30 years on from that, there's alcohol everywhere, there's explosions with small stills, alcoholism really starts to get heavy. And this is when you're starting to get the proper state involved. And so it's actually the local municipalities that take control of liquor production. They take control of all of the sales initially of liquor, but ultimately by the 1870s with wine and beer as well. And so that by the end of the 19th century, in 1894 so forth, those same communities that are controlling it start to put in prohibition, restricting the sale of alcohol in general, region by region. And by 1917, when we get World War I, where there's restrictions on supply and so forth, you get the first prohibition of alcohol in Norway entirely, which goes into the 1920s, actually somewhat ahead of what happened with the US but coming out of Norwegian prohibition, the federal government, the state instead of the municipality, started controlling all liquor, both production and sales, which is basically true ever since. So Norwegian liquor laws are very strict. They consider anything under 0.7% alcohol to be non alcoholic. 0.7 to 2.5 is what's called a low alcohol beverage and those are more freely sold. Old, you have 2.5 to 4.7% are most of your beers and things like that are considered category 1.4.7 to 22. This is generally a category would be like wine, that is though both of those could be sold by people 18 or older and are readily available in most places. 22% and above are considered spirit only up to 60% and anything over 60% is illegal in Norway to this day. So certain cask strengths like Abelur's Abunda, they actually have to sort the bottles because some of Those come over 60 and they're not allowed to be sold in Norway. And plus you have to be 20 or older to sell spirits. So. And this of course only applies to intoxicants, industrial alcohols and things like that. Not, not a particularly a concern. But I would argue the biggest reason that Norway has always struggled with alcohol here is that that they don't have a small producer model like in the 2000 and tens, largely through the EU and we've talked about this before, and it certainly applies in Denmark. They started making tax breaks for small producers so that you had a bunch of little companies starting to make different kinds of alcohol. They have done that for breweries, but they have not done it for liquor. And so they're kind of missing the market on all that as well. But it does mean that the handful of distilleries that make whiskey in Norway, and there's literally only five, are all big producers of other things, typically aquavit. So the coolest distillery in Norway is not one I really want to talk about today. And that's the Aurora Spirit Distillery, which is actually above the Arctic Circle. That's kind of their claim to fame. Wow. They use an old World War II German military fort as their distillery space. And we'll get into them sometime later. The one I've got here, because Glenn gave it to me is the Halvids. So this is only about a half hour out of Oslo. In Drammersford is where it's on a farm. And Staley Halvorson Johnson started it in 2007, although he wasn't making whiskey, he was making what they call herb spirits, and that is akavit and gin and the like. And in fact, his first production batches by 2009 start winning awards almost right away. And the distinction between gin and aquavit, again being the caraway flavor versus the juniper flavor. But really in contemporary gin production today, it's about the local herb, so it makes it distinct. And that was under a brand they call Kimmerud, which is named for the farm that the distillery was started on. And not that I'm a big gin fan, but they do make a version called Navy strength, which is 57% alcohol. Drink carefully, boys. Like that is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Very dangerous. Like, my goodness, essentially an ounce and a half. Right. Oh, by the way, you can't order a double in Norway. It's against the law.

[Paul Thurrott]

They really don't like drinking.

[Richard Campbell]

And yeah, they. They are very concerned about the social impacts. And I think it has a. In general, the Scandinavians deal with this pretty seriously. And part of it is that in the wintertime, when it's dark all the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Time, there's nothing else to do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and it can get very dark. Right. And both emotionally as well as environmentally. And so they. Liquor controls are pretty strict. That being said, I routinely order two singles, pour them together and give them back one in the glass. That's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, just follow the rules.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So they halved since only started making whiskies in 2023. So they. They don't have long duration batches. This particular one is called the Sledgehammer 2024. And so this is a three year old. No wonder they're worried about double sledgehammer. So initially aged in virgin American oak and then they do a finishing of less than a year in Woodford casks. In fact, they even identify.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Specific cask. This is cask strength. That is to say it's at 46.3% and they only make 900 bottles of it. So this is bottle 803 and it's only a 500 milliliter bottle. So you really. They talk about they only made 4. 450 liters of this spirit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't. They're all sold out now. It sells for 800 Norwegian kroners, which is about $72 US.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't have much to say about Halvorsen's distillery because they don't have any of the specs published. I found one photo of Stale, who's the lead of the place in front of a column still. Now, since they make gin in aquavit, of course it's a column still. They probably have a rectifier or finishing still as well, but have no specs on that at all. All Right. Smells. It's 46%. Right. So it's going to be pretty alcoholy. And it is. But not burning, which is nice. Like my hair. They know my nose hairs have not curled up. Oh, okay. So. Wow. That's. That's a lot smoother than you would expect for only a 3 year old. Like they've done a good job. Lots of heat at the end though. Hello. I can feel it going down and heating up. So gentle on the mouth. Little fruit notes. Maybe a bit of that kind of leathery feel. First sips are always an illusion. You gotta hit it again. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul and I are going, wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Yeah. It's got a kind of roughness to it. Like it reminds you. I can almost say it's like the west coast of Norway. Like British Columbia. Rocks and ice and trees and deep water. Like it's. It's poking and lots of heat, but boy, that's special.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like a glacial moraine sliding down your throat.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the first hit is like being hit by a sledgehammer. The second when you don't care anymore. Yeah, you're good. I'm basically stunned. This is fun, this one. I'm not going to hunt this down. And it's good because there's not very many of them. Right. Like, you don't want to go crazy for that. But. But they're making an interesting whiskey, you know, and that's. It's nice to see the Norwegians starting to do this. I don't think it's easy to make whiskey for them there right now especially. Imagine only making 900 bottles of this. Like, that's all.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's all there is.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

They do. They do an addition.

[Paul Thurrott]

They do. They do have another single malt, the Steiger.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So. And. And stiger means it's the form of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's otar.

[Richard Campbell]

It was Stale's great grandfather worked in the coal mines of. In Svalbard, which is the only coal mine in Norway. It's now closed. And where the seafood is called the Stager.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Neat. So we don't know what this tastes like because it's not the same.

[Richard Campbell]

No. The. The. The Sledgehammer 24 is a special edition. Again, finished in Woodford Barrels.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that would change it considerably.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it is. Like I said, the oak tree. The. The robust oak tree is different from the qu. The. The other oak trees. It's. Again, it's the stuff you make masts and ships and stuff out of make grows very large, very straight. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

And drinks and ships.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know. The barreling is particularly that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I bet their gin is good. I wouldn't. I would try.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and they make an aquavit for 100 years. Right. So gin is basically just a different set of herbs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Aquavit is a little close to a lighter fluid for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Really?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just caraway instead of juniper. That's the.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the main decision.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

You distill up till you get to 8 to 80, 90% range. Then you soak it in botanicals, then you cut it with water to 40%. That's booze. Like, if you don't put the botanicals in it, you just made vodka. Right, Right. They saw that. Depending on which ones you've made. Geneva gin or.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

It's still more magic than that. And the advantage of that is you can sell it the day you made it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no three years of aging and all that expensive stuff. Make it and ship it right to be home. I have a couple more stories from this trip that I will save for later weeks.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would love to hear them.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I got A Taiwanese whiskey, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'll have some fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're baking that up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I wish I was. And it's not. I would have. I was trying to find something in Tunisia, but it's Islamic. They, they had a little bit of alcohol only in the hotel and generally frowned on to be drinking it. So I would tend to go into the down to the bar in the evening and have a couple of chivises and call it a day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mr. Richard Campbell. That's kind of his motto. I had a couple of shivers and.

[Leo Laporte]

Called it a day. Yeah, no, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Many days ended like that. But I'm going to be drinking the havoc and for a little while now.netrocks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is his website.netrocks.com where you'll find that and of course, course, runnersradio.com a pleasure. Welcome home. Glad you're feeling better.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, much.

[Paul Thurrott]

We missed you. As you can tell because this is a three and a half hour show.

[Richard Campbell]

I did offer to talk to Paul yesterday. We just couldn't get it to work.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I know I got it. I literally saw your message after we arrived home and I was like, ah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know it's going to be a three hour call, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. We'll do it, we'll do it. We should talk soon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul Thurat is@the rot.com t h u double r o doublegood.com. that's where his blog is. And you should become a premium member because that's where the really good stuff is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the only way I'm going to afford to get a haircut.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's how he gets a haircut. And those delicious pods. What's the name, by the way?

[Leo Laporte]

The name is Napoli. It's not. I always screwed it. It's the red. It's a red bottom bucks. And it's the only one. It's always comical when we buy 30, whatever number of them, then they're always like, you know, if you buy 40, we can give you a free cup. We're like, yeah, no, we'll get 40. We have all this Nespresso merchandise in our apartment now.

[Paul Thurrott]

But anyway, 26 boxes in Napoli stat.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'll take the free cup.

[Richard Campbell]

I left one more link under the brown liquor. There should be in the show notes for the people who look, I didn't do a future of energy talk about Norway.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I saw that. YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

What is.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is, this is one of.

[Richard Campbell]

The talks that I do. And the future of energy is Talking about energy improvement in general. But I tuned into the country. So this June, when I was in the Oslo show, I talked about Norway's power generation and how it's evolving.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it was fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it geothermal, I would expect, or. No?

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're almost entirely hydroelectric hydro. Yeah. They got mountains and they got water.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Iceland is very. Is geothermal.

[Richard Campbell]

They're geothermal because they have volcanoes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Volcanoes. Most. Very nice. So you could watch this. It's a NDC conferences channel on YouTube. Search for Richard Campbell. The future of energy. I will. I will be watching that tonight instead of the Desperate Housewives Oslo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Those are the two obvious choices.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's like Desperate Housewives.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul's books are at Lean.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I did that dedicated nuclear power. 1:1.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I want to see that too. Is that up anywhere?

[Richard Campbell]

It's up there. But you. I can't. Now that all the tech companies want to buy nuclear power, I cannot tell you how many conferences have called me. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do a four.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a hot topic. Yeah, you're a hot topic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And doing it in Poland when I was talking about the Chernobyl disaster and I met a bunch of people who as kids were taking iodine drinks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. They're probably not real thrilled about the.

[Leo Laporte]

I just eat Cheetos. It's the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Almost the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But just quick summary. You. Modern nuclear power is a very different thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, nuclear power has always been incredibly safe. Coal's killed way more people.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

With pollution. Yeah. The new nuclear power, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Christopher Reeve, Superman, he's like, you know, just to be clear, flight is still the safest form of travel, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good. I'll watch this. That'll be very. That'll be very interesting and in life thing, I might add. Paul Thurot's books [e-mail] including Windows Everywhere and of course, the must have field guide to Windows 11. Now that I'm 24H2, I have to check the new 24H2.

[Leo Laporte]

Check. There's been a lot of updates.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of updates.

[Richard Campbell]

Your cheese will definitely be moved.

[Leo Laporte]

There's been a lot of moving of cheese.

[Paul Thurrott]

You've moved my cheese again. We do Windows Weekly. Normally it's only a couple of hours, but every once in a while we get a little excited about the topic and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I could tell it was going to be big. You know, Xbox, ignite a lot of stuff. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was a lot of stuff, it's good. Nobody's complaining that the shows are too long. You just, you know, as long as.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife would like to eat dinner.

[Paul Thurrott]

But other than that dinner, we do the show normally. 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That would be 1900 UTC. As I mentioned, streamed live on eight different platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, Kik, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and TikTok. And of course, our Club Twit members can also watch Inside the Discord after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available at our website, TWiT TV WW. If you go there, you'll see a link also to the YouTube channel. A great way to share the show or little clips from the show with people who are not familiar with it. And we appreciate it when you do that because that helps us spread the word about the goodness that is Windows Weekly. Best way to listen though probably would be by subscribing your favorite podcast client. Merely go to any podcast app of your choice and click subscribe. It's free and you will get the show the minute we're done with it. Which is exactly what you want want. And of course we thank our Club Twit members for the contribution that they make. Just remember, great podcasts thrive thanks to the communities they build and value. I know I host a few I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you Joe for as I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Always drink twit beer or beer. But when I do.

[Paul Thurrott]

But when I do, that's good. That's good stuff, Joe. Joe's a madman. Thank you Joe for that. Join the Club Twit TV Club Twit Tonight, Micah's Crafting Corner. Bring your. He's going to be doing quilt.

[Leo Laporte]

What's he doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

He does actually really great cruel work. But people. There are people there doing Lego. There are people doing any kind of craft at all. It doesn't matter. It's just a chance to hang and talk and have some fun. It's a community and that's what we love about it. So that's just one of many events at TWiT TV Club TWiT. Thanks to Richard Campbell. Thanks to Paul Thurat. You guys rock. I will see as does.net I will see you next week on Windows Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye bye now. AT T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25.

[Richard Campbell]

A line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins all on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per.

[Leo Laporte]

Line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account $5 more.

[Paul Thurrott]

Per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones.

[Leo Laporte]

Via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bill credits end if you pay off devices early.

[Leo Laporte]

CT mobile.com when you visit Arizona, time is measured in moments, not minutes. Like the moment you see the Grand Canyon for the first time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Visit a new state of mind.

[Richard Campbell]

Learn [e-mail] how do you feel when you switch to Geico and save on your car insurance?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like going to work on one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thursday morning morning and thinking to yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says Happy Friday.

[Richard Campbell]

Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Get more with Geico.