WW 919: The Supermodel of Apps - Windows MIDI Services, OCR, IVAS program

Summary

Windows Weekly Episode 919 Summary

Release Date: February 12, 2025
Hosts: Micah Sargent, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

---

1. Patch Tuesday Updates and Windows Enhancements

The episode kicks off with a deep dive into the latest Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 11, specifically versions 23H2 and 24H2. Leo Laporte discusses the incremental improvements introduced, such as enhanced taskbar previews and a centralized control panel for Windows Studio Effects accessible directly from the taskbar. Despite these updates, Leo notes, “None of it is major, except for the mouse cursor issue,” referencing a frustrating change where the mouse cursor would frequently disappear in version 24H2. This led Leo and Paul Thurrott to utilize PowerToys as a workaround.

A significant highlight is the introduction of the new Outlook application for Windows 10, replacing the deprecated Mail, Calendar, and People apps. Paul sarcastically remarks, “Everybody hates it because it's just change,” emphasizing the mixed reception from long-time users resistant to the shift.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [06:04]: “The mouse cursor disappearance was driving me insane, so I started using PowerToys as a fix.”

---

2. Active Directory Security Enhancements

A substantial portion of the discussion centers around Microsoft's security update, KB5014754, aimed at enforcing strong authentication for certificates within Active Directory. Paul Thurrott explains, “Microsoft wants to improve security by requiring strong certificates to prevent lateral attacks.” This update mandates organizations to either properly configure their Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or resort to registry edits to maintain compatibility temporarily. The deadline for full compliance is September 2025, causing considerable anxiety among system administrators.

Notable Quote:

• Paul Thurrott [14:03]: “They’ve given us a couple of years to prepare, but many are still scrambling to implement the required changes.”

---

3. AI Integration and Copilot Features in Windows

The conversation shifts to the burgeoning role of Artificial Intelligence in Windows, particularly with the rollout of Copilot features. Leo highlights the integration of AI across various applications like Paint and Photos, introducing capabilities such as generative erase and background manipulation. Furthermore, the episode touches on the Windows Copilot runtime, a collection of APIs designed for on-device AI processing, which Leo enthusiastically demonstrates by creating a basic app that leverages these new APIs.

Despite some skepticism, Paul emphasizes the tangible benefits of AI tools like GitHub Copilot, citing a reported 20-30% increase in developer productivity. Leo concurs, sharing personal experiences where Copilot significantly streamlined his coding tasks, though he also notes the occasional inaccuracies that require manual correction.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [28:21]: “Having AI integrated directly into apps like Paint and Photos enhances efficiency without being intrusive.”
• Paul Thurrott [55:13]: “GitHub Copilot is possibly the best, the most useful AI tool for developers today.”

---

4. HoloLens and Mixed Reality Developments

Addressing rumors about the potential cancellation of HoloLens, Leo speculates on Microsoft's strategic pivot, citing partnerships like that with Anduril, a prominent military drone manufacturer. Paul adds that specialized variants of HoloLens continue to serve niche markets, particularly within the defense sector. The hosts discuss the challenges Microsoft faces in maintaining momentum in the mixed reality space, especially against competitors like Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Oculus.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [33:57]: “Mixed reality has a challenging path ahead, with competitors like Apple and Meta pushing their own innovations.”

---

5. Earnings Reports and Business Insights

The episode reviews recent earnings reports from major tech companies:

• Qualcomm reported robust revenues of $11.7 billion, up 17%. However, the company faced setbacks as ARM Holdings retracted their acquisition bid, citing regulatory hurdles.

• Amazon continues its aggressive investment in AI infrastructure, allocating $28 billion this quarter, surpassing Microsoft’s investment of $22 billion. Paul notes, “These companies are spending cash aggressively, leveraging the AI hype to build essential infrastructure.”

• Sonos faces ongoing financial struggles, marked by continued declines and restructuring efforts following the problematic launch of their Sonos app. Leo expresses skepticism about Sonos’s ability to recover, highlighting issues like management turnover and operational inefficiencies.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [74:48]: “Amazon is utilizing the AI boom to overcome previous barriers to building data centers, pushing infrastructures that were once stalled.”
• Leo Laporte [80:17]: “Sonos has strong hardware but continues to falter with their app, making it harder for users to rely on their ecosystem.”

---

6. Developer Tools and Build Conference Anticipation

Looking ahead, Leo and Paul express excitement for Microsoft's upcoming Build conference. They anticipate announcements related to the Windows Copilot runtime and further AI integrations, hoping for features that offer seamless fallbacks between on-device and cloud AI processing. The discussion also touches on Google's Gemini 2.0, a family of AI models currently being rolled out, positioning themselves as significant competitors in the AI space.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [72:16]: “Build is going to showcase how Microsoft is bridging the gap between on-device and cloud AI, which is crucial for future developments.”
• Paul Thurrott [73:53]: “There’s a lot of energy around what Microsoft is doing at Build, especially with AI being a central focus.”

---

7. Tips, Picks, and Personal Anecdotes

The episode concludes with personal anecdotes from Leo Laporte about challenges with YouTube account recovery and the importance of robust data backup strategies. He shares his plans to upgrade his storage solutions, underscoring the episode’s earlier discussions on the significance of secure and reliable infrastructure.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [86:08]: “After losing access to my YouTube channel, I’ve realized the critical need for diversified and secure data backups.”

---

Conclusion

Episode 919 of Windows Weekly offers a comprehensive exploration of recent Windows updates, Microsoft's evolving AI integrations, security enhancements, and the broader tech landscape's financial movements. Hosts Micah Sargent, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell provide insightful commentary backed by real-world experiences and technical expertise, making the episode a valuable resource for both casual listeners and tech professionals.

---

Disclaimer: Timestamps are approximate and based on the transcript provided.

Transcript

[Micah Sargent]

Coming up on Windows Weekly, Micah Sargent here subbing in for Leo Laporte. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell kick off the show talking about Patch Tuesday and the introduction of outlook to Windows 10. Yes, you've got the new Outlook. Are you happy about it? Probably not. But we talk about, is it change or is it something else? Then we move into the AI discussion about that bid for OpenAI that may or may not have actually been a real thing. Earnings, you know, we've got a Qualcomm talking about how it's doing, Amaz on talking about how it's doing, and Sonos continuing on its downward spiral. Before we round things out with Xbox Corner, as I like to call it, and the tips and picks of the week. Stay tuned.

[Unknown]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twit.

[Micah Sargent]

This is Windows Weekly, episode 919 with Richard Campbell, Paul Thurot and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Wednesday, February 12, 2025. The supermodel of apps. It's time for Windows Weekly. I am Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte this week, who is off chasing crystals for their energy healing properties. As always, we speak to two of the foremost Windows and micro knowers.

[Paul Thurot]

Professional words, I don't think.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep moving forward. That's good.

[Micah Sargent]

Keep going. Just keep rolling with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

We are joined, as we usually are, by Paul Thurat. Hello, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello, Micah.

[Micah Sargent]

How you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty brain. Oh, that's good. Keep abusing that one. I'm good.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I like it, I like it. We're doing some Spanglish, trying to work.

[Leo Laporte]

It into the local language here in.

[Paul Thurot]

Mexico City for a few weeks now.

[Leo Laporte]

Partial success.

[Micah Sargent]

And you're also hearing the dulcet tones of Richard Campbell, who is joining us with his best friend. A bottle of Dayquil. How you doing?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, I'm after a month on the road, including a good week with the Thorats in Puerto Vallarta. I come home to immediately get the flu, but it's better than having the flu in a hotel. So, yeah, I would take. You know what they say, if you don't take anything, you'll suffer for a week, but if you take all the meds, you'll get over it. About seven days.

[Micah Sargent]

I like that. I'm gonna use that. I'd never heard that before. That's a good one.

[Paul Thurot]

It's just a quality of life thing. Better living through chemistry.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, indeed. Indeed. Yeah, I. I really like theraflu, which is that stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

You make stuff.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, and I introduced some friends who ended up with influenza way A as well to it. And they were like, oh my gosh, this is keeping me alive right now. But yeah, still lasts about the same amount of time but good enough in any case. Well, I'm glad that you're here. Right. And that you are are aware enough to join us for the show. We appreciate it.

[Paul Thurot]

And, and I'm home. So the view is epic. Like, don't feel too bad for me.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it is gorgeous. I, I, I mean my goodness. Do you go fishing?

[Paul Thurot]

Y Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. There's some, there's cod and salmon out there and Guinness crab and oh, come on.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm going to come visit.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, you're welcome anytime, Micah. You know you are.

[Micah Sargent]

Thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, I do want to say that I'm looking forward to kicking things off this this week for for Windows Weekly. As is typical for the show, you know, we gotta start with with Windows and where things are. Patch Tuesday is well underway and let.

[Leo Laporte]

Me disavow you of that positivity, of course.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean that's your role here, right? Tell us about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So two weeks ago we talked about the preview update that was the predicator to predicator. Jeez, I don't need to inventing words.

[Micah Sargent]

We're all making new words.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Let's move forward. Move forward to yesterday's Patch Tuesday Updates for Windows 11. So Windows 11, 23 and 24H2 basically got the same updates. There's a couple of things that are 23H2 specific for some reason. Well mostly because they probably already in 24H2. I guess I can tell you looking at this list, I haven't seen one of these. I only have I guess five Windows computers here, but I only, well usually more, I mean I usually have more of a representative collection but I have not seen a single one of these improvements. So a lot of the things that Microsoft adds to Windows these days are on what's called a cfr, a controlled feature release. So they roll out gradually. In fact I keep doing this I'm going to check again. I keep waiting. I'm especially looking forward to semantic search on my dev box. But that's not this one anyway so I'm not going to see that. I'm not sure why I looked at it anyhow. So for main, you know, stable people unstable you will look can look forward to may have some of these things improve Taskbar Preview so when you mouse over an icon in the taskbar for an app that has an open Window, the preview that appears will be improved in some way that I cannot describe because I've never seen it. When you are accessing your camera on a AI PC or Copilot plus PC and you have Windows Studio Effects, you'll get a central control panel for that in button form on the taskbar. So you can just access those features more easily. Previously and actually today still those things are available in Quick settings and then sometimes in the app, depending on the app. Vague File Explorer RA improvements, including such things as creating a new folder through the right click context menu. Actually. Okay, excuse me, I have seen one of these updates. It is this one. Mouse improvements. What does that mean? Well, one of the fun new features in 24H2 is that the mouse cursor would disappear all the time. That drove me so insane that I have been using that power toy that we discussed in the last one.

[Paul Thurot]

It's the halo around the mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you double taps control, it does that little, you know, animation. You can see the mouse cursor. So I, I started using that because in 24H2 it would just disappear all the time. It was driving me insane.

[Micah Sargent]

That is annoying.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy. Yeah. They added the ability to change the time zone if you're set up as a standard user as opposed to someone with administrative privileges, which, you know. Okay, I know there's a OneDrive continuity feature. If you're working in OneDrive on your phone and you're on whatever document or whatever the file is and then you return to your PC login with the same account, it will say, hey, did you want to keep working on that thing again? Kind of a minor Apple like feature. Some additional sharing features in Windows Share, which actually that interface has evolved a lot since they first introduced it in Windows 8, but it's evolved a lot even just in Windows 11. So I can't remember if I did this already, but someday soon, if I haven't already done it, there'll be a hands on Windows episode about that because it's weird how much it's changed. And then some new keyboard shortcut inside of the Magnifier accessibility app if you use that. So none of it is major, I would say, but except for the mouse thing, which is awesome. And then if you're in Windows 10, you get the new Outlook. Yay. I don't have a way to drop confetti on top myself right now, but I would if I could. So you know that the old Mail Calendar People app apps went out of support as of the end of December. So now they're pushing outlook on everybody because, you know, everybody loves it.

[Micah Sargent]

Sorry, is that classic Paul sarcasm?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that was sarcasm.

[Micah Sargent]

Everyone hates it because it's just change. Or is it legitimately bad?

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually rigid. I'll let you maybe opine on that briefly.

[Paul Thurot]

It is change. I think it's change.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Because the good news is the regular outlook has been updated in a way that starts to annoy you a lot too. They pop up, calendars you can't click on and things like that. So by making the old standby also annoying, it makes you more comfortable to be annoyed by the new one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's overdue. I hear there are a lot of complaints. A lot of it has to do with old school guys.

[Paul Thurot]

And the problem is you have outlook reflexes that are a decade old and these outlook reflexes are different. So my friend Paul Thurot convinced me to set it up on this machine. Convinced me. Just mentioned enough times. I'm fine, I'm switching.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't really push you on it.

[Paul Thurot]

But I, and I believe I cursed you about it for a little while. And then about two weeks later I said, listen, I've stopped noticing that I'm using the new Outlook. I'm just using it. So it's doing the things I'm supposed to do. It's not getting my way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just proof that you can get used to anything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you talk to folks in war zones who just get used to explosions overhead.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Like, yeah, like that. Right. You hear the bomb come in, you lift up the teacup for a second, it hits you put it back down, you're fine. You know, it's just whatever. So it's not that bad. I, I don't know, I've, I don't use an app. I use just the web apps for things like this. But I, I think it's fine. Every time I use it, I'm like, I don't understand what the plates are. It's fine. But anyway, you can, you can rest.

[Paul Thurot]

Assured you also got better reflexes for learning new software than most humans, Paul. Right. Like, you do it so often where, you know, the average info worker has been using the same suite for quite a long time and Outlook is their sovereign app. It's the first thing they open. It's how they organize their day. You know, unless they're.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I, I, I do, I get it. I, I, but the, one of the stories I've told on this podcast a lot and elsewhere in writing is that thing about the, the pre con session at Tech of the Year, the cloud computing was starting to happen and it's the exchange administrator guy, like, he's like, you, you mean to tell me that my final act as an exchange administrator for this company will be to hand over the reins of this thing to Microsoft? Because we're going to put it in at the time Office365. And you know, yeah, that is the answer. The answer is yes.

[Paul Thurot]

And you guys need an administrator to manage Outlook.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you may still have a role, but I mean, but the fact is in that case, you know, your company makes whatever, they make widgets or something. They're not an email company. They didn't mean to have 50 people managing these things. And it turns out things have evolved. There's a better way to do this, cost effective, et cetera, et cetera. So we're moving on. And I think people who enter our industry when they're younger especially do so knowing it's all about change. Things change and they're cool with change, they're cool with change and then they're not cool with change. And at some point you're in a position where you're the decision maker and you're not going to make a good decision or the right decision for your company because now you're worried about your job, you know, for example. And I completely understand that the other. But the other version of this is I just, I just started writing something about this. But the. I see this with AI people. It's the same crowd, it's the same people who ate Outlook, really. Right? The old, the old school guys, right? I'm never using AI Hate. I've never seen a good use of AI. All it does is make garbage, you know, and it's like, okay, so you've already said eight things that are wrong and what are you doing? You know, but there are guys who like want to take a wrench and like strip copilot out of whatever Microsoft apps are using or whatever it is. And it's like, guys, listen, I get it. This is happening really fast. It's happening even faster than things usually happen. I get it. And maybe you're late stage in your career, whatever, but this is, you know, complaining about AI in Word or Excel or whatever is like complaining about spell checking or auto format or whatever the other tools are that make your life easier. And it's like we've kind of lost track of like what it is we're doing here. And it bugs me when people who, especially people are highly technical and experienced, just kind of dig their heels in. Like, this is where I draw the line, you know? And it's like, okay, well, you know, the rest of the world's moving on.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, and AI admittedly is steeped in science fiction. That adds additional layers of stupidity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that the speed doesn't help. It's so fast. And, you know, we're going to talk about some of this later, too, but, you know, this is like the less speedy version of. This is another story I've told a billion times about my friend's wife, who I hadn't seen in a while, and pull up my laptop and it's a ThinkPad or whatever. And she goes, oh, I stopped using Windows because it's so buggy and crappy. I use a Mac now or whatever. And I'm like, oh, really? I'm like, how long ago was that? And she's like, you know, like, seven years ago. I'm like, well, you know, your opinion stinks. Like. Like, maybe that was true. So, yeah, like, it's, you know, maybe that was true seven years ago. I don't know. Like, I love you, but no, you know, so condense the timeframe. And I think that's what's happening with AI. Like, I think, you know, like, I get this on social media all the time. I get it in email, I get it in the comments, whatever. Some guy's like, oh, I went to name the service and I typed in whatever I typed in, and it came up garbage. AI sucks. And you're like, okay, so I think it needs a little more testing than that. And also, was that like, two weeks ago or two months ago or half a year ago? When was that?

[Paul Thurot]

Wait, was that yesterday?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because if it wasn't two seconds ago, I'm not really sure you know what you're talking about.

[Paul Thurot]

You missed it. There's a new version.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's moving quickly. Yeah. So anyway, that was a long story about the new outlook, but it's something I struggle with. I'm trying. It's just. It's just like a wall of negativity that I try. I'm trying to deal with. I'm trying to be rational about it, but I. There's something vaguely troubling about people who I feel should know better. Just like, kind of like, nope, this is where I'm. I'm done. This is it. I'm done. Word processors, as they were in 1997, were the end of the line.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like, okay, got it got it nailed. My word perfect 4.3. I need nothing more. Yeah, there's no one hijacked us over on the administrator side, but this patch Tuesday was a big one for sysadmins.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, talk to me.

[Paul Thurot]

They for the past four years, since 2022 or three years since 2022, there was a. There was a major update. It's KB5014754.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that you know this number. Yep, I have it in front of.

[Paul Thurot]

Me because I've been hearing about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of adhd. No, but go ahead.

[Paul Thurot]

But it was about strong authentication for certificates internally to Active Directory. Oh and again, we make fun of Microsoft a lot because they do dumb things, but I want you to see how cleverly they have managed this particular problem. So they want to improve. If you're going to run certificates for authentication in Active Directory, they want you to do it the right way. They used to be pretty loosey goosey about the whole thing. Just allow people to work. But it's a security risk and if you. It's for laterals so somebody gets breached through and an email phish, they can lateral into administrative privileges with a weak certificate of authority through Active Directory. It's a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Now this might literally have played a role in the hack of Microsoft. Absolutely. A year ago. Whatever. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So this, they've given us plenty of warning, couple of years worth of time to say look, we're going to. There's a D day and the d day is February 11, 2025, which also happens to be my 30th wedding anniversary, but that's a separate issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So and the way they did this is that basically Patch Tuesday pushes onto all versions of server require strong authentication for certificates. So what it really means is your Active Directory infrastructure will stop authenticating if you're using certs now you can fix it. You could a set up your PKI properly and actually get strong certificates working and everything is fine or balanced. You can go into the registry for each of your ads and put yourself back into compatibility mode, which will last until September when it'll stop looking at the compatibility flag.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So yeah, this is your time frame.

[Paul Thurot]

Now, admittedly they've been talking about this literally for two and a half years. So many sysadmins I know still had a stressful day yesterday because it was like, okay, I'm rolling this patch out. Let's find out if I've done this right. And for some they had and some they hadn't. And then your option then is to go in and run around and do regedits to get flipping compatibility and to figure it out because now you have a few months. But the main thing that Microsoft's addressing, which is the most common problem of them all, is that nobody's paying attention to their Active Directory at all.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I'm surprised today was a fire still exists.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, and folks would like you to, you know, Microsoft would like you to use Entra. They make more money that way. But it's not that simple and you would again have to pay attention to your infrastructure.

[Leo Laporte]

You're suggesting Entra and Active Directory are not exactly the same thing, Richard.

[Paul Thurot]

They're vaguely related, but yeah, there's some things going on there. Anyway, yesterday for me, besides recording a few net rocks, it was mostly bantering back and forth with many of the administrators that know me well from run as and are just going well I did this whole thing and I just don't know if it's going to fail. I got to keep watching for people to authenticate as this patch roll over, but others going, no, I'm, I'm literally rdping into each machine and and doing your regedit each of the servers.

[Leo Laporte]

Burt quoted your, you know, we make fun of Microsoft because they do dumb things thing. And it reminded me of, I don't like most people, I don't usually confront people in public. I prefer to do it on Twitter or whatever. But every once in a while, every once in a while you get that opportunity, like in person to finally tell someone you know how you feel about them. And I won't say who this was. It's someone who does something like I do. And she said I don't understand, you know, why you're so mean to me. And I said, well, I can explain it. It's because you're terrible.

[Micah Sargent]

So that's amazing that you just start, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't talked to her since anyway. So tied somewhat to what Richard just mentioned about commercial customers being impacted by this Patch Tuesday Microsoft announced this past week it didn't go out on patch Tuesday, but sometime in the first half of the year they are going to allow those with managed businesses configure whether or not the Windows 1124H2 are more recent I guess out of box experience in Windows setup or not displays but rather downloads the latest cumulative updates which requires some discussion in a sense because most of you are saying, but it does do that, doesn't it? Ready like doesn't it already? You know, this is different. A new thing in 24H2. So depending on the type of install you're doing, there are at least. No, there aren't at least. There are up to three different times where it could check for updates. Right. And in Windows 11, 24H2, which I first experienced with the Copilot Plus PCs in mid year last year, there's a new phase and you'll notice it if you're familiar with Windows setup and how it looks in Windows 11 with white background, pastel colors, et cetera. It drops into a new look and feel where you can see what's going to be the desktop kind of bleeding through. It has a different look to it. I have a shot of it in the article that is associated with this, but it was the first time I'd seen it and the first time I experienced it was literally because Microsoft had at the time delayed recall and they basically put a whole new version of Windows and required anyone who brought up a copilot plus PC that month or ensuing, probably 30 to 60 days, install a full feature update, which took a long time. The average install time for this regardless is about 20 minutes. Now the way this works, generally speaking, is that if you're an individual, you're going to install that thing one way or the other. Right? So you could go through Windows setup more quickly, I guess, and skip it if they let you, or. And then get into Windows and then you could just go to Windows Update like people do and check for updates. And sure enough, there's that cumulative update. It's the most recent monthly update. Right. We have. The point of cumulative updates is that whatever that month's update is includes everything from the past, you know, 12 updates or whatever it is. So they're going to let businesses skip that. They're not going to have to go through that additional 20 minutes basically. But you know, and of course it's up to them when they install updates to some degree, since they are creating a policy for that. I suppose individuals will figure out how to do that for themselves as well, right? So people make custom installs and all that kind of stuff. But I mean, you know, for most people it's not a great experience. We all have this. You buy something new, you can't wait to try it, and you get to wait because there are updates like everything does this, right? Yep. Windows arguably invented that or at least perfected it, but whatever, it's gotten even worse, I guess, or better, depending on your outlook in 24H2. So they are going to let businesses say no to that, I think it's funny the way Microsoft described it, because instead of saying, we're going to allow you to turn it off, they said, we're going to allow you to turn it on. It's actually on by default. So they're sort of saying, we're going to allow you to keep using it the way we intended, or you can just turn it off, which I think a lot of them are going to do. Okay, let's see. You were gone last week, so I don't ask you.

[Paul Thurot]

I wish I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember if we talked about while you were gone? So Microsoft has various channels in the Windows Insider program. So if you're in Windows 11, there's a canary, which no one can understand. There's dev, which as of today is still on 24H2 updates, there is beta, which as of today is still in 23H2. And then there's a release preview program which can actually have a build for any supported version of Windows. Right. So before the preview update went out for both versions of Windows 11 yesterday, the release preview channel ejected this similar build about a week earlier. Whatever. Okay, so that's where we're at. But nothing can be simple. So we're in a little bit of a window here where if you're in the dev or beta channels, you can switch into the other right now if you want to. And the reason is 24 is, sorry, dev is going to move on to whatever the next thing is. They haven't set it. But 25H2.

[Paul Thurot]

25H2. Right, whatever. Dev is supposed to be the closest, the rawest code. Yeah, discounted Canary because we just don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, because everyone discounts Canary because nobody understands it. I'm sure the Canary build will soon get the new Outlook, just the next mature. Right. So beta right now is on 23H2, but you have the option, if you want to, to check for updates and you'll get the same build that's in dev. And if you accept that, you'll move into 24H2. Testing. Right. So this is. They're shifting things a little bit, so we're just in the middle of that. So there was a new beta build yesterday, and if you weren't confused yet, you'll enjoy this sentence. That was for people who never opted into 24H2. So it's still on 23H2, which is the one of the two current versions of Windows 11, but not the most recent version. Does that make sense? Good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So in 24H2, you will already have Seen, I think. Actually let me look right here because I'm not actually I have trouble remembering what's weird. No, I don't see it on this one. Okay, so certainly on a copilot plus PC if you have, well, you will have 24H2. Right. They all do that. You'll see the new version of Paint which we did discuss last week and there is or soon will be a hands on Windows episode about. And that new version has a Copilot button which I know everyone loves. So no complaints. And all of the AI functionality? Well, four of the five new AI features that are in the app are in this pull down menu. Some of them are Copilot PC only, like Co Create and the new Generative Fill and Erase. I only see two of those three things on the one PC I have like that here now. And then the other two are available to everyone. That's the See if I can figure this out. Image creation and background removal. Right. Those don't require an mpu, whatever. For some reason they work with everybody. Those things are commingled in one menu. They're not actually in order. They're not marked in any way. It's hilarious. But that's the new app. Honestly, it's a good idea because we've reached this point where we don't really have a place in the ribbon to put entire buttons or whatever. So now we have a button with a menu. So that was a lot of talk for a really innocuous new feature in one app because there are no other new features in that build. But anyway, if you're in the beta channel did not go to 24H2. You have 23H2. Check for updates. You can get the new paid app. You know, have fun with that more excitedly, excitingly, whatever. MIDI is making a comeback of sorts.

[Paul Thurot]

Really.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, well, I remember seeing a band as. I swear to God, this was the late 1990s. I know this doesn't sound possible, but they had an Atari ST on stage specifically because it came with, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

MIDI ports built in the back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And that thing had been, you know, not supported or not a thing for.

[Paul Thurot]

At least five pin DIN connectors, man. Yeah, old school.

[Leo Laporte]

So I guess Windows has just been using this USB Midi something driver, whatever since forever. We just made fun of the Canary Channel, but actually there's a new MIDI 2.0 standard and the initial support for that through Windows MIDI services is now available in the Canary Channel for these six or fewer people that are interested.

[Paul Thurot]

Both people are really excited about it. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, MIDI is a serial standard, so USB is Universal Serial Bus.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? That's right. That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

They all do. They are friendly to each other. Carl will be excited about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was going to say maybe you have a legacy device of some kind. You're probably using a Mac, but whatever. You know what? It's fine. They're doing it. Okay. I don't think this is going to impact too many people, but look, no one expected to see the word MIDI appear today, so let's just embrace it for what it is. And then again, kind of outside of whatever channels we're talking about, Microsoft is updating the Photos app similarly to what they're doing in the Paint app, with a bunch of new AI capabilities. And that same Hands on Windows episode I keep referencing for some reason also features that stuff. So they're doing things a little differently. There's Designer integration, which I believe we talked about last week. There's some stuff that's been in that app for probably a year or more now. And then there's some new stuff that Microsoft announced, I don't know, October last year, whatever. That's kind of finally starting to roll out in the app, in fact, because I keep doing this, I'm just going to look at it. This is just a normal PC. It's not a Copilot plus PC. So I'm curious what weird subset of features this thing has. Let me open this thing. And yeah, so it has the Designer integration, which gives you an inline Microsoft designer experience. So you don't have to go to the website with it. You don't have to round robin a file if you're using it for design purposes. That's actually pretty cool. And then if you go into the editing features. Yeah, this is like a minor. Well, no, it's got some stuff. So generative erase, that wasn't there before. That was a. Well, generative background erase is part of Paint and has been for a while. But actual generative erase, meaning you can select the things you want to erase. So that's in this verse, and that's actually pretty good. And then the background features, background blur, remove and replace, that's been in Paint, sorry, photos, for a while. And then if you have a Copilot plus PC, you get additional features. So one of the features that should have been in Paint by now on Copilot Plus PCs is OCR capabilities with like 4, 460 different languages. And they were testing it, it was about to come out, and then they pulled It Microsoft and never explained why, but now it's back. So if you have an image that has any text in it, you can do the thing you do today and say, snipping tool does this. And I think they're awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

I ran across somebody ask about OCR yesterday too and somebody said like, just paste it into ChatGPT and say, what does this text say?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that works too. But if, if you're using Windows and you want to right click a file and what's the text and get that text copy to the clipboard, Snipping tool works great. That's. I think everyone has that and it's there now, but they're adding it to, you know, they're adding it everywhere it makes sense, right? So if, if, if the app has anything to do with images, they're going to add that capability.

[Micah Sargent]

That's nice, right? That you don't have to leave the context. That's the thing. Having it in other places is easy, but right there, because that came to Mac OS pretty late in the game, we only recently got that you can even pause a video and if there's text in the video, you could highlight it and copy it and paste it somewhere. It's just nice to have it in that context.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep forgetting where I say things, right? So either in Windows Weekly, possibly when Richard was gone last week and or in Hands on Windows, we would have talked about, we have talked about certainly this feature that was originally part of Recall but now will be made more broadly just in Windows. If you have a Copilot plus PC, which is called Click to Do, which when you hear that name, like that's a stupid name, but actually the way it works is you hold down the Windows key and you click and whatever that window is, it does the AI purple and pink ripple and it examines the thing and if it is a graphic, it will look to identify the objects that are in there. And if there's text in the graphic, it will do this OCR thing. And if it's text, it will highlight all the text. And then you can do things like copy to the clipboard, obviously, but rewrite the text, make it more professional, more casual, shorter, longer. You can turn it into a poem, which is hilarious. It's pretty cool. But the reason that's a neat feature, despite the name, is still slightly grating to me, is that it's app agnostic, right? So you have feature like putting features where they make sense in context, like Micah said, makes sense if you're going to have OCR capabilities For images, yes. Photos paint snipping tool. Yep, makes sense. But having something that works with any app because maybe use a third party app or maybe use whatever it is, maybe it's a graphic on a website, maybe it's a graphic in a Word document. Whatever it is, you can do it to anything. And like having it out at the OS level, like click to do does actually is pretty cool. So. So it's text and graphics, as you would expect. Text and images. Yeah. So I just went on, not a rant, but my kind of pet peeve of the day about AI and people kind of denying it or hating it and not wanting it. But this is maybe a good everyday example of it's just kind of there doesn't get in your way, it doesn't bother you. If you need it, there it is. If you don't, you just get on with your life. Right. And so yeah, okay, maybe AI is not improving your life, but actually this is, this is a really nice, useful efficiency, whatever you want to call it, feature. It's great. So yes, it's happening all over the place with or without you, by the way. So, you know, welcome to the future.

[Unknown]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount Programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help marketing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L, I, B S Y N ads.com today and then welcome to the past because yesterday I want you guys to imagine that Microsoft is going to announce that they have canceled HoloLens, that they are never going to do anything with this technology ever again. But here's the trick. You can't use the word hololens in that announcement. Now, what I just said is not necessarily strictly true, but There is the HoloLens variant that Microsoft made for the US army, which I think most would agree has been kind of keeping Hololens alive as a product. In a way, it's the big.

[Paul Thurot]

And also crippled them, too, because army wanted so many things.

[Leo Laporte]

It's super specialized. And so what Microsoft did was partner with a company called Anduril, which is fascinating to me, because for some reason, this company has come up in my tech feed a couple of times in the past two weeks, and I've wondered about it, because Anduril, of course, is the name of Aragorn's sword in the Lord of the Rings. I'm a nerd, like all of you. They reforge it and whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

But they are a proper military contractor.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, proper in the sense that they absolutely have contracts with the various parts of the military to the tune of hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars. So they make drones.

[Paul Thurot]

They're a drone company. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. This is Palmer Lucky, who previously founded Oculus. Right. Which sold to Facebook, or better, whatever it was called at the time. He left there under mysterious and definitely negative circumstances. If you look this guy up, it's. He is so comically a tech bro that it's impossible not to make fun of him. I'm going to try hard.

[Paul Thurot]

He's in his 30s, for God's sake.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's. It's crazy. So Microsoft is. So the partnership is. Microsoft doesn't have to deal with this anymore, but they will be the preferred. Not the exclusive, by the way, but the preferred cloud service for this stuff. So Azure will still, you know, be part of it. So this is a way for Microsoft to kind of wipe their hands of the hololens thing, but still get some business on the back end.

[Paul Thurot]

Perhaps there's still other verticals that are using Hololens. So, yeah, the question is, where are they going to live? Obviously, the army was not happy with the circumstances, so they fixed the army problem. But now you have the other verticals.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So HoloLens was last updated as a hardware device in 2019. So it was almost exactly six years ago. Right. I went to that. It was Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Tim Swinney was on stage and they Kumbaya ed the hell out of that. It was great. Microsoft was going to come up with the HoloLens 3. It wasn't enough of a leap. They ended up not doing it. I was actually with Brad in Las Vegas when he got the phone call from a buddy of his at Microsoft who told him the story, which was kind of interesting as it was happening, but.

[Paul Thurot]

And apparently they got to prototype and said no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it just wasn't enough of a move forward. So I feel like this world has kind of moved on. Obviously not HoloLens necessarily, which is AR, but there are mixed reality, VR, XR, whatever you want to call these things, solutions from a variety of companies. Microsoft supports, I think all of them, actually. So Apple with Vision Pro, Android is coming, or Google Android is coming out with Android XR soon, partnership with Samsung, but for everybody. And what's the other? Oh, of course, Meta with Oculus and their stuff. So I don't know. They laid off most of that mixed reality team mid year last year, as I recall. I don't know. I don't really see a huge future here, obviously. But HoloLens is one of the remaining pieces of what we used to call that one Windows thing. Right, where you could create a universal Windows app that theoretically could run on HoloLens, Surface Hub, Xbox, Windows, across PCs, tablets and phones and that whole IoT blah, blah, blah, whatever. So most of that's been kind of dismantled.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, Kipman was encouraged to depart in 2020.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm encouraging you to do the right thing because otherwise it was him and.

[Paul Thurot]

Scott Keane and there was a few. There was sort of a sweep of executive level misconduct all at once. And he was in that. So they've been leaderless effectively. I mean, I know some of the folks that were still working on that and they were very much waiting for new hardware. This thing's in. Is in stasis.

[Leo Laporte]

This feels like the type of thing where I don't know if you know this, Richard, but maybe they're probably still part of the Windows Org or at least the more personal computing Org, certainly. And I'm sure from their perspective, it's like, is there some way you could go, does this other thing or something could we get rid of. Can we just not do this anymore? So I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense in the sense that right now we look at how much focus they've put on AI related technologies and I've heard a whole org saying, if you don't have AI in your workload, you're the wrong team.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

Not that I don't think that augmented reality couldn't benefit from a bunch of these generative AI technologies.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is platform building. I mean this is required, this is.

[Paul Thurot]

Not a time to be building a platform. So it's not a bad time to sort of put this on the shelf for a while, keep a couple of smart hardware people around so that they're at the right conferences and seeing when the new chipset's coming down and can propose at least, hey, this might be a good time to move, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the other thing about. So Satya Nadella, obviously his time as CEO at Microsoft will be marked by first the cloud, now AI. That's probably going to be the extent of it, but whatever, that's the era. But the other thing he's really known for is this now very common thing at Microsoft where Microsoft is going to meet their customers where they are. Right. And so when you look at AR, Mr. XR, whatever we're going to call this stuff where customers are, is increasingly the meta stuff, maybe the Apple stuff, maybe this Android thing will take off, who knows? And that's where you go and say, we can make a difference with AI. We'll support the users on those products and then we don't have to worry about the terribleness of building that platform or whatever. We'll just support the platforms around the world.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, Microsoft's wins have never come from original hardware.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I understand the Surface line in terms of building reference gear and most, most of the cases when you talk about the good mice and the good keyboards, it was about building reference gear. It's like, hey, this stuff could be good and it's perfectly fine to make a small lot product that is expensive and is good for certain customers, but it sets a bar for the rest of the ecosystem to build underneath or attempt to exceed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, yeah, I mean I was at, yeah, it was the event at which they launched Surface Duo, which was that little, you know, the two screen Android thing. And I was, I think it's fair to say I was on the negative end of the spectrum on that one. You know, it didn't make sense to me at the time. Samsung had already done at least two generations of a folding phone. It was like, what are you doing? You know, you're a little late.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Frank Shaw said, an Android phone anyway. Yeah, but Frank Shaw said to me, he says, let me, let me just ask you theoretically, like if we can make a small business business out of this and it's profitable, I mean, is that okay with you? I was like, yeah, that's Fine, of course. But it's the profitable thing. I'm not really, you know, like. Yeah, of course. That would be fantastic. Is that what you're doing? Like, you know, we never got to that part of the conversation. So, yeah, I'm not ripping on Frank, but it's a fair point like, that he made, which is. Yeah, that's fine. But I think the problem is these businesses, which I would argue maybe are a bit of a distraction today because of the company's focus, like you said with ar and. Okay, well.

[Paul Thurot]

And at the same time, like Kipman's legacy, like the original Surface, before it was a laptop, it was a table.

[Leo Laporte]

You remember this thing? Of course, a table you could not.

[Paul Thurot]

Show on stage because it was optically controlled and stage lights would screw it up every time.

[Leo Laporte]

It was like a Pac man machine from, like, the roller ring.

[Paul Thurot]

It was literally the same form factor as the old Pac man machine, but he parlayed that into that. The Xbox accessory. Right. Remember the gizmo that sat on top that connect and do frame recognition? And that was going to revolutionize Xbox. And not enough people bought it.

[Leo Laporte]

And it did great at first, and then it couldn't see people if their skin was anything other than lily white, which was kind of a problem.

[Paul Thurot]

Great stories from the Kinect story. Like, I remember at one point they had to send out an email saying, please, because they had all these beta testers that were Microsoft employees. Please do not beta test this thing naked, because we do have to look.

[Leo Laporte]

We're literally doing body scans. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Because in testing, right.

[Leo Laporte]

The. You don't actually see this in real life, but the. When they. When they do the demo of how it mapped the room, the Kinect, they would use like that matrix dots that would kind of go over and around. Right. And so that effect actually figures prominently. If I remember correctly. I think it was a Paranormal Activity movie where they were. The Kinect was making those green dots everywhere. And, like, I don't remember exactly how they did, but, like, you know, some thing moved through the room and it detected the, you know, the mass of the thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, it. Yeah, it had. It was a flash in the pan, but it was. Yeah, briefly, very successful. And then they decided it was going to be a requirement.

[Paul Thurot]

Exciting. I don't think it was ever successful because you couldn't. You know, the real question is, can you make a game with this interface that people care about? And now we get back to the gaming problem, where the amount of money it takes to make a good game on that. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that this, this is, it's not, this is not a Microsoft problem, but I think this is a problem when you as a tech company in this case have this, you come up with like what is essentially a tech demo. Like hololens was like this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the reason hololens became a product was because they had this tech demo and Satya Nadella became the CEO and he saw that and he said, make something, you know, and I think Connect was like that. Where they're like, okay, this is crazy, let's productize it. And so they take this risk. They spend. It's hardware too in both cases. Right. So it's a huge investment. You're never going to get it right in V1. So you hope, you know, as we move down the road. And HoloLens got a lot better in V2 for sure, like field of view and so forth. But a lot of times those like the things that demo, well, aren't always great as products.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And there's so much more to making a product. The Kinect's from 2010. This is a while ago, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the Xbox 360 came out in 2005 and if you think about it, this would have been its mid season bump. Right. Just as this thing we've done 1080p, we've done a couple little hardware things. Like the Kinect was maybe the thing that pushes it through the second half of that life cycle. Unfortunately it only lasted about 15 seconds. So it's. But you know, and you know, we had the Nintendo Wii at the time and Microsoft was busy copying some of the UIs. Remember they did a little me like avatars and with the little weeble heads and stuff. And I think the Kinect was back.

[Paul Thurot]

When Don Mattrick was running the Xbox, the Mr.

[Leo Laporte]

Submarine and you know, like. But they, there were games that were like, you know, you're going down the river in a raft and everyone's standing in the room jumping together and.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, this was the real problem is they're video game players. Did you want them to. You're going to try to make them move around. They play video games.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know. They're way more comfortable sagging the couch, you know, than jumping around a room.

[Paul Thurot]

But how long did it take us to figure out how to play with the Wii? Stick to play.

[Leo Laporte]

How many people threw one of those numb checks through a screen?

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Before they're like, maybe we should put a strap on that thing.

[Paul Thurot]

But this, this whole chain apart, like from The Surface table to the Kinect, to the HoloLens, it's all Alex Kipman. It's a logical chain of technology, actually. Right. Moved into.

[Leo Laporte]

And every one of them is an example I think we just talked about, where it's like, wow, that thing is an awesome demo.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Product, probably not a problem. Mixed results. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So anyway, I. I feel like this is logically the end of this, but HoloLens, that is to bring it back to the actual.

[Paul Thurot]

You put it on the shelf. Because who knows when AR breaks out and. Or has an event where it's like, okay, dust that technology off again. Let's see where we're at.

[Leo Laporte]

So Burke asked me about my submarine comment. So after the Xbox 360, they did the Xbox One. And the original plans for the Xbox One were many. This was going to be the one that was focused more on entertainment than gaming. Remember, that was their big push. Kinect was going to be a requirement of this console. And one of the other requirements is that it had to be always connected to the Internet, including when you first set it up. So somebody asked Don Madrick in an interview before it came out and said, well, what if. What if they're on a submarine? Like, a lot of people are. The US Navy, for example, are huge fans of Xbox. They play Call of Duty and everything. They can't connect to the Internet when they're 10,000 or whatever it is, 2,000 people or what Surface. And he's like, well, I guess you're going to have to get a different game. He said something like, you'll have to get a 360 or something. And it's like, bad answer. Done. And that was kind of the end of him. And it was the end of the online requirement for the Xbox One. So. Yeah. Yeah. Someone says, yeah, the Wii was an awesome demo that turned out to be an awesome product. Yeah, those are tricky. You know, I think the. This is. I'm not trying to rip on Microsoft. I don't think this is a unique Microsoft problem, but it's difficult to do that, to get it right. I think the companies that do get it right, like the Wii, I guess Nintendo, with Wii, that. That's a win. That's a huge thing.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But Nintendo also controlled this dev story, so they made good games for that controller.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And that's not how Microsoft does things.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was a legit innovation from outside the. I don't. That's not even mainstream. That's not even fair. Nintendo is the mainstream, but outside of what the other companies in that space were doing. It was, you know, I compare them to Disney. They're just kind of different. You know, they just do things differently. Like they, they looked at this and said, yeah, this is, here's something wacky. It doesn't make sense. You look at the, the Numchuk controller, whatever, you're like, what is this thing like? It's crazy. But that thing was super successful. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, good for them.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount Programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling, calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help all.

[Micah Sargent]

Right, we have reached the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got there the end of the Windows segment. We'll take a small little pause here. In fact, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to remind everybody that's listening out there about Club TWIT at TWIT TV Club TWIT. For $7 a month, you can join the club and join the fun. You get ad free to every single one of our shows. You also gain access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twitt events get published there. Access to the members only Discord server. When we're talking about the chat, we're mostly talking about the Discord. And so it's a great place to go to hang with your fellow Club Twitt members and those of us here at twit. Paul's talking about his show Hands on Windows. I've got Hands on Mac and iOS today and hands on tech and all of those you can get ad free versus versions of by joining the club. So please consider joining the club. We've got a two week free trial that's going right now, so you can kind of test it out and see if it's for you. And to those of you who are already members, you can refer your friends to earn months of Club Twit free. That's TWiT TV club TWiT referral. So be sure to check that out as well. All right, that is all I have for you. Which means it's time to head back to talk about AI and Dev, which.

[Leo Laporte]

I stupidly just looked at my newsfeed and there are two stories that may actually well do fall into this category. So I'm not gonna Breaking News alert. Yeah, I can't get into this too deeply, but chat GPT 4.5 will. Has not been announced. I would not. Well, no, I'm sorry. It is a thing, right? Yeah. They're updating chat GPT 4.5. I shouldn't be reading this in real time. Let me go to. Back to this. It looks like they're saying that ChatGPT 4.5 will be the last non reasoning model. And ChatGPT 5, whenever that happens, will include O3, which will then no longer be offered as a standalone model. But there's more going on. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds there. And then in our notes, let me see how I did things. It's like it's in a little blender. Later on we're going to talk about some, some dev stuff related to AI, but Microsoft just announced a course for generative AI for beginners with. Net. And that's actually, that's really interesting to me. I suspect that. I'm just looking at it real quick. I suspect this is cloud based AI, not local AI, which is what most people think of AI. So I'll be looking at this. Maybe we'll talk about this more next week. Anyway. Okay, so we're heading into what I call conference developer conference season. Usually that involves Build from Microsoft and Google, I O from Google obviously in May and then in June, Apple has wwdc. And since this has been the schedule Microsoft and Google have playing this little game of chicken where they try not to get in each other's way sort of, but sometimes do. And they could not have gotten in this way more this year.

[Paul Thurot]

It's about as good as it gets. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the other day Microsoft announced that build would be May 19th through 22 in Seattle. Google then scheduled I O for May 20th to 21st. The two days in the middle of that four day span. Now here's the thing. Here's the problem. Well, there's a couple of problems. There is some overlapping audience here, I would imagine. Right. And audiences. Right. Because not just developers who may want to be involved with both. I'm sure there are some, but also just people who are like bloggers or press or whatever and want to cover both these events. It's going to be hard to do both in person. So I guess you could go to the Build keynote and then leave that and get on a plane and fly down to Mountain View or whatever and go to the Google thing the next whatever. So good luck with that. But the reason this is a problem is because Google's event is at their own facility. They could schedule this whenever they wanted. They're not at the.

[Paul Thurot]

They're not beholden to a conference center Moscone or anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they could do this. They just did. They're like, when's built. Yeah, let's do it then. Like, it feels a little, you know, whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

But okay, where build is at the.

[Leo Laporte]

Washington State Convention Center. That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

In Sel. All right, so there's that. And then speaking of like, just like openly hostile people, I would like to trip secretly if I could. Elon Musk and some group of investors. Investors have. Well, I say supposedly because at the time the story was they have made a bid for OpenAI. They offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI. Elon Musk has been trying a variety of legal tactics to undermine OpenAI, a company he co founded back in the.

[Paul Thurot]

Day and then tried to take over and was kicked out of.

[Leo Laporte]

And was kicked out. Yeah. And he's just really upset about how, I guess successful they are probably, and he can't stand it and whatever. Okay, so this is just the latest one. It's kind of underhanded and terrible. Two things to this. One is Sam Altman got on X Twitter. I still call it Twitter, but so does Sam Altman. And he wrote, no, thank you, but we will buy Twitter for 97. I wrote 97.4 billion. I mistyped in my article. I just noticed for the same price. In other words. That's a cute number. But of course they're going for a valuation now that the could make OpenAI worth as much as 300 billion, depending on how things go over the next couple of months. So we'll see. But it's just a little crappy thing. But the other thing is, officially no one has actually made a bid for OpenAI. So a couple of days went by and he said, look, I just want to let everyone know we talked to the board about this. They've never made a bid for our company, so I don't even know. They just made this huge announcement about it, but they've never given us a bid, so we can't even evaluate it. We don't have to. We're going to say no to it. But I just.

[Paul Thurot]

An OpenAI is not a public company. There's nothing to bid on. There's no process here.

[Leo Laporte]

They're trying to undermine confidence in this company because I don't know if he has a little company called xai, for example that is allegedly competitive with this and whatever. It's. The whole thing is so stupid. It's like, it's like two children grew into adults but didn't grow into adults in their minds and they're still kids and they just slapping each other. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Are you talking about tech bros? That's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tech bros, exactly. Well, a tech bro and what appears to be a robot. All right, so I don't know. And you can guess which one I mean by that. OpenAI obviously has about 3 million ChatGPT services. Now. ChatGPT search required a sign in, but now you can just go and access it on the web. You don't have to sign in. Obviously there are limits when you're not signed in. There are limits when you don't pay. Whatever. But they're just spreading wide as well as deep. Now Google announced that Gemini 2.0, which is a family model, it's not a single model the way they described it, is available to everybody. It's like not everybody asterisks, but it's in the process of rolling out to everybody. What I mean by that is like if you're in Google workspace, for example, you still don't have the final version of some of these models. But whatever, the models are done, they're heading out, they're available, they have that thing we talked about. Richard will remember last week when he wasn't here about reasoning models where the kind of sits there and thinks out loud and people are more confident and that kind of thing. So everyone's doing has that. Okay, so there's that. And then to further the lightning round mode of this part of the show, GitHub Copilot, which to my mind still is possibly the best, the most useful.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I would say most measurable benefit. Like. Yeah, there you go. I've got very good numbers now from a bunch of different teams about the productivity increase of developers. It's a better part of a year to really learn how to get it in their workflow. It makes a big difference.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

20 to 30% performance deliverable.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm surprised it's not higher, honestly for.

[Paul Thurot]

Me, some people get more, but that seems to be the consistent number.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So to me it's magic. I think it's incredible. I have run into a couple of instances now where I think you might have been around for this way I described me trying to parse this really complex line of code it had created to replace a block of code I had written. And. And you sort of assume it's correct. Right. And it's super complex. And I'm like, nope. I was like, I went through, I'm like, this doesn't do the same things. And it didn't, but, but other than that, I mean it's been, it's been really, really good.

[Paul Thurot]

And that's one of the things I've, I've noticed too is as your work gets more complex as you, the tool struggles more well.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, I mean, and then God help you like the things like I'm not a professional developer so the thing I'm working on, I've hit the limits of peak Paul here I have a hard time if it's not first thing in the morning and I sit in front of the thing and bring up Visual Studio, look at my own code that I wrote and I'm like, nope, I can't handle it.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no. I've definitely used the tool to explain what the heck I wrote yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

But this thing, what this will do is take what is ostensibly, I'll say objectively at least more readable code. It's more simplistic because I'm an idiot, but. And it will take the code and write it into something way more efficient. But it's also concise and terse and hard to read. And I'm like, I probably does the same thing.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. It's a difference in a link expression and a loop. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Although Copilot does a good job of flipping between those.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I'm waiting for NET rocks.

[Paul Thurot]

I use the link expression because it's very terse. But I have a comment that is copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. So, yeah, so the, the more down to earth example of this that like any human being would kind of understand if, you know, a developer is use a tool like Grammarly or the, you know, the AI features in word or whatever it is and you get some sentence, it underlines something and it says, yeah, you probably want to this word. Maybe you reused it too many times or maybe it's not. The, you know, the one that always corrects for me is all right, it's hard to know what blah, blah, blah and it will say, you know, the word definitely. Difficult is better. I'm like, okay, so I'm like, you know what, you're probably right. I'll switch it. I use difficult. I start typing again. Then online's Difficult. I'm like, what? He goes, you know, I think you mean hard here. And I was like, dude. So, like, you know, GitHub Copilot. I can sort of get into this as well. It's like, you know, there's a better way to write this. You're like, okay. And then it takes the thing, it expands it out into this little thing. Like, okay, I wouldn't have done it that way, but, okay, fine. And then you start working on more code. It's like, oh, actually, you know, there's a better way to write this. I'm like, let me guess. It's the other way. Yep, it's the other way. And, you know, it's just like. So you kind of round robin it. You're like, I don't. I don't know what's going on anymore. So, like the rest of the AI world, it's GitHub Copilot is. Well, they added a bunch of new features, for one thing, including Gemini 2.0. Flash is now available in the Model Picker. It was Anthropic before and chatgpt and obviously Copilot. And now you can do Gemini and. But they're previewing what will become their. What they call an autonomous agent. It's codenamed Project Padawan for now. Speaking of, you know, like, popular movie franchise references. And it will, you know, it will do everything. It will bake bread, it will. Whatever. It will drive your kid to school. It's going to whatever. But it's not all you can. All I can do right now because I don't pay for this. And there's no way for me to really see it. I could just look at their videos, but. But this is an agent that will work on your behalf in an autonomous way where you kind of set it off on some research project or whatever it is, and it will do the thing that you ask or the multiple things will do. I don't remember the number, but some number of tasks at once. And then it will come back. You'll be sitting there working in Visual Studio, probably doing that round robin thing I was talking about, wondering where your life went. And it will say, hey, we came back, we solved the problem you wanted us to solve, or whatever. Not surprisingly, I'm speaking very theoretically here, because I don't have it.

[Paul Thurot]

Thomas Demke promised us to pull request, that this tool would actually get to the pull request point. And now you get to review the code, decide if you want to add it or not.

[Leo Laporte]

I am struggling not to do this sort of thing because I'm working on this programming project, like I said, it's above me. I've chosen a technology that's not well suited for the task. There's all kinds of problems. I'm the biggest one, but whatever. But there is a capability that's in AI today. You could do this in ChatGPT or the other AIs, but this tool specifically will be designed for this and specifically for the kind of developer workloads you do in Visual Studio. Meaning you might be using XAML to make the UI for a Windows application or a cross platform, like a Maui app or whatever it might. Web app, whatever. What you can do is like draw a picture of a ui. Like you could literally use a crayon and scan it or however you do it. Like, here's the window, here's what I want it to look like.

[Paul Thurot]

Get a little Microsoft paint going there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And then make the code. And not just make the code to make the ui, which would be useful, but also write the underlying click event handlers, whatever it might be. Yeah. So pretty soon we're going to be like the guy with the whistle at a traffic stop that nobody pays attention to, telling AI what to do. And he's like, yeah, I got this, I got it.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, I mean, I do appreciate that it's easier to criticize code than it is to write it from scratch. And so having the tool generates the.

[Leo Laporte]

Initial chunk of code, let me tell you, it's easier to criticize anything than it is to create anything. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the.

[Paul Thurot]

Just a question of, you know, what is the net time? Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Because you're going to, you're going to end up having to go through that code and make some corrections and push back and forth. And certainly, you know, I've been in this iterative cycle where I've tweaking and tweaking. Eventually it's like, okay, go away, I will finish this.

[Leo Laporte]

So you've reminded me of something. I didn't intend to tell another story like this, but actually I think this might be instructive. So my wife and I are both writers. Right. We have both sort of collectively agreed that we're not going to use AI to write. Like, we're not going to say, I have to write a story about this topic. Could you throw something, cobble something together and then I'll go edit it or whatever. However, in my wife's case, I had shown her it was some of the things I was doing for hands on Windows, where in a Copilot Plus PC, in the next version of Windows 11, you're going to have this little AI thing that could rewrite and make poems and do all that stuff. I showed her some of that stuff. I showed her the click to do thing with the purple and pink. Razzle dazzle, whatever. Apparently this inspired her, which is not usually her reaction to things I tell her. And she went and started looking at AI and was thinking, like, in my work workflow, like, how could I actually use this thing? So one of the things she does the most often involves four steps. The first step is you talk to someone on the phone, or, sorry, it's not 1999, you talk to them on Zoom and she records those things. And then those people would be like a doctor or some kind of medical or healthcare professional. It could be a person who had an experience with whatever the thing is she's writing about, and they can tell their story. So she's on the phone for half an hour, 45 minutes, whatever it is, and she does this several times a week. So she then takes that recording that Zoom generates, and she pushes it through Microsoft Word, which has a transcription tool built in, you might not know about, but it is in there. And she was doing this early on. Like, when she first started doing this, it was only. That transcription feature was only available in the web version of Word at the time, but now it's everywhere. So cool. And now you've got this text document that's your conversation, which can be quite big. So she will go then. Then the third step is she goes through that thing and she pulls out the main points and she kind of organizes them in whatever way she wants. But after that, she writes. I would say as a writer, the only thing she should be doing in some ways is writing, but you also have to talk to people. In her case, her deal is she talks to people all the time. That's what she does. So you can't eliminate that. But the other two steps are kind of interesting. Could AI be used to not just transcribe this thing, but then make a summary of some kind in a bullet, the list or whatever that you could then build what you write and in her case does write herself? She's not using the AI to write for her, but. And the answer is yes. And so she said, you know, I don't think I'm ever going to go back to doing the way I used to do this. Like, this thing saves me an enormous amount of time. It's super effective. And the other thing and she can be very specific. She'll say like, for example, she wrote a story about like, I don't remember, it's foods that help with, let's pretend it was inflammation or something. And across three different interviews, she got 10 food types of which there's some crossover, but not entirely. And now she can go to OpenAI. In her case, she used GPT, I think, and say, look, go through this thing, organize these claims they've made, find reliable research from the past five years that supports or debunks these claims one at a time and it goes with sources and then she can go to the source, make sure it's credible, make sure it's real.

[Paul Thurot]

Real.

[Leo Laporte]

This, this is stuff she did manually all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

She's an intern job, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Right, right. So I mean, she's a freelancer, so she is the intern. But yeah. So to the people, now she has.

[Paul Thurot]

A digital intern that's pulling these things together for her to validate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the reason I mentioned this now, the reason you reminded me of this is because this is how software development is going to go. It's not that you're going to be removed from the equation as a human developer, it's just that you're, your use of the tools is going to change and AI will become part of it. Doesn't necessarily mean it's going to write all the code for you, although, you know, in some cases it can do that. But I think there's use cases like my wives that can be applied to.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, different steps, different jobs. Yeah, totally agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there you go. And I'm struck. This is, you know, she's already, she's made a leap. I have not made. I still, when I write every, every day, right. Thousands and thousands of words. And when I think about what I just said, when I think about what she's done and I think about how I might use. I'm like, I don't know, I can't get there. So maybe I will. But right now I haven't done it. Okay, one more thing. Last May at Build, Microsoft announced about 3,000 things, but one of those 3,000 things and one of the two or three that really, really interested me was something called the Windows Copilot runtime, which is not a runtime, but let's get past that. It's just a collection of APIs and models that run on device. So these were for copilot plus PCs. That's why they not. Well, it's a developer thing. They would have announced it anyway. But they also announced the Copilot Plus PCs right at the same show. So there'll be all kinds of capabilities you'll be able to use in your own code. We talked about some of them earlier, actually. Right, so. So all the things that are in Recall or Click to do or the Generative AI erase and fill and whatever else that's in Paint and Photos and whatever else you'll be able to use in your own code as a software developer on Windows. But the asterisks here, and the reason. The thing I mentioned up front about the. NET course on Generative AI, the reason that's important, unless I completely misunderstand it, is that that will be broadly applicable to any developer because those things happen in the cloud. And you as a. NET developer could write an app that runs on a phone, it runs like a website, it runs as a Windows app, if you're one of three people are still doing that. And the Windows Copilot runtime stuff is very specifically for on device AI, which today is this hard gap between two sets of capabilities that I think eventually going to come together and be that orchestrated thing. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mean it on multiple levels because the Windows Copilot runtime capabilities. I hate saying the word runtime over and over again because it's not a runtime, but whatever. Those APIs only run on the MPU. They only run if the MPU is of a certain power, like a Copilot plus PC. There's no fallback if you don't have those things. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

They don't have an ODBC for this to run.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

GPU or.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. They don't have the right. And orchestrator that would say, okay, that abstracts that from the developer, the os, you know, and says, look, you're asking to do this if you have an mpu, that's the best way to do it. We'll do that. If you have a gpu, we'll do that. That's going to be fantastic. We'll take down the power grid in Miami or whatever. But it's fine. It will work. If you don't have that cpu, be a little slow, but it will work. And if you don't have that to the cloud, that's the thing. The final fallback should be that high hybrid scenario where, okay, so what's the corresponding API that's up in the cloud and that's the piece. We don't have this. Actually, until about yesterday we didn't have any of it because well, they're obviously their cloud APIs and all that stuff, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, the. The OpenAI API has been emulated by a bunch of the other LLMs because it is a common. It's becoming the common interface.

[Leo Laporte]

It's becoming an odbc. Yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

So doing this in the house here, right, where I'm still calling out to the OpenAI API for the language stuff in the house, but I can replace it with a local model running Claude that has the OpenAI API simulator in front of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is interesting because depending on what it is, like when Copilot PC first came out and it was image generation capabilities that would run on the device compared to the same app, a slightly different feature, but run against the cloud, the images you would generate off the MPU were garbage, like, compared to what you could do against the cloud. Now, from Microsoft's perspective, they just saved 17 cents because you're not hitting the cloud. So it's better for them. And then someday maybe we'll catch up enough and it will be good. What I've seen since then is that the capabilities that run on device have actually gotten better. I'm not saying the image generation is as good. It's not. But there's all these, well, SLMs, really. Microsoft confusingly calls them local language models because it's LLM again and again. Stop. But whatever. SLMs that run on device, they've gotten better. So I describe Notepad and the rewrite stuff. That stuff's fantastic. But the thing that's been missing is that thing they announced last May, the actual Windows Copilot runtime. Where are these APIs? Right, yeah. So about a week ago, they hit the Windows app SDK 1.7 experimental 3 release. So if you go back to the tape, and I did Davlon, Paul Ori said, this will come out next January. He actually said that. And it kind of did it. It was February, but they only missed it by a couple of days. It was a slightly different version of the app. SDK, whatever, who cares? It's experimental. You cannot use this in production. It's not like sometimes in. Net prerelease they'll say, look, actually this version preview, what do they call it? Release candidate. You can actually put it in production if you want. It's not there. As we started the show, Rafael texted me and said, you're not going to believe this because we were chatting about this yesterday. They just put it into preview. I had guessed and he had guessed separately that these capabilities will be released to build in Stable. And this suggests that's what's going to happen. I just mentioned that I am not a professional developer. I feel it's important to keep highlighting that. But I've been. Wait, I keep checking like when it. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? It just came out. So I actually wrote a little app which I wrote an article about that just does two things. You paste in text and then you can summarize it or you can rewrite it. And that's two of the capabilities. Right. That Microsoft Word does with Copilot, that Notepad does with this new built in capability on device. And let me tell you something. So it's seven lines of code and it works fricking great. Like it's awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

It's impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what I'm doing. And I wrote an app that does those things and it looks like garbage because I didn't care. I was just throwing it together. It's happening. So this is very exciting. And there's a bunch of stuff we mentioned. Ocr, that's one of those capabilities. The ability to isolate objects in an image so that you can then do generative fill or generative race on that thing that's in the APIs. I can't remember all of them. I'm sorry at the time, this is a bunch of them. It's a big list. So I suspect when build comes around in about two months that Microsoft's going to have a pretty good story. The problem is. And the question is the Windows app SDK is very specific. Well, this part of it, sorry. The Windows copilot runtime. These capabilities are on device. MPO requires a copilot PC. There's no fallback. You can test to see if the machine meets it and if it doesn't, the else clause is up to you. There's no APIs for you. You got to go figure that out.

[Paul Thurot]

In theory, this is what Microsoft good at.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Although I realize Microsoft builds compatibility layers when they're not leading in a market or believe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So the way to think of this. And I think this is going to change. So I said there's a. My guess is they're going to announce this. But I have a question. The question I have is what will they announce the next step which is some form of fallback. Right. Logically. The next form of fallback, the first form I guess would be GPU CPU.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. NPU emulation on GPU NPU.

[Leo Laporte]

100% they'd be.

[Paul Thurot]

So I mean, it's like turning into proxy to cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably a Registry switch. Like, it's probably going to be really easy, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But the more sophisticated thing would be that Orchestrator thing, if they can go to the cloud with it. Now, the reason to believe that's not going to happen is because we can look at what's in Windows 11 today and that does not exist. Right. So I, I just mentioned these things. If you have Notepad and you're running like now, you have to be in the dev or beta channel and you have a Copilot plus PC, you will get a little AI icon that will give you those features I described. If you're running it on a normal PC like the one I'm using here, it just looks like Notepad looks. That thing is not there. You don't get that if you're running Paint. And I mentioned the new Copilot menu with those features. If you have a non Copilot plus PC, you'll just get the two features that don't require that. If you have a Copilot plus PC, you'll see all four because two of them require the mpu. So Microsoft's not even doing it yet. Right. So I'm looking at a future that doesn't. They're not even doing. So to me, what this needs is that thing I just described. So. But. But I've been waiting nine months, so. And I think others have too. So I'm excited that it's finally happening. I think Build is going to be super interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Even though most of it's going to focus on the other stuff, like not Windows and whatever. But I would. I'm looking. Sorry.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, we'll see. Like, there seems to be a lot of energy around what they're doing at Build.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So if you're. If this stuff is in any way interesting to you, definitely pay attention to Build this year. I think it's going to be.

[Paul Thurot]

I suspect we'll both be there.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we'll see.

[Paul Thurot]

It happens to be the same week as NDC Oslo, which I love and I'm already accepted to. And they said, oh, please don't go to Oslo. I'm like, why?

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's have a meeting. Like, okay, well, that meeting hasn't happened yet, but I strongly suspect I'm not going to Oslo.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Interesting. Okay, well, let's talk about this. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

All right. Anything else in AI Dev news before we head into.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I guess not. I feel. I hope I didn't babble there I'm actually very excited about this. And. And I think it speaks to that conversation up front about like, well, AI. I've never seen AI do anything interesting. It's like you're not looking hard enough. I mean, you know. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff.

[Micah Sargent]

Agree. All right, it is time now to move on to earnings where we always have some Paul's favorite learnings.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so we're in that part of the quarter and there'll be a few more next quarter. The PC makers, I think it's Della. Not Della. Lenovo and HP always bring up the rear with this stuff. But we did some of the big ones, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Alphabet last week. This week we get some more like Amazon, the biggest one like 188 billion in revenues. The big thing there is not so much their revenues, not AWS revenues. Although that's interesting to look at to compare to what Microsoft took with their Microsoft cloud. Non business is they spent $28 billion in this quarter on AI infrastructure. Capex build. Yikes. That's more than Microsoft. Microsoft was 21 if I remember correctly. 22 maybe. And they said in this fiscal year they're going to send $75 billion compared to the 80 billion that Microsoft threatened or promised or whatever. Google had a similar. Excuse me, number, I don't remember that one. But. But these companies are spending because like there's no tomorrow clear.

[Paul Thurot]

They're spending cash. Like this would have been money that otherwise wouldn't use for stock buybacks.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Bezos was making a bed of the money and jumping on it from a high height and now they're actually using it. It's fun. Yeah, it's a little oily.

[Paul Thurot]

One of the arguments I've heard is that the hype around AI is useful in terms of being able to secure zoning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

To be able to get that whether they use these data centers for AR or not, they going to need them eventually. And so right now, if you think about just a few years ago before this AI cycle, there was a real pushback on building more data centers. That.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

The towns were refusing them and now this. They're utilizing this hype cycle to get past a lot of these barriers.

[Leo Laporte]

I made this point either last week when you weren't here the previous week, but you know, in the Lehigh Valley where I live in Pennsylvania, it's full of vama, Amazon warehouses now. It's a nightmare. There's trucks everywhere. I'd give anything for those things to be data centers. And if you're familiar with the. What do you call it? Asimov foundation books. There's this planet that has been covered. It just looks like metal from outer space because it's all metal. It's buildings or whatever. And this is what, this is what we're going to have. We're going to have data centers in the ocean. We're going to have them in, in space with satellites. We're going to have them. You know, it's, it's. We're heading into a crazy future, but it's.

[Paul Thurot]

But I do think this feels very much like the end of the dot com boom with all the fiber being laid. Yeah, right. It is a sprint to spend the money while you can. Make the moves while you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Because it will end.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. And then there'll be. Yeah. The one I remember is, I think it was Verizon was going to. To fiber the entire state of Vermont and then they realized how much it was going to cost and that had changed and they were like, just kidding, we're not going to do that. And they had to pay some bills there.

[Paul Thurot]

Then 2001 came along, a whole bunch of those companies went broke, but the fiber was already laid and now it was available $0.10 on the dollar. As much as this is insane. It's also useful, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Well, we're going to use this infrastructure. There's no doubt about it. I mean, whatever infrastructure, these companies still can't meet demand. The reason Amazon is spending the small.

[Paul Thurot]

Stabilizing the power grid because they're demanding so much power.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, we got to make those funny graphics or whatever, you know, the memes. And then this has been, you know, had been delayed for some time, but in a boat, what is this about two weeks? Yeah, two weeks today actually, Amazon is going to have their next Devices and Services event, which means two things. We're going to get to see Panos Panay again, which, you know, yay.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm excited though.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to see him to be replaced by an AI avatar. But we'll see. And this will be that conversational Alexa, just like Apple is trying to improve Siri to be less like Zoe Deschanel and more like a rocket scientist. They're doing the same thing. We'll see what form that takes. It took longer. They didn't describe it quite this way, but basically said it's a hard computer science problem. They're working on it. Then my favorite news of the week, actually Qualcomm announced their earnings 11.7 billion in revenue, up 17%. But as part of the little earnings conference call, surprise, surprise, ARM holdings contacted them, said, just kidding, guys, we're done. Sorry about that. They withdrew their claims.

[Paul Thurot]

They listened to the judge and went, you are going to lose.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And it's like, maybe we shouldn't be attacking our biggest customer. And we still want more licensing fees. It's probably going to come from another company or some other set of companies, whatever. So that's great. So that's moved on. And then just because I like beating on them now, because they've hurt me so much, and I'm going to show you where in the bear. Sonos has had another negative quarter, another negative year, actually. And they were supposed to release the broadest set of products ever in their history. Last year, they released two. One of which triggered that Sonoscape thing with the app fiasco and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So they finally got rid of the CEO, I think, last month, and then.

[Paul Thurot]

Restructured Dev, too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And layoffs and whatever. So, I mean, good luck.

[Paul Thurot]

This really means taking a lot longer to fix the problem. Like, you're now talking about reconstituting a team to try and figure out how to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess Sonos. I. I think the way the teams were built is every product had its own team, and there was like, you know, maybe there's a simpler structure here where we actually work with each other.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, and I'm still wrestling with, is it. Is the team fighting internally or are they fighting management? Like, who's really the power broker here? I can't tell you how many times I've been in situations where I realized, hey, this company is actually built around this chunk of software written by this guy four years ago, and he left two years ago, and you've been decorating it ever since.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. So I can't. I don't know anybody who works at Sonos anymore. But I. I do know that this always comes out, right? So they do the app fiasco, they screw it up, they can't release the old app again. I don't know why. They didn't sleep in the market, blah. But whatever. They.

[Paul Thurot]

They might have a licensing problem.

[Leo Laporte]

All the stupid stuff they did. And then what comes out is their employees were telling them not to do this before they did it. They were like, you know what's going to happen, right? Like, they. So I'm hoping that it's those guys who are left and, like, you know, the credible ones or whatever. I hope. I.

[Paul Thurot]

But often the best and brightest. When they. When he gets to the situation, they've got another job anyway, so they leave. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I mean, they have good core tech. Their. Their products, their hardware products are of high quality.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure. No, they're all over my house. They're all over your house.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know. I have a ton of them. And the app has always stunk. And the new one is even worse. Yeah, it's prettier, but dumber. You know, it's a supermodel of apps, whatever. But it's.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm now relying on my home assistant interface to Sonos to be able to.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I just rely on Airplane now. I don't even. I pretend the Sonos app doesn't exist.

[Paul Thurot]

Or Spotify. I mean, that's your work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Now it's just. It's just semi smart speaker.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there you go. Okay. Somehow, wow, we got through that pretty quick.

[Paul Thurot]

We did.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like I missed something.

[Paul Thurot]

That's all right.

[Micah Sargent]

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it's skip something big.

[Paul Thurot]

But hey, it's a light Xbox this time around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Which you know what? I love it. Anytime I'm on, there's always a corner of the show, and this is Xbox corner. So.

[Unknown]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low income Bill assistance and energy discount programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill, and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help do.

[Paul Thurot]

We have the Halo?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Halo music. Yeah, we haven't actually heard that.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, is there like a jingle?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, it's like the Halo music in reverse. It says, master Chief is dead if you listen carefully. Okay. Jeez. In the beginning, God create. Oh, I'm sorry. So one of the problems covering Xbox as a business is that it hasn't been going well for a while. And so in, I want to say it was 2015, maybe they stopped releasing console. Console sales numbers. Now this is something a lot of companies did, even Apple. Remember Apple used to be super transparent. Every quarter we sold this many Macs, this many iPhones, this many whatever. So they stopped doing that. Right. The problem for Xbox is that they compete in a market where the other two players release very explicit numbers. Right. So we kind of know. Exactly. Well, we literally know how many PlayStation 5s have been sold, how many Nintendo switches now have been sold. You missed this, Richard, last week. But the Nintendo did their latest quarterly financial release and had to revise their estimates again. So by the end of Nintendo's. Yeah, downwards. Sorry.

[Paul Thurot]

They've been pitching the Switch 2 for so long, I think they're actually hurting Switch sales people are waiting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So they're not going to. Their goal was by the end of the fiscal year for the Switch to be the best selling console of all time. It's going to just miss it. Barely. But obviously this year it will.

[Paul Thurot]

It's easy to fix. You just create a discounted version of the Switch.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. They'll definitely keep it in the market for a while. It'll be fine.

[Paul Thurot]

Just you got to drain your shells. What are you going to do, plow them? Sell them off? Well, I mean, look, make enough to make it the best selling of all time, just. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, it's fine to have a lower. There's going to be compatibility between the games and it's okay to have this. That's fine. But in Microsoft's case, we've had to deal with all these kind of soft numbers for a long time. Microsoft uses different metrics for success because the sales numbers are not a measure of success. So there's this engagement. So many users, so many monthly average users, so many people. Every once in a while we will get a game pass number. We haven't got one of those in a while, but. So there's a video game company you've probably heard of called Take two. They did their quarterly results. Not particularly good by the way, but whatever. And they just kind of throw it in a slide like 94 plus million. The current generation consoles have been sold as of November 2024. Now generation 9 means PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X and S. And we know how many PlayStations have been sold, which means we sort of know how many Xboxes have been sold even though Microsoft hasn't told us. I've gotten some weird pushback about this. As if like somehow we're guessing on this. And yes, I mean I would use the word estimate. I would also use the word educated in there somewhere because we're not pulling a number out of anyone's butt or anything.

[Paul Thurot]

You know how many you made, you know how many you ship to stores. You may or may not have money where it's actually sold in the stores, but somewhere in there isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

These guys have insight into the channel that we do not. So this is not a random source. Like this is, you know, I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough. So here's the thing. If you do the math, that means that fewer, probably fewer than 30 million Xbox Series X and S consoles have been sold in this generation. That is this generation, which is less than half of the 65.5 million we knew that Sony had sold through that same time frame. Roughly it's a month off, but close enough. Right? Sony did not sell 10 million more in one month. They might have sold a million or two. It's close.

[Paul Thurot]

Xbox didn't sell 30 million more to be competitive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So in the previous console generation, and again we went through that entire thing not knowing what they were selling, the general failing, and it was based on some reports like this and some other things, that whatever estimates from whatever analysts, etc. Was that Sony was outselling Microsoft at that time by about 2 to 1. And the feeling in the current generation, and you can go back and look at this, it's horrible. Every quarter, double digit and big double digit losses in revenues, quarter over quarter, like year over year, rather quarterly year over year in console hardware revenues. It has to stop somewhere. Like, it's bizarre how long this is going on.

[Paul Thurot]

When does this stop, is the question.

[Leo Laporte]

So we've gotten reports that are much vaguer than this, that have suggested maybe, maybe this gap might have grown to as big as three to one. Right. But whatever the number is, it explains the Xbox strategy, which is the thing I said earlier about Sacha Dell, meet the, in this case players where they are. And it's why you see, Xbox is more about being a platform that works everywhere or as many places as they can, you're going to see Switch, two games, more games on PlayStation, PC games, cross platform, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But, but what this means is if this figure is accurate, and I did write it that way, I didn't say like this figure's accurate, but it seems good to me. Sony is currently outselling Xbox by about 2.25 to 1. And I got to say that is not bad compared to what we thought it was. And just looking at how much money they're just erupting into the world on this console, it's just not working out. Look, we can debate the. Whether Microsoft will or will not be successful with this new strategy. I think it, I've made this case a lot of times, I think it's the right strategy. I think it's the one that could work. They are the biggest game publisher in the world now. So.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, let's See. Meantime, while the consoles aren't doing well, they own the majority of game houses.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And with that in mind, they had a major new release this week. Not really. King, which is the other part of Activision Blizzard, we don't really talk about, because sometimes, depending on the mobile game.

[Paul Thurot]

Story, they were so excited about.

[Leo Laporte]

So even when it was in a standalone, like when Activision was its own company before Microsoft bought it, they would refer to themselves as Activision, Activision Blizzard and Activision Blizzard King, sometimes in the same paragraph. So they're different names, but those are the three primary components. Microsoft had made the case in the past that it wasn't so much about Call of Duty, although fantastic. They needed to get into the mobile space and that was what the King part of that business did. So most people in the Microsoft space are familiar with King because Candy Crush was included in Windows for a horrible short period of time. And if you didn't like the new Outlook, I got to tell you, Candy Crush, Stupider, Whatever. So in the what I can only describe as the perfect King Microsoft mashup, the latest version of this game franchise is called Candy Crush Solitaire, which I assume will be followed by a Candy Crush Minesweeper, Candy Crush Reverse, Candy Crush Pinball 3D or whatever. Like, you know, so there you go. So I'm. What am I, 50? I think I'm 58. 58 years old to do the math on that, because I'm old and there's no version of my life where I play this fricking game. But whatever. It's. I'm sure it's big or something with the kids or whatever. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Everybody plays some version of Candy Crush at some point in their life. You can't deny it's not just a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to think if I've ever played it. I think I've played games like Candy Crush. There was a game on Windows Phone that was. I think it was called Bejeweled maybe.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, same species.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, Bejeweled, but yeah, there are quite a few of those Match three, Match four games. And yeah, I don't. I don't know if I've ever played Candy Crush proper either, but I've played one or two of them.

[Leo Laporte]

I assume it's exactly like wordle. It's intelligent.

[Micah Sargent]

Definitely challenges the brain. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Something.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow, look at the time. And we've already made it to.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. We've powered through this.

[Micah Sargent]

The tips and picks of the week. And it. Of Course starts out with wonderful. I guess you've got a kind of a set of tips of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. More than I expected to have. In fact, between the time I wrote that, put the notes in here and then started the show. I actually added two items to this because Richard was there when my phone buzzed. And I looked down and it was the guy I work with. And he said, we're locked out of one of our Twitter accounts.

[Paul Thurot]

That was a great morning for you.

[Leo Laporte]

You were very upset. Yeah, I handled it in a very adult fashion and actually.

[Paul Thurot]

Stomp off. You just said, I have to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. And then there was.

[Paul Thurot]

We all had breakfast without chat.

[Leo Laporte]

You, the cape unfurled, and he was gone. And it was a blast of smoke. But the. But within minutes of this, I also got an oh, no. Brad texted me and he said, hey, I can't upload the latest video to our YouTube channel. Could you reinstate me as a manager or whatever? I'm like, yeah, sure. So I told the story. I don't want to beat this death. I've actually retold the story many times because it's trauma and that's how I get through it. But YouTube blocked me out of my YouTube channel without any warning. We had switched the ownership over to me two years ago. Two years prior, when I took control of my part of the company. And we had been uploading videos for two years, and then we couldn't. So, yeah, I went back. I didn't have breakfast. I went back to the room. I spent a bunch of time on a chat with YouTube support, which the word support should be in air quotes because I didn't get any. I was very upset with these people. People. I then spent the week we flew home from Puerto Verde. I kept checking in, whatever, and again, without beating it to death, to get this back. I had to go back to the owner of the company before ask him to reinstate Brad's Google workspace account, reset the password so I could get into it, and then they could send the code to them to him. And the first time, it asked for an authentication app. Authentication, which don't have. So I looked for other forms, and it had his phone number. The last two numbers were there, and I knew those were Brad's number. So I texted Brad, said, please give me the code.

[Paul Thurot]

Do this.

[Leo Laporte]

And he did. And then I went in to switch the ownership back to me for the second time. I got into the account and it asked for an authentication again. And this time there was no choice. It had to go through the Authenticator app. And I texted Brad knowing the answer and I said, you're going to be able to.

[Paul Thurot]

Can you give me the authenticator?

[Leo Laporte]

He did. Even though this thing had been dead for two years, it was still sitting there in his app. And I got the code. It's the only reason I got back into this account. They never would have done it for me.

[Paul Thurot]

Church.

[Leo Laporte]

So I've been undergoing this kind of. It's going to be a year long pursuit of rethinking a lot of things related to where data is stored and backed up and all kinds of stuff. I've been talking about this. I have now written three articles about this. I've if anyone wants to know anything about Google YouTube brand accounts, I know more than anybody on earth right now, including the company. I've made a lot of mistakes with it, but it is a bizarre thing that I can with my [e-mail] Google Workspace account, sign into YouTube, go to a dropdown and select between different brand accounts. So I have one for Eternal Spring, which is the thing I do with my wife, and I have1forThorat.com I can't use those brand accounts to sign into things like Google Search, Google Maps, Google Gmail, whatever. It turns out there are three services that you can use these things with. YouTube, obviously that's actually what it's for. Google Photos, interestingly, but also Google Takeout. So I made the mistake of doing Google Takeout with my primary account, thinking it would give me everything. I was thinking I was going to get Eternal Spring, I was going to get throughout.com, i was going to get whatever was in my account and I did it. I just did. Back it up for now. Eventually I'm going to do a NAS and I'll start replicating whatever. And I put it together and I was like, oh, this doesn't have half of my videos. It doesn't have all the videos I did with Brad for First Ring Daily. Like where is this stuff? And I'm thinking I can't go to Brad and be like, hey Brad, could you download all the videos yourself? Why can't I own this thing? Why can't I get in? But I had made the mistake. I didn't sign into Takeout with my brand account, which I didn't even know you could do. So yesterday I did and I every time I do takeout, I don't know if you ever use the service. It's actually pretty fantastic, but also pretty convoluted. I always choose 2 gigabyte files because they're just easier to download. You have to do it manually. There's no way to automate this. And I think the first time I did it, not understanding it wasn't all of it. There were 81 of them or something. Right. I was out at lunch with my wife yesterday. My phone buzzed. I looked out. It's an email from Google Work. You know, Google? It's like, your takeout is ready. I'm like, nice. And I'm going to get the number wrong. Let me just see if I can find this number. It's crazy. This number is nuts. It is.

[Paul Thurot]

How many terabytes?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, that's the thing. 1373. Two gigabyte files.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes. And I literally. This is what I said. I saw that on my phone. We're sitting there eating lunch and I said, we're going to need a bigger boat. And my wife, who's apparently not in my head, said, excuse me. And I'm like, I thought I was going to be able to handle this with the thing I had here, and now I can't. So I've done. Sorry.

[Paul Thurot]

This is a great conversation about, should you go nas, what's the right way to do this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So it's actually. It's not going to be as bad as it sounds like. I looked at the. Whatever. I just said the number was 1373 whatever files. And some of them are like 1.61, but, you know, like, they're not all two gigabytes.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's not 2.7 terabytes, it's two.

[Leo Laporte]

Terabytes somewhere in there, whatever the number is. I don't know. So. Okay. But I still have to download them.

[Paul Thurot]

Whatever drive that'll fit.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I literally did that. So when I get home from Mexico, I'm going to get a nas. I'm going to start this, getting this set up, and if it works out the way I want it to, I'm going to do. I'll do two.

[Paul Thurot]

And, you know, the other argument here is to use cold storage services in the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like what you. I mean, Amazon Glacier or whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I'm concerned about the same issue from the point of view of. Yeah, if I get locked out of this account, all this stuff is gone. So I need it backed up somewhere. It just needs to be under a different set of credentials.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurot]

So whether those are credentials that are.

[Leo Laporte]

Local, it could be anything. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Or they're in the cloud. It doesn't matter, as long as they're different set of credentials.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In, in one of these articles I, I. 20 years ago I had a, a 30 gigabyte, which you know, today is hilarious gig mp3 file I know go bad on a computer and I lost a bunch of stuff. So that's, that's how you get religion, right. You have a loss, you have a problem, you're like, all right, I'm not, this is not.

[Paul Thurot]

Everybody has to lose something before they really clue in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I went to my wife and I said, you remember this literally 20 years ago, I mean almost to the month 20 years ago. And I said, I did some research and I said I need to buy 2. Which at the time were ginormous 1 terabyte external hard drives, FireWire 800 interface primarily for the Mac market. But I found a FireWire 800 card I could put in my Windows server. And my plan was I was going to back up on some schedule to both drives the first time and then leave one at my parents house and then a month later I would back up again and then I swap the drives and back up again and a month ago, you know, and I did that for several years but of course cloud services happened. OneDrive, go, whatever. So we have all these different options and it was actually literally 10 years ago I got a NAS, which at that time had two six terabyte. Yeah, two six terabyte drives mirrored but only one of them obviously one house like a normal person. And I used that for several years. It's out of support now. I can't use it online anymore. I can't like, I can't access it from here because it's in Pennsylvania, whatever. So. So I'm kind of overdue doing this but I think the shift for me is going to be to date I've been putting my most important data which is our photo collection which I consolidated. It's the stuff we work our work files for me date back 30 years and those things are replicated, they're in OneDrive, they're in Google, whatever, they're in a NAS at home. But to me I'm going to make the NAS as that are going to replicate to each other be like the primary source of that stuff and I'll just, I'll back up to Google Drive or OneDrive etc.

[Paul Thurot]

Because I like the free copy solution. Always makes me more comfortable. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's got the geographic bit to it, right. Which you want.

[Paul Thurot]

And so you're operating in YouTube, you have a local store and then you're Synced off site.

[Leo Laporte]

So yep.

[Paul Thurot]

So ultimately and all with different credentials, like, I think it's a credential issue that's going to get you. You get lost out of a. A Google account and everything's under that Google account. You're hooped.

[Leo Laporte]

This was. Look, I knew this, but it's. It's sort of like saying, look, when bad things happen a lot of times or even a good thing, you're having a child. Like, you know what, you know your life's going to change. You have no idea how much your life is going to change.

[Paul Thurot]

So it doesn't matter how many people explain it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

You just don't understand logically, you can explain. It does not matter. So logically, I knew this was possible. We've all heard stories about this. Some guy had pictures of his kid in the bathtub. They're cute. Got some flag. Yeah, they got flagged. Lost his account, never got it back. Great. There are all my photos. What the hell? Google, whatever it is, right? This happens, but it has to happen to you, right? So now I'm not thanking Google for this because they were terrible, but this was a reminder that I need to fix this. So I'm going to spend a big chunk of this year fixing this. And you know, I've already made a bunch of mistakes. It's hilarious. But that's what I do. Yeah, I struggle through it. So you can follow along.

[Paul Thurot]

Me getting away from actually having full Rack servers down to just a synology. I feel pretty good about myself.

[Leo Laporte]

So I went back and looked like I have my archives there, you know. So I went back and I have this stuff that there are multiple locations. I found the lace idol. It was a. Lacy was the name of the company. External hard drive. I went to the Wayback machine, found the website from that month and sure enough, there is 999. My wife, to her credit, by the way, because I went to her and said, I need to spend $2,000. This is what I'm going to do. And she was like, just. Just do it. I know you know what you're doing. I know this is important. I don't have. You don't have to explain it. I'll just do it. And you know, same reaction, like we're having the same conversation 20 years later. Now I got, you know, she's like, yep, just do it. Just do it. I'm doing it.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm doing the same money again.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the, the weird coincidence, whatever that 100%. So that's happening. And yeah, so I'll be suffering a lot this year. Bill Gates last week came out with the first of a planned three autobiographies. This covers his life up through the formation of Microsoft. So the book ends with him driving from Albuquerque to Seattle. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

The famous. And getting busted, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, Twice. Yeah. You got pulled over twice. I'm not sure. This is hilarious. I have mixed feelings about Bill Gates, but his.

[Paul Thurot]

I very much feel like he's rehabilitating Image Right now, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you think about his life and you think about what I do for a living, the part I care about is the middle one, the Microsoft part. So that's going to come out in some two, five years. Whatever it is, I was thinking I'm not going to care about this book too much. I have to say this book is much better than I thought it was going to be. And it also covers more of a period that I care about than I thought it was going to. I didn't think it would have any of the other Albuquerque stuff. So it actually has all of that stuff. So between his. And he goes. By the way, he goes. This is. I think it blows my mind that it never occurred to me. But Richard, you'll know this. And Mike, I don't. He's maybe so famous. Everyone kind of knows this. But when Bill Gates was young, there was two things that really striking. There were a bunch of executives at Microsoft who imitated the way he looked and the way he did things. So like Jeff Raikes is a great example. But, but, but he had this weird habit. He would sit in a chair and kind of rock back and rock. And this is how he would process information. So you could tell he was deep thinking or whatever when he did that. But he would do it without realizing he was doing it. And of course today they would have thrown him in a padded cell. No, I'm just kidding. They would have, you know, he'd have adhd. He's on the spectrum. Whatever it is. This is a thing we didn't know about or talk about in the 1970s. So he was undiagnosed. Right. He. And he talks very openly about that. And I think that part of the book is really interesting. But to me, from the industry perspective, it was a, it was a great reminder because I grew up reading these books, the Genesis books about Microsoft, like Gates by Stephen Manus or Hard Drive or the books, early books about Apple. Same thing. And I always felt like I missed it. Like I. This, this industry we're in was invented in the mid-70s to late early 80s, and it was gone. So by the time I was of age, late 80s, whatever, I missed it, right? And it turns out the Internet was a nice little. Actually, you're going to be okay. This stuff's still happening now, AI whatever. But I had read all this stuff. I'd read it multiple times. But in more recent years, Paul Allen, sadly has passed away. But he wrote his memoir, Idea man, which, by the way, also worth reading. And between that book. Sorry. And the final quarter of the Gates book, we now have what I would say is kind of the definitive story of what happened with them inventing the thing. So I wrote an article about this. But the thing I want people to know is the incredible thing that these people achieved. The perfect nexus of time, place, and people to invent this industry. Paul Allen wrote. He called it a simulator, but an emulator that would emulate first 8008 intel code on the PDP10 that he had access to, and then did it for the 8080, which is the thing the Altair was based on the first personal computer. Gates, using that emulator and a debugger that he wrote created an incredible version of BASIC for the day and then later, three versions. Never had hardware to run this thing on. Saved it to paper tape. Paul Allen got in a plane, realized on the way there he had forgotten to write the bootloader. Wrote it in assembly language. 8080 assembly language, a chip he has never seen on paper. Got to the company and it was.

[Paul Thurot]

Like 118 instructions, too, which requires whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

That is, times eight across a bank of switches to enter those all in. Got it right on the first try. And it said, ready? How much memory do you have? And he typed in 7,000, 268, whatever the number was. And then he typed in 2 plus 2 and it said 4. And it worked the first time. He then entered the code for a Lunar Lander game, which worked the first time. All of their code worked. In fact, it was better on the real hardware, which he didn't expect because a PDP 11 or 10 was much more powerful than ostensibly. But now that it's running natively on the hardware, he was like, this thing is flying. And that is the start of Microsoft and it's the start of the personal computer industry. And I'm sorry, but whatever I think about this person and these people and whatever. Or you think about them, that is incredible. It's incredible. You should read this book. That's my point.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's the Excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I feel like I've talked too much. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show up on my app, I'm going to show a photo, I'm going to hold off on the epic. I'll just do that next week because I do want to talk about this and I don't want to waste any more time with me, blah, blah, blah. And so let's just do that next week, if that's okay.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I mean that works for me. It works for you. Richard Campbell. I am definitely getting that book. That sounds really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

It's more worth it than I thought it was going to be. I was kind of not sure, but it's very good. It's very. It feels honest and it's well written.

[Micah Sargent]

Nice. All right, that means it's time to talk about the Run as Radio for this week.

[Paul Thurot]

This week's episode's with my friend Robert Smith, fellow MVP has been for a long, long time and one of my go tos for Windows Server. And so we were talking about what does it take to move to Windows Server 2025. Now that's been out for a while and so the conservative system ends are like do I want this? And it's a real good question of is it necessary to move up? And and a big piece of this ended up being the Active Directory conversation because Active Directory is not an easy thing to get rid of. You do still need to authenticate on premise and doing it through the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of feel like they touched it for the first time in a long time too like that in a meaningful way.

[Paul Thurot]

22 had some things but 20 you know, again in mentioning that KB article because that was the big push on we've got to fight against these lateral exploits through Active Directory that the black hats are using. And so one of the things that 2025 definitely builds up some stronger functionality in Active Directory that is both secure and easier to deal with. But it does mean lifting your ad functional level, which is again these are old school conversations. That means the functional level you want is server 2016, which is not that new. It's 10 years old.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that means you have to eliminate all older versions of Active Directory from your infrastructure to be able to go to 2016 functional level. So that's it's generally speaking today for most organizations you only have one or two bare metal ad servers. They're your cold start servers and then the rest are virtual machines. So you build out a template of a Virtual machine relatively, relatively small because it's just doing ad workloads, nothing else. There's no reason to combine it with anything. And then make sure they're pushed in the right location so that they are available locally for however widely distributed your place was. And then you push up your functional levels. And this also involves certs and a couple of other things. So there's some work to be done there and it's good old fashioned work, but you get some wins. Some wins. When you get to 2025 you get some functionality that make people a little uncomfortable. Like SMB over quick. You know, at its essential level, SMB over QUIC is exposing a file server to the Internet. How you feel it like that should bother you because you've been living behind firewalls for a long time now. QUIC is very secure.

[Leo Laporte]

Like I was gonna say, is this better than HTTPs or.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it is. And more importantly, it's very efficient for file transfers and it takes load off your vpn. So you've got this whole conversation going on about maybe, you know, I could just haul all this stuff to OneDrive and be an M365 guy. And that takes care of this problem because that's certainly what they count on is SMB overquick. But if you've still got on prem file stores, you can get that same feature without having to ram through your VPN for it. So SMB compression, another big feature on it. So good conversation from someone who's really doing the work. Like part of of Robert Smith's daily job is helping companies get 2025 running. And so he's going through different organizations that are battling these problems. And so it was good to get him in on the show and just talk through. Okay, here's what I've seen over the past few months. These are the problems you're going to have, but this is. These are the wins you're going to like.

[Leo Laporte]

You must talk to Jeff Woolsey from time to time.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh yeah, Woolsey's on. I try to get Woolsey on every year. He's just tough to get. But last time I had him on, he could. He wasn't allowed to call IT Server 2025. It was server V next.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, of course I did listen. Yes, yes, yes. He was especially. It was like a lot of hyper V I think at the time.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And you know, that's an interesting angle on it. You know, I've been holding off on a show of like, okay, so you had to flee VMware how are you feeling now because of the horrors that have happened on the VMware side? Because for the most part, VMware people look down on Hyper V big time. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, of course.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But not anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it's kind of like how you feeling now, Right? Like, virtualization is good, but virtualization vendors hard, very problematic. Anyway, Robert's a good guy. Super easy conversation. He just knew he was just straight do's and don'ts. This is going to be hard. This is going to be easy. Look for this. Watch out for that. Boop, boop, boop, boop. You spend a half hour on that, you're in a better place for moving to 25.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Unknown]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount programs. These programs provide income, qualified applicants, a discount on their monthly bill, and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help all.

[Micah Sargent]

Right, and now we round out the show with the brown liquor pick of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

I got to look at this.

[Paul Thurot]

There's two links there, Kevin, for a reason, because the McMurra story. This is the Swedish whiskey. Because I was in Sweden last week. This is the one I wrote for last week and was unable to present.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Macmirra is actually a village about 200 km north of Stockholm. It was originally a mining area. This is the ironworks, going back to like the 1600s. Although the ironworks finally shut down in the 1970s as it just became too expensive to operate. It says, so this is not old whiskey. This is new whiskey. McMurray was formed in 1999. Eight friends on a fishing, on a skiing trip, all bringing different whiskeys, ended up talking about whiskey and how. Why are there no great Swedish whiskeys? The Swedes make their own alcohol. Theirs is aquavit. But they thought, why could we make whiskey? One of those eight is a fellow by the name of Magnus Dandanelle who become the CEO. So they started operations in 2002. Took a little while to get going, but to make a product quickly, they did a clever thing. They use 30 liter casks, little, little casks instead of 500 liters or 600 liters. 30. So it's. You got a lot more wood contact for your new make. So you age the spirit pretty quickly there. It has its own quirks, but they definitely tried to make A Swedish whiskey. And of course the Swedes grow their own barley, so that's fine. They even have their own peat so that they went all out when they first started making product to see can we get every ingredient for our whiskey down to the oak barrels in Sweden. In fact, within 150km of distillery and they end up pulling it off. Except for the yeast. The yeast actually comes from a. From a separate source. So their original distillery was actually in the old Mac Mira Ironworks. If you go to that building now, it says MacMurray Distillery on the side of it. But after a few years making some the money, they built a new distillery as well. But and everything they went on the modern style. So a lot of stainless steel, not a lot of wood. The only thing that's not Swedish are the Forsyth stills. So these are the Forsythes is the guy who make the stills in Scotland. And that's where they got their stills from. They use Swedish oak as much as they can. But of course buy bourbon casks because they're arguably cheaper than the actual Swedish wood. And they have problems with temperature. It's a bit. It's too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. It's not the consistencies that Scotland has. And so one of the tricks they do to age their whiskey is they use the old iron mine. They came with the license with the iron works. So they actually put. They cleared out a chunk of the mine and used it for barrel storage because temperature controls are a bit stronger. And they went on from there to actually build storage facilities all over Sweden, up above the Arctic Circle, down on some islands, so they could sort of mix and match. So very quickly these guys took off as a pretty successful whiskey maker, including hiring a woman by the name of Angela Diazio as their master distiller starting in 2004. She was the expert and she really liked the experimentation they were doing. And so the whiskey, the particular version I'm talking about today, if you're going to go buy some McMurra, because they make a lot of special editions. But the Brooks whiskey is their fundamentalist. Started coming out in 2010. The earliest have no age on them, which means they're, you know, 3 to 8 years old. They're relatively young. If you look hard, you can find older ones. Now there's like a 10 year old, a 13 year old. 2011, they built a new distillery they called Gravity. They had this whole idea of building it as a tower. It's 37 meters tall, so over 100ft high. And the Idea was to lift the basics, the water, barley and yeast to the top of the structure and use gravity to work its way down into barrels at the bottom of the building, which then go to storage. Their design of the distillery was to do experimentations with different barrel combinations, different aging strategies and so forth, so they could make a variety of whiskies. By 2013, they made their first peated whiskey called Svend Rock. They still use the drying technique with electric heat, but then they introduce smoke to it in the finishing steps, just to give a little bit of peat flavor to it. MacMira peaked in 2019. They were winning awards all over the place. You could also buy custom casking. So it became a very hip thing for a company to do, like a tour of McMurra, and you'd get a 30 liter cask, lay it up yourself, and then it would go into storage until it was aged enough and you could do your own custom bottling. Where this story takes a turn is in when the pandemic hits, and I think it's because the company was highly leveraged that Magnus realizes that they're in trouble. It's tough to run the company in the pandemic scenario. So he brings in a professional. He steps aside. He's the founder now. He's been running the company for better part of 20 years. Steps aside to bring in a pro, a guy named Johan Larson, who used to work for a company called Peak Performance as a CFO to sort of optimize the company. It appears to not go well because within a year, Dear Azino, their master distiller has been around now for 15 years. Immediately leaves, although before she goes in 2021, her last product is called Intelligenz, which I haven't been able to get my hands on, but it was a version of whiskey quote made with AI. So they collaborated with ThoughtWorks to build an AI model based on the data streams coming out of the Gravity distillery, with all their different aging and blending and barrel options to try and find an optimal whiskey. And that's what intelligence is. And it's the last product that D'Arizo made before she left. So the pandemic obviously took a beating on the company. Their sales dropped off market, shipping was limited. There was all these sorts of problems. And so this Johann Larsen didn't seem to deliver on his goals. Within a couple of years, he's out in 2023. He blames the pandemic. He also blamed the Ukraine war. Not quite sure why. I just read the press release and the Guy who takes over as acting CEO is the marketing director. So last year there was their 25th anniversary, did this big party, they had these special casts, everything was exciting. And By February of 20, by August 24, they filed for bankruptcy. Now this was a problem because a very. Everybody's a little stunned. How do you run out of money like this? But I think it's just they were over leveraged financially and were expecting constant growth and just were caught with their pants down on the pandemic and weren't able to get their refinancing done. But like most whiskey companies, they had a lot of barrels in storage, including all these custom barrelings. They started back in 2019. So there was all these folks who had paid for these barrels who wanted them back. But now they were locked down in a bankruptcy and it's like, but wait, we paid for that barrel. And it turned out they didn't pay for the barrel, they paid for the liquor that that was inside the barrel. The barrel was still owned by the company and that was controlled and they weren't allowed to access it. So there was a big row over that. And plus they were under, all under bond, so they hadn't paid tax on it. So you couldn't get it out without paying the tax on it. So it was locked up. And out of this comes in the fall last year, this guy named Lennart Hero, who had joined the board back in 23 when Larson left. So I think he's a fairly famous Swedish investor. He had a fair bit of money and so he did some bridge financing in 23 and came in as a board member. And then when the bankruptcy thing goes down, he leaves. But by October he comes back with another investment company called Number One Capital. They refinance, he brings it out of bankruptcy, they're generally cheering him as a hero, which is funny because that's his name, but it looks like it was a tactic that he wasn't happy with the way the company was running. But right now, if you go to the website and I think you pulled this up for a moment there, Micah, the only thing it says on the website is, don't worry, we're going to make everybody whole. Just watch this. So the main website, there's nothing to see right now because of all of this turmoil. So I also provided a whiskey based link because if you actually want to look at Brooks Whiskey, that's what it's about. Brix whiskey is a classic style of sherry cask whiskey. It hasn't got an age on it per Se it's probably an eight year old. They do Swedish oak with a sherry finish. It's about 60 US if you can find it at 40% ABV and it's completely drinkable. It's a perfectly normal whiskey, which is impressive for a small company that hadn't lasted very been around for very long and is now struggling to to come back out of it. And we'll see what happens. You know, the, the experience of these young new age whiskey companies has been just up, up, up, up, up, right? Can't kind of can't go wrong. And this is one of the rock stars of the new age that just has fallen on hard times for any number of reasons. And I think it'll have to come down to a lack of experience, leadership. Dan Dendenil, I appreciate, stepped aside immediately when he knew he was over his head. They just got the wrong guy to fill in and he couldn't find his way forward. The way you run a company when you're in trouble is different and finding the right person for that is hard. So leadership has been the problem and they've taken a really good company and got it right. Heavily on the rocks. Hopefully they can pull themselves out. But it was not the story. I originally I wanted to talk about Swedish whiskey while I was in Sweden and all of a sudden this craziness.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, how dare you. I thought it was good. I don't think you intended it, but it was great on the rocks. Anyway. Thank you, thank you for the brown liquor pick of the week. Thank you for this episode of Windows Weekly. If you out there would like to catch the show as soon as it's, you know, put together very nicely by our one Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

For its age, then.

[Micah Sargent]

You can head to Twitter TV WW where you'll find the show notes for the show as well as the latest episode. Subscribe to Audio. Subscribe to video. We do record the show live every Wednesday round about 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific time. That's where you can tune in to get the show. Also, another little reminder about Club TWiT, TWiT TV Club TWiT to help us continue to bring these shows to all of you. And now is the time where I say thank you to Richard Campbell for being here. Anything you want to plug before we say goodbye.

[Paul Thurot]

We're all good shape of course Net rocks are run as radio doing their things and I am working hard to finalize the details on the Fabric conference which will be the first week of April in Las Vegas. So if you're interested in Microsoft Fabric, the data analytics tools. We've got about 8,000 people coming to the MGM grand go to Microsoft Fabric Community conference to check it out.

[Micah Sargent]

Awesome. And Paul Thurat, what about you? Friend.com.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything else? Well, my wife and I working on a book. We haven't talked about that too much, but if you go to eternalspring.com no eternalspringcdmx.com sorry. You can find out about that there.

[Micah Sargent]

Beautiful. All right. If you want to check out my other shows. Well, good luck. No, I'm just kidding. United Twin tv. We've got many. So that's where you go. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you all for tuning in this week. Leo will be back next week.

[Leo Laporte]

You better bring some gems back.

[Micah Sargent]

I was going to say his chakras will be aligned. The crystals will be bringing energies loaded.

[Leo Laporte]

Down with alien technologies.

[Paul Thurot]

Can't wait to see the amethyst implanted in his nose. It'll be awesome.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. And so, yes, you can count on that next week. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. Goodbye, everybody.

[Unknown]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount Programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help.