WW 926: You're Ugly When You Cry - Altair BASIC, Switch 2's pricing, Wintoys

Summary

Windows Weekly (WW 926: You're Ugly When You Cry - Altair BASIC, Switch 2's Pricing, Wintoys)
Hosted by Leo Laporte with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell
Release Date: April 3, 2025

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1. Celebrating Microsoft's 50th Anniversary and the Release of Altair BASIC Source Code

The episode kicks off with a celebration of Microsoft's 50th anniversary. Paul Thurrott shares exciting news about Bill Gates releasing the original source code for Altair BASIC, marking a significant moment for computing history.

• Paul Thurrott [07:54]: "Bill Gates today published the source code for the original version of Altair Basic. Within Intel 8080 assembly language with Paul Allen."

• Richard Campbell [12:20]: "This is the first time the original version of Basic, the source code has ever come out in full."

They delve into the history of Altair BASIC, discussing how Gates and Allen developed the language for the Altair 8800, highlighting the challenges they faced with limited memory and the innovative solutions they implemented.

2. Deep Dive into Windows Features and Updates

The trio explores the latest updates in Windows 11, focusing on AI integration and new search capabilities.

• Richard Campbell [35:11]: "Windows 11 feature roadmap... They list things like the live caption with live translation, co-creator and paint resell image and image creator."

• Leo Laporte [40:05]: "Did Peter Norton invent it?"
  (Referring to the new features in Windows Search)

They discuss the rollout of AI-powered search features, including semantic search that goes beyond simple keyword matching to provide more intuitive and relevant results. Paul expresses excitement over the rapid deployment of these features, while Richard remains cautiously optimistic about their practical utility.

3. Thoughts on Nintendo Switch 2's Pricing and Features

Paul Thurrott provides his insights on the newly announced Nintendo Switch 2, particularly focusing on its pricing strategy and feature set.

• Richard Campbell [95:41]: "It was on every new keyboard of a PC Ever seen."
  (Discussing Microsoft’s Copilot features)

• Paul Thurrott [95:35]: "I didn't watch it... I waiting for Black Friday, you know, or whatever."

The discussion highlights the higher price point of the Switch 2 at $450, making comparisons to the Steam Deck and existing Switch models. The hosts debate whether the enhanced features justify the price increase, considering factors like 4K capability and compatibility with existing games.

4. AI and OpenAI Discussions

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the evolving landscape of AI, including legal battles and the integration of AI tools in development workflows.

• Richard Campbell [82:07]: "A US District court judge has ruled that the New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft can continue forward."

• Paul Thurrott [88:47]: "Then he says, you're talking about. You're talking about..."

They explore the implications of the lawsuit, discussing concerns about AI's use of copyrighted material and the broader impact on the tech industry. Additionally, they touch upon the concept of "vibe coding," where developers use AI tools like GitHub Copilot to assist in writing code, emphasizing both the benefits and limitations of such integrations.

• Richard Campbell [87:20]: "Vibe coding is not coding, but it's not too bad for a throwaway weekend project. It's amusing."

5. Wintoys and Windows Tweaks

The hosts introduce "Wintoys," a modern tweaking tool for Windows users aiming to customize their system beyond default settings.

• Paul Thurrott [119:24]: "We're going to talk about Highland park. It's another very popular whiskey, without a doubt, and it's one of the island whiskies..."
  (Segueing from technical discussions to whiskey)

• Richard Campbell [123:14]: "If you look this up... you can uninstall Edge, for example. You can uninstall Bing. You can do all kinds of things."

"Wintoys" provides users with a centralized interface to adjust various hidden and advanced settings in Windows, addressing common pain points like slow File Explorer performance and unwanted startup tasks. The trio discusses the necessity of such tools in managing the increasingly complex Windows environment.

6. Whiskey Segment: Highland Park

A delightful detour into the world of whiskey, Richard Campbell shares his appreciation for Highland Park, a renowned distillery in the Orkney Islands.

• Richard Campbell [117:00]: "Highland park is located up there... It's worth the look."

• Leo Laporte [141:29]: "It apparently goes very well with sweet chili crisps."

They delve into the unique aspects of Highland Park's production, such as their use of heather peat and the meticulous crafting of their whiskey. Paul promotes Highland Park's books available at Thorat.com for a nominal price, emphasizing their educational value.

7. Advertisements

Throughout the episode, several advertisements are seamlessly integrated, promoting services like US Cloud and T-Mobile's Switch 2 offer. Leo Laporte takes a moment to highlight these sponsors, ensuring the audience stays informed about valuable services that complement their Microsoft and gaming interests.

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Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte [02:32]: "Holy moly."
  (Reacting to the size of the Fabric Community Conference venue)

• Richard Campbell [56:02]: "That's why we're tiny. Well, we're big, but we're tiny."
  (Discussing the Club Twit Discord community)

• Paul Thurrott [86:19]: "Highland park is best known for getting the first perfect 100 point score in the Ultimate Whiskeys Challenge tonight in 2013 for their Highland Park Park 25."

• Leo Laporte [64:00]: "It's Fair to say most people should have it."
  (On the necessity of Microsoft accounts for Windows users)

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Concluding Remarks

The episode wraps up with discussions about upcoming features, the importance of community support through Club Twit, and final thoughts on balancing system customization with usability. The hosts encourage listeners to engage with their content platforms and support the show through various channels, emphasizing the value of community and shared knowledge.

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Connect with the Hosts:

• Paul Thurrott: thurat.com | LeanPub
• Richard Campbell: renisradio.com
• Leo Laporte: TWiT.tv

Join the Club Twit Discord: Engage with the community, participate in special events, and gain access to exclusive content. Visit Twit TV Club for more information.

Upcoming Topics:

• Interview with a Wall Street Journal reporter on Sam Altman's biography
• Latest AI developments and their impact on the tech industry
• In-depth look at Wintoys and advanced Windows customization

Stay tuned for next week's episode of Windows Weekly, where Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte continue to explore the ever-evolving world of Microsoft, AI, and beyond.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. We celebrate this week.

[Paul Thurott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

The 50th anniversary of Microsoft. And you won't believe the gift Bill Gates has for us all. We'll also talk about, let's see. New versions of Windows. That's usually pretty popular. Oh, and Paul's thoughts on the new Nintendo Switch 2. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you tr.

[Richard Campbell]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 926, recorded Wednesday, April 2, 2025. You're ugly when you cry. Hey, winners and dozers, it's time get gather around the podcast.

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Gather round the podcast appliance. It's time for Windows with Winners Weekly with Paul Thurat. There he is to my right. He is the man in charge of Thorat.com, publisher of many fine [e-mail]. hello, Paul in Mexico City, as we say here.

[Paul Thurott]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Also to his right is the wonderful Richard Campbell, who is joining us today from Lost Wages, Nevada.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, indeed you are.

[Leo Laporte]

You are in llv. Nobody calls it lv. Why do they call it LA but not lv?

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know. No, nobody. Somebody calls it that.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I mean, as a resident of the Lehigh Valley, I find Preposterous.

[Leo Laporte]

The real LV would never.

[Richard Campbell]

Vog.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm at the Fabric Community Conference with 6500 of my closest friends.

[Leo Laporte]

What's Fabric?

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Paul Thurott]

It's Fabric is the data analytics stack for Microsoft, their new cloud centric, you know, power bi on the front end plus the onelake in the back end and all the goodies in between.

[Richard Campbell]

Dear God, what's happening?

[Leo Laporte]

And is this your conference?

[Paul Thurott]

We did a show, we did this show last year in April, and we had about 4,000 attendees and this is the second time around. And 6,500 showed up and we, we couldn't fit in the MGM grand, so we rented the T mobile arena for the keynote.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy moly.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's been really great.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw Lady Gaga there. Wow.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, now you can see in a rune gulag.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That's. That's one of the biggest events Microsoft events of the year, isn't it?

[Paul Thurott]

I think we're going to be right up there. You know, we'll see how they, how they do. But boy, oh boy, the analytics audience is excited. The tech is great. So they've been, they've been all hanging out and having fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's, it's business intelligence primarily. Is that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

You know, along those lines. A lot of real time stuff these days. So, you know, all the instrumentation, they've really brought that stack together where the analytics tools and the warehousing and they're super, you know, cross platform.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm one data lake away from retiring.

[Leo Laporte]

I just can't watch.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the bridge. I can't.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, that's the thing. The first time I came to the old. The old studios, you know, in Penaluna, it was. It was a build event and I had to talk about data lakes because nobody else wanted to.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? Yeah, we were like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that was the new term of the. Of the.

[Paul Thurott]

Of the hour. Give it to Campbell. He can explain it.

[Richard Campbell]

We were just like slowly sliding away on the seats, like.

[Paul Thurott]

But I bought whiskey, so everything was okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Made me fine. I didn't know here a word you said. Show us the view from the beautiful sky at the MGM Grand.

[Paul Thurott]

We're up on the 29th floor here, so I gotta look out to. I think it's to the west. And that's the. The New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That's the strip you're seeing out there.

[Paul Thurott]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy moly. Those are all. What's funny is those are all, folks.

[Paul Thurott]

Everything's fake, right? Like all of that is fake.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing behind those windows after the fifth floor.

[Paul Thurott]

It's just something like that. Yeah. Up there. I don't even know, but it looks like it could thunderstorm at any moment. In here. It's looking really gray.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's how big his suite is, ladies and gentlemen. It has its own climate.

[Paul Thurott]

There you go. Well, I wish I could turn the air off because it's freezing in here.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, my apartment has its own nuisance. It's my downstairs neighbor.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Richard Campbell]

At least they're not your upstairs doing construction work.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we were embargoed. We could not start this show one minute earlier than we did because of a big story. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, well, am I wrong? Yeah, that was an hour earlier. I had the time wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you got me all excited. I thought we were like breaking news, but this is already.

[Richard Campbell]

I did the thing in the notes and then I looked at it again. I was like. I actually asked my. I'm so. This is the simplest of math I'm not taught. This is not octal. It's not X or anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is based 24.

[Richard Campbell]

What the hell is that? So I said, just. I'm going to read this to you and you tell me what time is the right time.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I think there's a website called what Time is It?

[Richard Campbell]

There's also this thing that's in your head. It's called a brain. And I guess mine doesn't work properly because actually.

[Paul Thurott]

But you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. World time, buddy. That's a good one.

[Paul Thurott]

Great.

[Richard Campbell]

I just. I had a. I. When I went to Israel in 2000, I emailed Charles Petzold, author of Programming Windows, the amazing Windows programming series. Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

To ask him if he would send me a copy of his time zone app that he wrote in one of the books and all, you know, in the book, because it was supposed to be available through some FTP site, but it wasn't there anymore. And he emailed it to me. He was very nice about that. And that's how I kept track of the time zone change there. But this is two hours off. It's not hard.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it's like the same day. It's.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Base 24. Never been my favorite.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, time zones are political construct. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

As our borders.

[Richard Campbell]

That's. That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But we still honor them.

[Richard Campbell]

They're still easy to. I don't know. I just. This is just a personal embarrassment.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike Elkin really wants us to go to UTC everywhere.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I don't. What time would it be? Utc?

[Richard Campbell]

Look, I. I would just take. No more daylight savings. Like, let's take baby steps. You know, let's do that first.

[Paul Thurott]

Can we get over daylight savings time first? Then we can worry about.

[Richard Campbell]

And actually, that's. That's. That's my problem. One of my problems is Mexico did stop observing it. It's one hour for half the other year. It's two hours. It's just. I. Yeah. This is why I drink right here. I can't. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

And the fact that there's a bottle of tequila in your.

[Richard Campbell]

That, that and the. Right. The readily available. This may look like juice, Leo, but actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Margarita. All right, let's. Let's talk about Microsoft's. So it's funny because Apple is 49 years ago as of yesterday. 49 years old as of yesterday.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft is one year older.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it's officially as of the fourth, which is in two days from this recording. So this Friday, although I believe today is that they're having an event. I think it's today or maybe it's tomorrow. I don't remember. But they're having an event in Redmond, which I was invited to.

[Leo Laporte]

And I. I'm Sorry. Bill Gates just stopped by. I didn't mean to scare you.

[Richard Campbell]

Windows 8 is 8. Anyway, so I'm Bill Gates. It all started with my first computer.

[Leo Laporte]

During my 8th grade year at Lakeside. Do you want me to stop this Teletype terminal?

[Richard Campbell]

I didn't explain what it was. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this? What are we watching?

[Richard Campbell]

Bill Gates today published the source code for the original version of Altair Basic. What? Within Intel 8080 assembly language with Paul Allen. I mean, he wrote most of the source code for the. The actual basic language. Although Paul Allen wrote the Bootstrapper on the plane, by the way, to Albuquerque to show it to the owner of Mets.

[Leo Laporte]

Very famous, in fact. They were writing code in the plane, weren't they?

[Richard Campbell]

That's what he. Yeah, he wrote the boot. The Bootstrapper.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. You just said.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yes, he did.

[Paul Thurott]

He wrote.

[Leo Laporte]

But as I remember, he. They didn't have. Oh, right. I have to change his channel real quick here. They didn't have a. Oh, boy, I can't get rid of them. They didn't have a Altair to run.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Right. So they. They had access to a PDP 10 at Harvard. And by they, I mean Bill Gates. And he gave it access to it to all his friends, got in a lot of trouble for that. But they. Paul Allen had earlier written a. I forget which. The. I forget what it was. Maybe an 8. What was before the 8080.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Paul Allen, the hirsute.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, 8008. 8008. Probably emulator on the PDP 10. So they had some history doing that. And he got the manual from intel and wrote the emulator. Gates wrote it to the emulator. Alan wrote the Bootstrapper so it could actually come up on this device when he got there.

[Leo Laporte]

But he was writing it on a plane without the emulator. He was writing it.

[Richard Campbell]

He just wrote it off the top of his. Yeah, because he's so good at it then. And by the way, this thing worked the first time, it worked immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I think they were holding their breath, weren't they?

[Richard Campbell]

Of course. I mean, why on earth would you think this would work? You know, it's astonishing. It's an incredible story. So I have one right here.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the replica mits altair8800 that they wrote it for. And it's running a little program right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. What's it. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember what it was. I think it's just like.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they hooked it up to some kind of a teletype so they could Type in, you know, a question, like question mark, print 10 or something and it would print 10. And then they do math and then they could write short code. And he wrote a.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, that's interesting. It had BASIC in it. He wrote the BASIC for it. That was their first basic, right? Was there, Was there an operating system or was that also the operating system?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that was it. There's no operating system.

[Leo Laporte]

You would boot that and you'd be running basic and that's that you couldn't.

[Richard Campbell]

Do anything with this thing. Right. So people bought it because they were so excited to own a computer. Yeah, no, I know, it was amazing, but it wasn't, you know, you, you needed to buy a lot of extra things, you know, RAM a different, different peripherals. In the end you would spend thousands of dollars, but it still couldn't do anything right. So it needed a basic. Operating systems weren't really a thing. It wasn't until CPM came out that people could see, like, actually we need something like this. We need something to interact between whatever the programs you run are and the hardware. Right. And that's, you know, CPM was the first kind of microcomputer operating system, I guess the book.

[Leo Laporte]

Programmers at work had a little snippet of code that Bill wrote. He was super proud of, you know, because he was coat golfing or something. He didn't have a lot of memory.

[Richard Campbell]

So the other thing about this, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, is he. He wrote a. There was a bit. He had a problem to overcome with this, and this is something I think we've all kind of done, but to a much lesser degree. He couldn't solve a particular problem. I don't remember what it was, but he went out on a hike, which he didn't like to do, but he had a girlfriend and she wanted to go on a hike. And he's like, screw it. So he spent the whole time thinking and talking about this instead. Right. Needless to say, they didn't make it. But while out on the hike.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder if I should do a mo or a dupe here. I can't. I wrote should I wrote it.

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. Okay, that was my replay.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, he solved the. He solved this incredible problem in his head, went home and wrote it on a piece of paper and then went to the lab and typed it in. And that also worked.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Paul Allen wrote the non runtime stuff. Monty Davidoff wrote the math package.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's the Things to do. I'm sorry, I wanted to. This is turning off my microphone right now. Go ahead.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's okay. I just. This is the first time the original version of Basic, the source code has ever come out in full. So there are leaked versions of, you know, 1.21. But whatever they are, this is the first one. Bill Gates just, you know, a month ago published the first edition, first volume of his autobiography. And it covers this part of his history right up until he drives to Redmond to move the company there. Well, to Seattle area. Wasn't Redmond originally, but. And yeah, they tell the story. The thing you just read is part of the story. Like, they were really short on time. And the math, the. I don't know if it was floating point math or whatever the math library was. Is difficult or Was difficult. And, you know, he was like, I don't. We're not gonna have enough time. We're gonna have to, you know, do a version without it. And then someone at the table next to them at Harvard in the whatever, lunchroom heard them. He's like, I could write that. And he was like some math expert. And they were like, all right. And he did. And, yeah, he wrote the math package.

[Leo Laporte]

The world famous Monte Davidoff. And how much did Bill pay him for that, I wonder?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't remember off the top of my head. I can. He's not. He didn't say it. He did pay for it, but he didn't. That guy did not retire on that, I can tell you that.

[Paul Thurott]

Wow. Well, it was the middle 70s too, right? Like. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, no one. This is brand new. The notion that you could write software and then make money for it. Well, it just Write software was almost unheard of completely. You know, names in the mainstream world. And then you could turn this into a business that didn't, you know, this was not obvious. Anyway, I. I think I might have mentioned this story, you know, whenever it was about a month ago in the Gates book came out. And it is. It stands as a. A singular achievement. I mean, whatever you think of Bill Gates or the BASIC language or what. Or Microsoft, whatever, this is an astonishing feat that they accomplished for this era. It's incredible.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, you're also playing in, what, 4K of RAM, so, I mean, it's literally not that many bytes. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What processor is this for?

[Paul Thurott]

What.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this, 88,800 or. It admits out to 8,800, but it's running in 80.

[Paul Thurott]

80.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So, yeah, it was the first, you know, Paul Allen had wanted to do this for microcomputers. He wanted to go after this market early. And Gates kept saying, no, these. These chips are not powerful enough. And like, the 80, you know, whatever 8008 or whatever the predecessor was, was almost there, you know, and he saw this, you know, the famous story with the magazine cover. He came running back, this is it. This is the thing you said to wait for. And here it is, let's do it. And they did.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm impressed by the comments. There's a lot. There's a lot of explanations of what's going on here. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty high quality code. This is almost literate coding. I'm sad, though, that he published it as a picture of the tractor feed printout.

[Richard Campbell]

Fortunately, Leo, we have a tool in Windows today called snipping tool that does ocr. And I. You could just.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you. Is it good enough quality to. Yeah, yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

I did part of it earlier today, actually. Not. Not because I wanted the code, but just I. I saw that and thought that myself. I'm like, huh, you know, interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love to see maybe Steve Gibson, somebody who really knows 8080 code.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Kind of look at this, look at.

[Leo Laporte]

This and say, hey, you know, this was pretty clever. Or this was boneheaded.

[Paul Thurott]

Or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm guessing it's all fairly clever. 4k memories. Not a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

It was for the day was actually.

[Paul Thurott]

Write a program in so you don't get to use. Yeah, I mean, basic.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm gonna go off the top of my head here, but I. The base RAM on This thing was 4K. The base. They fit the original. I think it was 6k, but of.

[Leo Laporte]

Course you wanted 8k, you know, for $4,000 more.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was expensive and then. But that. But, you know, whatever. And the thing is, you know, they liberally took from all of the basics that were out in the world. This was actually, at the time, one of the most advanced basics there was. And it ran on a micro computer, not on a mini computer. Like, this was astonishing to people. They, you know, they're like, obviously, given the constraints of this thing, it's going to have, you know, like the integer math only or whatever. Like a lot of basics did, including basics that came after this. But they. This is, you know, again, for. It's. We look at it today, like we have AI. We're like, yeah, cute. But I mean, in that era, this is astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool to see this, I have to say. And I'm super impressed with the commenting I know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's almost like 150 pages of code.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But most of that's comments. I mean, there are pages, there's some pages, just comments. This is quite, quite neat.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the word Bill would use. It's neat.

[Richard Campbell]

It is neat. Super neat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You want to go on a hike?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, he would never say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's. Oh, you want to go on a hike. That's how he would say it. Oh, you want to go on a hike. Okay. But I might be thinking about something. Wow. No, I shouldn't mock him. This is, this is very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

And is the sense that he was a great coder or of.

[Richard Campbell]

He was for that era. I, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Conflicting reports.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, of course, those would have come from his, you know, competitors who were critics because they couldn't stand how successful he was. Right. So, you know, one of the many ways that people even of that era looked down on him was because he was so caught up in basic. You know, everyone else was like, well, there are more sophisticated languages. And, you know, he, he was onto something with basic, not because it's a great language, but because it's approachable by people. And that's what was needed at that time. You needed. If this was too complicated, if it was assembly language or C. Or C would have been probably impossible on this thing. But whatever, whatever. Other, you know, a more structured language, a more technical language, whatever, you know, this, this stuff would have happened a lot more slowly. But he made this, you know, he made this, made computing accessible. Right. So the people are super excited to buy these computers and upgrade them, get all the stuff and do, actually do it. You know, they wanted to do something with it. And this is what enabled that. And also, by the way, started an industry, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Very impressive. It's nice that he released this. You know, they'll never release the Windows code because there's too much proprietary stuff in this.

[Richard Campbell]

That's okay. Other people have released the Windows code, so there's some. Done it for various times, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a lot of go to tens, but, you know, it's okay. No, actually, I do.

[Leo Laporte]

We know. I mean, it does say at the front what Bill wrote and what Paul wrote. I'm not sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Most, most of the actual BASIC was written by Bill Gates, except for that math package. And then Alan was responsible for the emulator and then had to write the.

[Leo Laporte]

Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Paul wrote the non runtime stuff, which.

[Richard Campbell]

Is I guess the later. Yeah. And the bootstrap. Well, he didn't know when he wrote that code. I mean. Right. You know, he didn't know. They both forgot about the bootstrapper. They forgot. There was no way to bring this thing up. Like, you had to.

[Leo Laporte]

How do we.

[Richard Campbell]

You had to be able to load this thing into memory for this to work. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Was the bootstrappers, switches, I mean. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's literally. I think in the Paul Allen book. There's a picture from those notes. You can see it's like up, down, down, down, down, up, down, down. And like eight of them at a time. Right. And then it's like up, down, down, down, up. You know, whatever it is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's switches on the front.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's exactly how you load code in the Altair. Here I have a note to myself how to run the Kill the bit game. And this is. You can see how long ago I wrote that. It's on my Newton notepad. Switch stop up, reset up. SW1 up.

[Richard Campbell]

Hold up your left foot. All the others genuine toward the moon.

[Leo Laporte]

And then to start, it's a chicken switch aux one down. And then the game Kill the bit starts.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

There was like 30 bytes. So you had to set the switches load. Set the switches load. I think got them all correct.

[Richard Campbell]

I believe it took them 18 minutes to do this. Something like that. It was some crazy amount physically on the front of. Yeah. And you had to get it right. If you screwed up one mistake, Start over. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Then turn it on.

[Leo Laporte]

Tells that story on a PDP. Early PDP.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You see, I have a replica PDP 10 that has the switches in front of it as well.

[Paul Thurott]

A static code storage just wasn't a thing then. Right. Like that's right. The wrong later. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

ROM comes and Bill Gates is one of those right place, right time type stories too, because he happened to go to this very fluent school district. They actually had a Lakesides PDP 10 with a terminal with a keyboard and paper. Like so you could actually type onto this thing and then save the paper, you know, for later.

[Leo Laporte]

Mothers had a bake sale to raise money, including Bill's mother, to raise money to buy this terminal, which was a timeshare terminal.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

In the Lakeside School. I went to the similar time frame in the 67, 68, 69 school in Rhode island that had a similar room, little typing.

[Richard Campbell]

I've never even heard of anything like Teletypan.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm kicking myself now. If I had just spent a little More time in that room.

[Richard Campbell]

We didn't get computers in my high school. Well, in junior high school there was one commoner pet in a small room somewhere by itself. So I was aware of that. But when I went to high school and I graduated in 85, it wasn't until my sophomore year that we got computers. And they were at that time completely out of date. They were VT100 terminals from Digital, but they were called VT 180s because they had like a double five and a quarter inch. I think it was floppy on the top and there was some storage. I don't remember how they did storage, but we all, you know, there were these giant things, right? And you know, by this point we, I had, I had a Commodore 64, you know, my dad had gotten an IBM PC, this thing, we got these things. And I was like, what is, like what is this the 70s again? You know, like it was just. But it was probably some fire sale and you know, school districts didn't have any money then either. So that's what we got. We got the bargain basement hand me downs from, you know, five years earlier or whatever. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The history I, it took what, 50 years to see this code though, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah. Well, this is why I like, I mean we've seen, there have been parts of it and we've seen other versions.

[Leo Laporte]

Of it, but yeah, I've seen a chunk of it. The chunk that Bill is the most proud of has been passed around. Yeah, no, it was in the, as I said, it was in the appendix of the. You're right, the Gates book, Microsoft published book about the program about programming.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I see. I'm sorry. Yeah. I don't know. I think between the Gates book and then the Allen book, which probably came out, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, I think we have the definitive account now between the two of this time. Like, you know, these are the two guys, like they did it, you know, it's, it's kind of. That's really interesting to me.

[Leo Laporte]

When did they turn mean and rapacious? At what point did that happen?

[Richard Campbell]

So after about 10 seconds, after he got basic working, it was right there. No, I don't know. I don't know. I mean they were trying to make a business. You know, it was controversial that he didn't want people giving away this program for free.

[Paul Thurott]

Look at software, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Bill very famously went to users group meeting, maybe it was in Albuquerque, and yelled at them for sharing paper tape.

[Paul Thurott]

Famous Letter to the Computer Computer Hobbyist Club. Yes, I think it's from 1976.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the big out of print, but boy, it is a great book from Microsoft Press and it has that code in the back.

[Richard Campbell]

That's interesting. Yeah. So the. Yeah, I mean, Mitts tried to prevent them from selling BASIC to others. They were required by their contract to help them with that. And they saw everyone as a competitor, which is accurate. So they had to go to arbitration and Microsoft one and otherwise, I don't know, Microsoft probably wouldn't exist today. Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I can get my overhead.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Just move on. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want to move on. You want to move on.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it's just like Wednesday. No, I mean, what are you trying. What are you trying to find?

[Leo Laporte]

I just was going to show you something.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, go ahead. We'll find it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just the book. So this. So this is very. This is actually related. What's kind of cool about this though, And I'm sure Bill gave the author this is. There's handwritten notes as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think some of those stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen notes on storage layout for basic, stuff like that. But we only got this little chunk of code. So this is a good book. I recommend it. If you could find.

[Paul Thurott]

In the old days of the MVP summit when Bill would talk to the MVPs, somebody. One of the MVPs had found an original manual from that Altair Basic. And on the back of it, like the last page, it said, if you have any problems with this basic, call Bill Gates and add the phone number.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Paul Thurott]

And he got to get up on the stage and hand it. He wanted to build a sign it for him. And Bill got really emotional about it.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet. I remember that phone number.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, God, things were so simple then.

[Paul Thurott]

It was an Albuquerque phone number too, so. Oh yeah, of course, before any of that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah, they were actually in Albuquerque for several years. You kind of. This part of the story gets glossed over a little bit. But yeah, they had a. I mean, and they were originally all languages. Obviously they didn't want to get into operating systems. You know, it's just I think a lot of people out there are probably like, I kind of wish they didn't, but I don't. I like. I don't like CPM would have been any better. Goodness knows I would be writing about Win CPM or something. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, actually, in the back of this book, Gary Kildall's notes for CPM are also here, so if you want to. Or is that Dr. Dos?

[Paul Thurott]

He did.

[Leo Laporte]

It was Dr. Dos.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it was eventually Dr. Dos, but it was CPM originally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Susan Lammers, if you can find it. I think it's been out of print for a long time. Program now. I'm going to reread this now that.

[Richard Campbell]

I. Yeah, this is the type of book that. That won't be digital for some reason, but should be. And I find there's a lot of stuff like that. Actually we're going to get into this a little later, oddly through some piracy and AI story that's coming up. But yeah, there's a lot of books from our industry that just never made it to electronic form, which is crazy to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

At least not officially.

[Paul Thurott]

There's got to be some rights issues out there somewhere. And angley.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's the same reason.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Source code, I guess, but because that's got proprietary.

[Richard Campbell]

We're going to get to this. It's crazy. Like, I don't. I don't understand any of this, but I bet open AI or anthropic or whatever would be really good for learning or for writing Intel 8080 code right now. I bet there's so much information out there. I bet they could just ask you.

[Paul Thurott]

To help you write basic for the 88.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. Right. Like find out what feature was missing from this and then say, here's the source code from basic. Add that feature to it. Right. I bet it could do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet it could. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

I'd like Async in a way, in my 4K.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

8080 might be a little tough because of course it's dependent on how much code there is out there that it's read.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, all you need is the instruction manual and. No, I mean like literally whole cloth. Well, that's how Paul Allen wrote it.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean. Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But wrote the emulator.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Paul Allen's maybe a little smarter.

[Richard Campbell]

Just a little. Thousand man. I might accept that challenge. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he's not.

[Richard Campbell]

He was a smart guy. I'm not. I'm not discounting Paul Allen's intelligence at all. He's genius.

[Leo Laporte]

But I met him a couple of times.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A little underwhelming, to be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

Good. Though. That's what he wanted. He never wanted to be famous or anything. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

And of course that's why he went on to buy all the sports teams and you know, but whatever. But you know, he he just.

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't there a book written about him called the Accidental Billionaire? I believe that was the name.

[Richard Campbell]

Was that him? His book is called the Idea Man. And so for. Well, it's fair, though, because we all know about the Microsoft thing and then we know about some of the other stuff. But honestly, he was involved with a lot of different things over time, and in his story, Microsoft is just an early part of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry. The Accidental Billionaires was about the founding of Facebook. They really were accidental.

[Richard Campbell]

So you've read this book, right? This new book? Which Facebook book?

[Leo Laporte]

I have it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Have you read it?

[Leo Laporte]

I read a little bit of it. It's a little. It's just tawdry.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So I finished it and I. You got to go to the market.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's a good book. I mean, it's well written. It's not my kind of a book, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Showstoppers.

[Richard Campbell]

No, because it's just about. It's about the people, politics, you know, whatever. But go read the end of it because it explains why Meta is doing open source AI and it is the evilest reason imaginable and it is the worst. And it's the one technical thing that's in this book. I think it's the only technical thing in the entire book. And it's. I read that and I was like, oh, my God. That makes sense. It's awful. It's way worse than you think it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually. Later today, we're going to interview a woman from Wall Street Journal. Reporter from Wall Street Journal, who just has written a book, the biography of Sam Altman. And that's also interesting, right? She's got the scoop.

[Richard Campbell]

Morally questionable subhumans that have incredible power and wealth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Microsoft connection, of course, is she has the story of Satya Nadella's phone call saying, what the hell are you guys doing?

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

She got the very good report.

[Paul Thurott]

Appearance of Dark Sacha.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break then. We have lots of Windows news as well. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry. You're good.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you okay?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I'm gonna cut out.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you have a bad morning?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just gonna get rid of some stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Me being the top of that list, probably. Well, let's just. I'll tell you what, let me just do the ad and then you can get rid of me. How about that?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that's not what I meant.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I'M sorry. Maybe I'm the one who's having a bad morning. I'm a little sensitive. Maybe that's what it is. It could be.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't be sensitive, Leo. I hate it when you're so ugly when you're sensitive.

[Leo Laporte]

As everybody knows, completely insensitive.

[Richard Campbell]

A riff on my favorite joke of all time, don't cry, honey. You're so ugly when you cry. Anyway, go on. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I shall not say that to anyone.

[Richard Campbell]

I definitely don't say that to an actual human being, like out loud.

[Leo Laporte]

But you could think it though. It's okay to think it, I believe. Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. Love these guys. Spent a nice morning with them talking about what they do. They are the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We've been talking about them for a few months now. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises they now support. This number has been going up 50 of the Fortune 500. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premiere support. And it's faster. So it wouldn't be enough if we're just less expensive, right? It's gotta be better. Well, it is twice as fast on average. Time to resolution versus Microsoft. And that. You know what, that's an important stat. Cause when the network's down, you've got ransomware infesting it. Whatever's going on. Speed is of the essence. But they can also save you money in other ways. US Cloud is so excited to tell you about something new that I suspect Microsoft does not or will not do their Azure cost optimization services. I mean, you know, Azure is great, but when's the last time you really drilled down on your Azure usage? If it's been a while, you undoubtedly have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. But there's some good news. You can save on Azure and it's easier than you think. With US Cloud they offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you're not alone in this. You're going to get expert guidance, access to US cloud senior engineers. They have an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. I mean, that's the third part of this. They're less expensive, they're faster, but they're also super smart. At the end of those eight weeks, you're going to get an interactive dashboard that will tell you everything you need to know. They'll identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and resources that are just completely unused. So you could take those precious IT dollars and reallocate them towards things you need. And if you'd like to keep saving, maybe invest that azure savings into US Cloud's Microsoft support and save up to 50% on your costs. Right? That's what a few other US Cloud customers have done. Eliminate the unified spend. I'll give you a testimonial. This is from Sam. He's the technical Operations manager at bead gaming, gave us Cloud 5 stars. He said, quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. Those VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or 50,000amonth, it really starts to add up. Yes, Sam, it does, doesn't it? Maybe. That sounds familiar. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with usCloud. Visit uscloud.com just one more reason to go there and book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. Uscloud.com and if they say, how did you hear about this? Don't forget to say, oh, it was on Windows Weekly, because that helps us a lot. Uscloud.com, book a call today. Get better, faster Microsoft Support for less.

[Richard Campbell]

Uscloud.Com so last week, you may recall, I had a lengthy discussion, but a much lengthier write up about this build from the dev channel. That signals to me the next version of Windows, even though they're not calling it that yet. I went back and looked only at the dev channel, at all of the features they've announced. Well, most of the features they've announced. It was an enormous list and then listed out which of which have not yet shipped. And that was a pretty long list, right? Starting with the most obvious things like recall and Click to do, etc. So two days later, Microsoft publishes something they call the Windows 11 feature roadmap, which I have to say is a pretty good description of the thing I wrote a couple of days earlier. Interesting. They've never published such a thing. I found that to be very bizarre. So I saw this and I thought, well, okay, maybe this is complimentary, I don't know. But then I forgot it was Microsoft. So of course their version of this is terrible. It's really short. They lot, they missed a lot of stuff. It's nowhere close to as good as the thing I wrote and the thing I wrote was incomplete to begin with, you know, by design. I just didn't have enough time. So that was cute. And then I want to say two days after that or one day after that, they announced when some of the features they've been testing in the Insider Preview program for Copilot Plus PCs will actually come to stable and specifically or mostly for these intel and AMD based copilot plus PCs. Right. Because Snapdragon has gotten those features earlier. But still, by the way, in the Insider program, mostly aside from the stuff that came, you know, back in the beginning. And that too is incredibly incomplete because they list things like the live caption with live translation co creator and paint resell image and image creator and photos and some other things, but they don't mention Recall. I click to do which are still in the. In the thing, you know, like what are you doing?

[Paul Thurott]

But only inside. They haven't done the release version of Recall yet.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope. And but even when they do, I mean certainly they will still be pre called previews.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no way they're going to drop a preview tag. Not immediately. So we still don't know exactly when that stuff's going to come. The other thing that happened that's tied to this last week and I don't remember the timing anymore, but last Tuesday was the week D preview update day. They released a 23H2 and a Windows 10 preview build preview update, I guess we'll call it. But I went for 24H2 and then that one did come out a day or two later like I predicted. And it has all of the stuff you would expect, the stuff we saw in 23H2, but also has. I'm going to call it semantic search. I'm not sure, I don't know that there's an official name, but it's the AI powered search, Windows Search.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Peter Norton invent it?

[Richard Campbell]

No, not like Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, you're good. So that was interesting to me because I specifically enrolled my Snapdragon X based Surface laptop in the dev program so I could test this stuff. Right. So I don't remember the timing off this of this off the top of my head, but some weeks ago they started testing us and they phased it in over time. I think I talked about this last week. At the beginning it was local files only and it was documents only. Then it was images. Then it was like images only off of Cloud Storage 2, but only OneDrive. And then it became everything and like it would only work from the search box in Start, but then it was also in File Explorer kind of, it kind of happened over time. So I never got this feature right. So I was actually really surprised to see that this thing was heading out to stable in a preview update and then would be going at stable period in two weeks later. And I wrote, well, I wrote whatever I wrote about it at the time. And then I let's do it now because yeah, when I bring up Start and when I bring up File Explorer now, guess what? I have it. So it just came on. I randomly, I guess it's ready. So someday this will be extensible. So if you use a third party storage service, whatever it might be, they can plug into this as well. But now you can do those searches. So I don't remember the search I did, but if I search for like this green or something like green, it will bring up file names, you know, you know how Windows Search works. It has like the, the item is highlighted and you can see it's in the file name. Like you can see it's stupid. But now interspersed throughout that are results that do not contain the word green, but it might be an image that has something green in it or it might be a document or other file that has. Which is cool, really, you know, which is. Yeah, exactly what I've been waiting for for about, I don't know, six, eight months, I don't know. So, yeah, it's fine.

[Paul Thurott]

That's finally happened 20 years, but okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, that too. Actually, it wasn't really a big deal for me in the past, but now that I have so much data, you know, I could actually really use it. I just explained, I can't do time zone math. How could I find something I wrote? I mean, think about it, fairly functional as it is. And then beyond that, there were other Windows Insider builds. There were dev, new dev and beta builds this past Friday. The beta build and These are both 24H2 builds. The beta version only got Quick Machine recovery, which is a feature Microsoft announced back in November at ignite for commercial PCs. But it's going to consumers as well. So I can't actually see that I'm in the dev channel, right. I think I would, you know, dev channel would get this first. But we already explained nothing logical exists in my world. There was among the other controversies of last year. I guess one of the weirder ones was back in January, February, Microsoft announced this copilot key on PC keyboards. Since then, this thing has appeared on like every new keyboard of a PC Ever seen. Like, it's not on some of them. It's like just out there. When they did that, they got rid of the original shortcut for Copilot, which is Windows key plus C. And then they didn't give it to anything, they just took it away and it was like, guys, not everyone has a copilot key. Like, why wouldn't you just keep that? So in this new dev build and beta build that has made a comeback, you can type Windows key +C again. It's like, okay, this is progress, I guess in our world. So there's other stuff there that they're starting to like.

[Paul Thurott]

It's D regeneration. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's like, yeah, you know the new movie about the guy who keep like has agreed to be cloned and he keeps getting killed and cloned. Killed. Clone. This is the. This is Windows key plus. It used to be Kotrana. I think before that it was something else.

[Paul Thurott]

When you run out of good ideas, the great thing about bad ideas, you get two versions because you get to do it and undo it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Usually in the Microsoft space though, they'll reuse something for something different. Like they reuse a brand. Like Surface is a good example. Or what else?

[Paul Thurott]

Fabric.

[Richard Campbell]

C sharp. C sharp fabric. There you go. This is the reusing it for the same thing. I'm not saying it's unique or whatever, but it is weird.

[Paul Thurott]

It's interesting to point out that you can't search on a search bar now in a browser and not have AI involved. Doesn't matter whether you're using Bing or Google or whatever, there's going to be an AI window.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I guess you have to do it in Windows now too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. And I. Look, I'm going to give this one some time. I'll see. I will say from using it that I didn't find recall to be useful. Although I have enough empathy to kind of understand this might be useful for other people. So it's fine. But the way I think and the way I do things, I do think, you know, file system based search is a good place for this for me. So I'm hoping, you know, we'll see.

[Paul Thurott]

My only problem with the Windows search thing is all the indexing that's constantly hammering away your machine. And now that you're going to be hammering away at colors too, like what does that even look like?

[Richard Campbell]

So the initial and yeah, for the best results you should go into the settings and turn indexing on for the entire disk.

[Paul Thurott]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you should walk away for your computer for 72 hours. I recommend just going on a long weekend away.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm almost looking at that option as like, you know, I don't like my SSD anymore. Let's use it up in one sitting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, like my neighbor downstairs would be like, was there an earthquake while you were gone? I'm like, no. My, my computer was indexing. You're lucky I don't have like a hard drive. It was an ssd. It wasn't as bad.

[Paul Thurott]

At least it's quiet. But it does wear out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So Windows Quick Recovery looks kind of interesting. By my count, it's the 27th way you can recover a Windows computer now. But this is designed for those instances in which you can't actually boot into Windows successful. So it's something you access from the Windows recovery environment. And you know, to me what this looks like is a 2025 version of system Restore. You know, or remember in Windows Me. Actually people forget this. They associate this with Windows XP. But Windows Me was the first. Windows 2 have a driver rollback feature where if the system wouldn't boot, it would just automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

They had to, I believe.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it was. No, that version had a bunch of innovative features that, you know, got lost in everyone hating it so much. But do they.

[Leo Laporte]

They stop System Restore, right? They don't do that anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

It's in there, but it's not on.

[Paul Thurott]

But this is what quick recovery has really become. It's. It's System Restore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's quick. Yeah, it's System Restore. Well, yeah, System Restore is a good term. Actually. I'm surprised they didn't reuse it.

[Leo Laporte]

System Restore would fail so often.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, system. Yeah. I mean it's. To me, I, I don't mind having it as a fail back for certain things.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it just sounds so confident when you call it System Restore. Yeah, Emergency. Maybe this will work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a better name. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I also like it because your doc. It wouldn't impact your documents or your files. Like your, your non system file, like your non application files. And of course this. But this was created by adults in a different era. And so it didn't say something like, oh, don't worry, your documents will be right where you left them. You know, like the, you know, it was just like, well, we're gonna pretend you're an adult. Like we'll treat you like a human being.

[Paul Thurott]

Is there anything better than booting up Windows? And you get that high and you're like, oh, no, we're just Putting.

[Richard Campbell]

We're just putting some more wonderfulness in your PC.

[Paul Thurott]

Remember when this was your computer nuts anymore? We have. Treat me like you will wait.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Don't talk to me like I'm a dog. You're not sure I know the language. She just all upbeat all the time. So I think everything's okay.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't like that.

[Richard Campbell]

They're changing the color of the blue screen, right? They're not sure yet. They did that before.

[Leo Laporte]

Wasn't it green?

[Richard Campbell]

No, they tested green and then I think they left it. I think you might still see green screens in the Insider program. But they.

[Leo Laporte]

What color?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they don't know it's going to be green or black. It's going to look.

[Paul Thurott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, this stuff's important.

[Leo Laporte]

It is so important.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. And then. Yeah, so that's most of that. So there's a pretty good blog post explaining how Windows Quick Recovery works. It's a. It's something that came up out of the Secure Future Initiative stuff. You know, friends don't let friends use CrowdStrike kind of thing. And then there was a beta build which basically just brings all the Same features from 24H2. They're still doing that. And then a couple of unique features for some reason because everything has to be terrible. So this morning Proton announced the Proton drive. Proton drive is now native on Windows 11 on ARM, which is very cool. There's some new features. There's some new features on the Mac as well. They rewrote that client. But in the post about the Mac there's a little throwaway line at the end. They're going to bring this product to Linux.

[Paul Thurott]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And I guess the rewrite that they did for the Mac, which when you think about it is that's kind of Unix, you know, is going to inform that. And this apparently is a much asked for thing. And to me the lack of a Google Drive, OneDrive, whatever, you know, first class cloud storage, something, something with files on demand is one of those things that is like kind of a blocker to using Linux for me. So that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you knew how to use S3, you wouldn't have to worry about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Paul. Yes, well, I do know how to use Git and I still hate it, but fair enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually Git's an excellent choice as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you could use. You could actually use Git.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I'm out of focus. That's a bad sign.

[Paul Thurott]

That's a good move on by Proton's part because you know, they. The diversity of Desktop's getting better. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's open source. It's. It's source.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's cool.

[Richard Campbell]

It ticks all the.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now I'm gonna have to take a look at. I've had a Proton account for a.

[Richard Campbell]

Long time, but yeah, I just installed it this morning. Yeah, it's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So is there command line version?

[Richard Campbell]

Is there a command line? I don't know, I didn't look at that. I mean you could access the file system from the command line.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I just write the code to do the API. That's fine. I'll be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, actually, so there is an API that they're creating and that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Even better.

[Richard Campbell]

That's better.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that means there'll be third party tools. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, that's right. And then this is. I just threw this in here because it's semi related. But Proton VPN is now integrated into the Vivaldi browser. Right. So there's a free tier of it. And obviously that's what you get there. And if you are a customer, you get the full blown version. Whatever. That's kind of interesting. I mean like this is like I think we would. I don't think we had started the show yet, but I said, you know, I see this need for what I think of as per app, Bluetooth, I see the same need for a VPN. Right. Most VPNs. I mean there are VPNs and browsers, but I think a lot of people have a VPN app, they turn it on, your whole system's on the revpn and then they turn it off and you're not. And I actually see like the Brave browser is like a Tor tab you can open that is just for that thing. And I kind of, I see a need for that. It's kind of an interesting idea. Like I don't really need my whole world to be on the vpn, but maybe I'm doing like I'm in Mexico now. I want to shop on Amazon US or whatever. Yeah, that's a good way, you know, to do that. And then I don't know if you guys caught this, but intel had their. Has had their first in person event. It's in Vegas, by the way. You can go see it. Richard called Intel Vision, the first one in a while. They remember last fall they canceled whatever their big thing was. Actually, I think they canceled until Vision. I think this is the thing from last fall.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And their new CEO has appeared in public for the first time. A little hard to understand. But you said all the right things. He in, in a throwaway line. If he was on stage day one, for an hour, in three seconds he just mentioned that they're going to get rid of our spin off non core businesses and then never discussed it again or said what those things were.

[Paul Thurott]

Haven't they been doing that for years?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, Pat Gelsinger was doing some of that for sure.

[Paul Thurott]

The Knucks and Yeah, but I think.

[Richard Campbell]

It needs to be said explicitly and he did say later to me, I believe he used the word core, that their core businesses are the chip design, which I'll Describe as the x86 chip design bit. And they've got Panther Lake coming on their 18A process this year and then the Foundry, which is how they're doing the 18A process. Right. So. And he expressed a desire to work with partners, customers on custom designs that will be new to them and blah, blah, blah, whatever. All the right things you would expect.

[Paul Thurott]

But does this read to me like, so business as usual because it's been going so well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's, Yep. I don't know if you used AI to generate that summary, Richard, but that's accurate. Yeah, I mean that is what it is. But I don't know. I, I, Intel's weird, right? Intel was dominant forever. Yeah. They were the, Microsoft invented this business.

[Paul Thurott]

For the most part, Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. They were horrible and behaved illegally to their competitors, to partners, to customers. They were horrible. Giant company, super successful, were horrible. And now I, you know, do I want them to fail because of this? No, I'm not, you know, come on, I don't need it. No. This is like people like, I'll never use a Microsoft product because they used to hate Linux. It's like, that was 30 years ago.

[Paul Thurott]

That was.

[Richard Campbell]

Why not loud. Get over it. You know, I always use the example like that's like saying, I'm not going to Germany because of World War II. You got to get over it. Like it's gone. You know, we're past this. So I'm trying not to be that way. But I see people like, oh my God. I really, I want them to survive so bad. It's so important. I'm like, is it? You know, so I don't, I don't hate them and I don't love them. I don't mean it like that. I recognize the role that they played forever. I mean, they're super important. We just talked about the first computer was based on an intel chip. I mean, they're a big deal. They always have been. But they also ignored a lot of things that were going on in industry. Microsoft begged them again and again and again. You got to make these things more efficient. You know, one of the things he talked about on stage was Panther Lake. He's. The way he described it is going to combine the best of Arrow Lake, which is the performance and scalability stuff, with the efficiency and power savings of Lunar Lake. Yeah, that's what they were asking for 15 years ago.

[Paul Thurott]

I appreciated Ben Thompson's analysis and all this is that. But when they missed mobile, when they missed arm, you know, the writing was on the wall from then on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was.

[Paul Thurott]

They don't make enough chips. When you're only making hundreds of millions of chips, you really can't justify the top end stuff. You need to make billions of chips.

[Richard Campbell]

You can all. Yeah. And Microsoft had the same problem, basically just high level missed mobile. Right. If you want, just to put it simply. But Microsoft had this fallback. Right. They went to the cloud. Intel also missed the cloud, by the way. I mean, not that they don't have cloud stuff, but they, the, the fact that Nvidia was able to happen on their watch is rather.

[Paul Thurott]

And they did make gpus. They just never took it all that seriously. It wasn't a core business.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. Yeah. I mean if you go back to Windows Vista, one of the big problems was that all of the existing computers out in the world which had these crappy intel integrated graphics could not run Aero Glass. It's a huge problem for people. And they, intel did not see this as a huge priority. You know, some of their newer chips.

[Paul Thurott]

That did have business CPUs. I don't know why you're bothering us with that.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're. You were literally holding the industry back. Yeah. So that's the problem again.

[Paul Thurott]

Imagine if Microsoft had looked at the cloud and. Well, that's not our core business.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, exactly. Windows in the cloud. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And arguably it doesn't. But it also turned out to be a pretty good business. So it worked out pretty good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Sometimes these adjacent businesses end up being the business.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's right. I mean Microsoft saw that with work groups and then servers and all this. And then the servers, you know, all the SQL Server, Exchange Server, et cetera, et cetera. And then was able to make this kind of semi natural transition to the cloud. It worked out well for them and intel just didn't. I don't know, I just didn't do it.

[Paul Thurott]

But don't worry they're sticking to their core business.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's a very nerdy joke.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, before we go to a break, they're asking in the YouTube chat, in the YouTubes. In the YouTubes if you care about or if you want to talk about the fact that Microsoft has killed the nro. You know the bypass in a row.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I mean I, Yeah. So that's. This is overblown. So there are this allowed you to.

[Leo Laporte]

Bypass the Microsoft account when you install.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's. I believe there's a. I believe the script is literally named bypass nro. Cmd.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cmd. That's the name.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you actually look at the script you can see the. How they do it and you can still run those commands. Like those are not going away.

[Leo Laporte]

So okay, so they're just taking away the script.

[Richard Campbell]

It's nothing. The important thing to remember here is that there are other workarounds. So when you use like Rufus to create a install media then you check the right options. They are enabling those things that this script would have done. It's this.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Chris Titus is an idiot.

[Paul Thurott]

So wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

You know he's. This is. This is. The guy gets hundreds of thousands of views about nothing. He just, you know, he was. The recall is. Is they're secretly putting recall on your computer even though they said he take it away. He's wrong about.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the unfortunate thing about YouTube is this incentive is kind of linked in this Stu.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. So this is nothing. My reaction to this is this is nothing. So when I update the book each year for each version of Windows 11, I just, I don't put every work around. I just pick the best one or two. So right now this still works. It's not going away. You're not going to download Windows tomorrow or in three months and not be able to use this if they. They're testing it in one build of one channel of the insider program. So I just, we talked. I wrote a 6,000 word article last week about how so many of those things have never appeared. So it will or will not occur in the next version of Windows. If it does, there will be other workarounds. There always are. So you don't have to worry about it. And by the way this is kind of a ham handed whatever but the ultimate workaround or the one you know that anyone could do is sign in with a Microsoft account the first time, create a local account, delete the Microsoft account and then use your local account. And there are actually really good Reasons to do that right now because one of the advantages, and it's not the only one, but one of the advantages of using a Microsoft account is that it enables automatic full disk encryption on the computer. Whereas if you sign in with a local account, you don't get that. You have to sign in with a Microsoft account to get that once.

[Paul Thurott]

You only do it once.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Microsoft gets a little heat for how it described this in the build.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, even in the throwaway line at the end. No. Okay, but why, though? Because what percentage of Windows users actually have used this switch ever? One time? It's less than 1%. Right. You understand? It's probably 1% of 1%. It's. This is not used by anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Like statistically it. It exists. And for the. Look, my stance on this is like, here's my list of why you should use a Microsoft account, actually. But if you want to be smart about it, here's the list of things you should do. Just like you could use Microsoft Edge, but you got to do these things. Are you being stupid? Because it's tracking you and whatever, you can do it, but don't.

[Paul Thurott]

The best thing you do with Edge is download Chrome, Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Yes. I mean, based on telemetry, that is the number one use.

[Leo Laporte]

It is scary when they say this change ensures that all users exit set up with a Microsoft account. I mean, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're looking at that like it's a.

[Leo Laporte]

A bad thing.

[Richard Campbell]

A bad thing because. Because there's good and bad to everything. But for most mainstream users. Well, no, for Sicily. Every mainstream user of Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the right thing to do for so many reasons. I mean, it's not just the full disk encryption that's part of it. This is an account that's backed up with two FA and passkey security so you can recover it. This is an account that gives you automatic pass through to your Microsoft services through the browser, through OneDrive, through the store, through whatever you. Through Xbox, you. I use it to go into the Xbox app, download Call of Duty and play Call of Duty. And I never sign into anything because it's passed through. It's all part of the account.

[Leo Laporte]

Sophisticated enough or you have the need for it, you can figure out.

[Richard Campbell]

You already know. This is nothing to be outraged over. You already know how to do it. Don't worry about it. No, nothing's changing. It's fine. That's why, that's why. That's why I didn't mention it's Nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Okay. But you know, it's my duty as the.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I. You know what, so this is something. No, this is, this is. No, you're right. This is something I struggle with because I look at that and I say what I just said. I, I think this is nothing.

[Paul Thurott]

But it's not how they wrote it. Not even close. Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't know, it's not, it doesn't matter. Nothing until I hear your explanation. Then I say, oh yeah, you're right, it's nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but it's people like, they conflate things, you know, and so like a guy who's really active in my, on my site and my forums did. Wrote a forum post about it and I'm just going to read the way he wrote this because this is very typical. Not because he's a bad guy or not, he's super smart, but it's just, you know, new method to install Windows 11 with a local account. It's not actually a new method. It's. It's the, it's the command that's behind inside of that command line script. Right. With this method. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. So like the way he describes this is like this just changed. We have to use this now. And it's like nothing has changed. So. And by the way, even if, like I said, even if it does, you're fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is exactly why we turn to you guys. So you give us the perspective.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but the thing I get wrong, and this is a great example is I should still bring it up just so I can say, hey, by the way, you might have seen something like don't worry about it. Yeah, don't. Yeah, I don't do that. Like that's my own, that's me not communicating effectively. Like it's, it's, it's stupid that I beat yourself up. No, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

This comes up ugly when you cry.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you. I do look ugly.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know. Self woven looks so good on him.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, I think you gotta, it's in my wheelhouse. You gotta play to your strengths.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't know. In all honesty, I read that stuff, I might even think in the back of my mind. Yeah, that seems like a tempest.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, here they go again. Microsoft taking away our rights, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, especially when they put in a line like, well this is. Make sure you have Microsoft account.

[Paul Thurott]

Everybody has a Microsoft account. And I think there's a thing to be concerned about which is now that they're paying attention enough that they would Even attempt to remove that script. What's next?

[Leo Laporte]

Now, Richard, now let's not stir up trouble where there's no trouble.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm trying to remember where I read this. So not the Microsoft account, but it applies 100%. It was something about, I'm going to forget, but Google probably somewhere, some blog post somewhere this past week someone said something like, we require you to have a Google account, whatever it was, for this reason. The thing about a Google account, just like a Microsoft account, is that you can come to it from. You don't have to use a dot or an outlook.com account. Right. So you could say like, I have [e-mail] or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, same. Same with Apple. I can use a Gmail account to.

[Paul Thurott]

Have my Apple account.

[Richard Campbell]

So you can. So the point was you can use this account. You don't have to use our email. We're not trying to get you on our email. It doesn't matter. But the beauty of using an account that's already an online account is that you now have a way to recover that account without you doing anything. Like when you set up a. Like if you set a [e-mail] if that was available, which it isn't, and you were like, okay, this is a brand new account. It's not associated with anything else. You have to go through a series of steps where you're like, all right, well, here's my phone number. Here's another email address which might be a Gmail account or whatever it is. And not during the setup process, but afterwards you're expected to then go in and Create2FA, maybe through an authenticator app or through a passkey or whatever it might be and secure that thing. And you can do that. But the nice thing about going into an online account like a Microsoft account with your own account is automatic recovery. Right. Because you can email at that address somewhere else. It's got that redundancy kind of effect. Right now you should still do the other stuff. You should still add your phone number to it. You should maybe. Or use an authenticator app. Definitely. Or get passkeys going on your devices. Absolutely. But the nice thing about going into it without using their address scheme is you get automatic system recovery. So look, there are actually about a dozen reasons why this makes sense and I think those are amplified when you were, I'm going to say normal. I know people don't like that word, but like a mainstream, non technical user this is. They should be using a Microsoft account to sign into Windows. They really should.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Fair to say most people should have it. And if you don't want it, you are sophisticated enough to figure out how not to have it. I think that's the way it should always be done. I think the way Apple should do iPhones, the way every operating system should operate is there are bypasses for people who are technically sophisticated.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I see.

[Leo Laporte]

Otherwise the default is the most appropriate choice for the average user.

[Richard Campbell]

If you. I don't remember. I don't do it enough to remember exactly the steps. But when you sign into a Mac for the first time and you create an Apple account, or don't, I guess you're creating what in the Microsoft space we call a local account. You're associating, if you have one, an Apple ID with that thing. But you really. You're not creating. You're not signing in with [e-mail] or whatever. No, right, you're signing in with Paul or whatever. You created a local account. We have not done that in Windows since Windows 7. That was the last system.

[Leo Laporte]

And people miss it.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's the reason. Maybe. But you know who doesn't miss it?

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Richard Campbell]

All those people that you're not thinking. Not you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Normal users.

[Richard Campbell]

The people, which is Everybody, which is 99.999999.

[Leo Laporte]

The fact that you get BitLocker if you're a normal user, if you just sign in your app, your Microsoft account is a good. That's a good thing.

[Richard Campbell]

And the reason you have to have that is because you need some way to recover that thing. You have to be able to recover it.

[Paul Thurott]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

So that's why they do. It's not like a. It's not an evil scheme, guys. I mean, there is evilness at Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It exists.

[Paul Thurott]

It is a corporation. Make no mistakes.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you can put a crucifix on your computer, wallpaper, whatever, do whatever you want.

[Paul Thurott]

But yeah, the holy water is a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, no, I always think, you know, Apple has a setting which by default is on the highest security setting, that you can't install applications from weird places. But there's a way to turn that off.

[Richard Campbell]

So by the way, Microsoft in Windows side interrupt but has a switch just like it. But it's the other way around. It's off by default. You can go in and make it more secure.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It would be nice if we're on by default and then people who are sophisticated could turn it off.

[Richard Campbell]

I think in their defense, and I hate doing that, but in their defense, I think it's because they understand that Most people would be confused by this bad experience.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't install.

[Richard Campbell]

They're like, what are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to get brave.

[Richard Campbell]

What are you doing? Oh, you stopped me from doing quotes. Chrome now. Oh, Microsoft. Yeah, no, we know what you're all about.

[Leo Laporte]

You know that's 100 YouTube videos right there.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. So, Chris, Titus, you're out there. Please make that video. Yeah, go for it.

[Paul Thurott]

It'll grow for you instantly.

[Richard Campbell]

I just. I don't. I just. Look, I absolutely get outraged about things. I try to make sure those things are real, you know, and I.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how Google handles sideloading, and I think it's the right way to do it. On Android, you can't sideload unless, you know, you go into the settings and you turn that off and it warns you that's appropriate. Now, I, as a geek, can do the things I want to do, but normal people will be protected. I think that's a great way to do. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's optimized for the most frequent use case. And by the way, it's not 75, 25, it's 99.9999 something to 0.000 something. Like, it's not even close. Like, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you're a tiny fraction of them.

[Richard Campbell]

We are. We're tiny. Well, we're big, but we're tiny. And. And we, you know, we tend to be large. Anyway, the point is, we tend to be larger, but we also tend to have strong opinions. Look, you can get. You're smart enough to get around this. What are you outraged about? Relax. If you were really outraged about this, you'd already be using Linux. Just relax.

[Paul Thurott]

Where I was thinking, you know, one of the options is just use Linux on the desktop, use the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Keith512, I appreciate him in our Discord has informed me that NRO stands for Network Readiness Operations.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't know that.

[Paul Thurott]

Not National Reconnaissance Office.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah, well, it may also stand for that. Anyway, let's take a break. You are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly. This is why you watch it, to get this kind of information. Paul Thurat in Roma Norte, Richard Campbell and Las Vegas. I'm in Petaluma. None of these town names are in English. Isn't that interesting?

[Richard Campbell]

That's a good point.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When I first moved to Petaluma, they.

[Paul Thurott]

Said, wait till we talk about whiskey. And all the names are Norwegian.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we're doing Norwegian. When I first moved to Petaluma, they said, no one knows what it means. And then later people said, actually it's from the original Pomo Indians who lived here. And it means hill by the river. And. What do you mean? No one knows what it means?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you've just so. Like, Makunji is bear swamp, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like it.

[Richard Campbell]

But, Richard, I meant to send you this, and I just. I guess I zoned on it. I. I follow this thing on Instagram called the Language Nerds, which is spectacular. They had a pitch, like a picture of two things which was to me was like, so you and me. It was just perfect. One was an avocado and one was a bottle of whiskey. And it was like in. In. In Scotland, whiskey. You might know, whiskey is somehow associated with, like, water. It's like the. It's like the perfect water of life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

In Mexico, avocado is aguacate. It is a. It's not. It's actually pre. Aztec, but the Aztecs used it. We'll call it an Aztec term that means testicles, so. Which, you know, you hear it and you're like, yep, okay, I get it. Yeah. So it's like an avocado and a bottle of whiskey. Walk in a bar.

[Leo Laporte]

It's everything you need in life. You know, avocados now have to be propagated by humans because there are no large mammals to eat them and defecate the seeds.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, we're the large animals that do that. But I see what you're saying. If you can eat. Yeah, you'd be passing that one would be like, don't. I gotta name a moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Do what a normal person does. Put toothpicks in them. Put them in a glass of water by the window, and grow your own tree.

[Richard Campbell]

So next time you see someone who really knows what they're doing rotating through an avocados agricate really quickly, you'll be like, oh, it's like they just kind of like. They, like, jab the knife.

[Leo Laporte]

It's impressive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

The guacamole masters. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry, I forgot.

[Paul Thurott]

Absolutely. I love the linguistic games. Right. Like, you've heard the term. You've heard about Torpenhow Hill, which has the word tor, which is the old English for hill, and pen, which is the old Celtic word for hill. And ho, which is an English word for hill. So it's actually.

[Richard Campbell]

So the only reason I know the word tor means hill in old English is that there were. There was a map inside of a yes album in the 70s that had. Whatever tour. Whatever tour whatever tour. And I did the 1979 version of Googling it, by which I mean I opened a dictionary or I guess an encyclopedia and looked it up, and I had never heard that term.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like it's. Lord of the Rings also uses it. I feel like.

[Richard Campbell]

See, that's. I had read the Lord of the Rings by this point, and you would think I was, but nobody reads the map. I'm not saying I'm a Tolkien scholar, Leo, but I mean, okay, maybe I'm wrong. I could be kind of. I mean. No, I don't. I like. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I hope you've enjoyed this ad Free interlude. Now back to the show.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, we're back already. That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

We're back.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, that was the whole thing.

[Paul Thurott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That was it right there. We will replace all of that chatter with an ad.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

And all the good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[D]

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[E]

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[Leo Laporte]

On we go. Microsoft 360Fiver.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so we mentioned that Windows feature that Microsoft announced as part of sfi. Back at Ignite, they also announced what looked like a wonderful little nuc, which everyone was real excited about until they realized it was A basically like a, like, what do you call it? Like a headless. Not headless. Yeah, headless. Like a, you know, remote access device, thin client, I guess, called 365 Windows 365 link. So it is now available. You can pay $350 to get an empty box that connects to a Microsoft service that costs at least $20 a month. Or you can just use the PC you already have. I don't know who this is for. This is for businesses, obviously, but I don't feel like this is going to go great. I don't really see the point of it, but that's available. Microsoft announced, I think it was last week, that they're going to enable something in Windows that will allow Office apps on Windows to start up faster, starting with Word. Now I did what I think everyone did when they read that line in a story or whatever and they launched Word and it came right up and they were like, I don't understand, it already comes up instantly.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But they're literally putting a startup boost app inside of Start. So it starts every time your computer starts.

[Paul Thurott]

You think there's basically just a copy of Word running that you only get to see.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to start with Word, but then they're going to go to Excel and PowerPoint and probably Outlook too, because Outlook actually is the one that probably could use this. I don't understand what the point of this is. I have also wondered, related to this for years, why Microsoft doesn't block by default anything that tries to put itself in automatic startup at boot time. But then of course, if, if you've ever run copilot by mistake, in most cases you will have noticed you close it, it's still sitting in the tray and if you look, it's in startup tasks because Microsoft evil bad. So Microsoft does this a lot actually. And I don't like this behavior and I wish there was something that would prevent it. You should get a pop up. It should be like that Apple thing where it says, hey, this app's trying to track you or whatever. In this case it should say, hey, this Microsoft app is trying to put itself in Start startup or whatever.

[Paul Thurott]

And most third party apps, when you install them, say hey, should I be part of your startup? And you can check it or uncheck it. Yeah, Microsoft knows better than you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And this is somewhere else in somewhere. Somewhere in somewhere. I don't know, somewhere in this show I was thinking about writing about all the things I do with the Windows PC when I first install, you know Put it together, whatever. And then how different my life would be if I was, you know, like a normal user. Like, if I didn't have to do all the stuff that I do. And there's all this stuff I would turn off for sure. But one of the things everyone should do, and yet, unfortunately, you have to do it from time to time, is go look at the startup tasks. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Just did this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's. So if you, you know, maybe you bulk install a bunch of stuff on your computer, you finally get it where you want it, that's the time to go look. But then every month or two weeks or something, you got to go look at this. Because if you ever reboot, you know, like, you see, like, Discord. Discord puts two tasks in startup. One is Discord, and the other one is Update Discord. It's like, guys, she's Louise. Like, I don't know. So there's a lot of apps like that, and a lot of them, unfortunately, are Microsoft apps.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's the only thing forcing onto the home screen of your phone.

[Richard Campbell]

It's gross.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so annoying.

[Richard Campbell]

This is. You know, Apple used to do this thing when you had a notification, the dock, the little icon would sit there and go up and down. Yeah. But it wouldn't. It wouldn't stop bounce. And I was saying to a friend of mine at the time, it's like 20 years ago, you know, I said, stupidest thing I've ever seen. So what do. This is good. Like, And I'm like, all right. And I put my hand in front of his face. I just. Tell me when this is annoying. Let me know.

[Leo Laporte]

You trying to watch tv?

[Richard Campbell]

Is this annoying? I don't know. You don't think that's annoying? This is a service, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey. Hey, I'm over here. Hey, can you help me? Just real quickly, I went over to Proton Drive. I thought I'd check it out, and it's asking me to identify that I'm a human.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, boy, that's tricky.

[Leo Laporte]

How can I. I don't. It's just a place.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. What are you using? What's the browser?

[Leo Laporte]

Zen is you think you're probably using.

[Richard Campbell]

Some kind of an ad blocker or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. So I was blocking the human verification.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, I bet it is. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

This is like a mini version of the tech guy show. Thank you so much, Baltharat.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I run into this a lot. I. You just. I wonder if I can.

[Leo Laporte]

So annoying.

[Richard Campbell]

I downloaded an app. Let me see If I can find out what it was, I'm just. Because I never did install it. I can't find it. Oh, that's bugging me now. Anyway, it downloaded some app I went to install, did one of those web things where you sign in on the web and you go through your password manager. Like, cool, that's fine. Then it came up with the screen. It said, we want to make sure you're human, just like you said. I'm like, all right. Okay. It seems like an unnecessary additional step. I just did all the other stuff. So it's like, which parts of this little grid of things are like a fire hydrant? You're like, you do it. I'm like, all right. And then it does it the second time, you're like, all right. This time you're like, I'm going to get this one right. Nope, did it again. It did it four times. And I was like, yeah, I'm not doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

AI could do it. That's the sad thing. It's human. Can't I just.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, guys, I passed the test.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Your webpage is not that important to me.

[Richard Campbell]

No, whatever it was, it was some app. I don't. I was like, yeah, no, I'm done.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just not doing it so long. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And then this is a small thing. This is kind of cool. So I don't. I'm not an Excel guy. I think I've made that very clear. I'm barely a guy, but I. You know, barely a human being. I mean. But Microsoft Excel supports what Microsoft calls rich data. So that means things that are not just words or numbers. Right. So obviously, when you have numbers, it can be different formats like currency or whatever else you might have for numbers, but they have other forms of data. So there are things like, I think map locations and whatever else is rich data. And you can use these things in formulas, and you can use them in charts and whatever else, but they're not called out in any way. So they're adding a feature to Excel called value tokens. And so basically, they're going to colorize and add an icon in the fields where those things exist, and then also up in the formula bar. So it's the type of thing like. Like I said, don't use Excel, but I look at that and I'm like, yeah, no, it's a good idea.

[Paul Thurott]

Sure. And I think just a little bit closer to becoming publisher. Right. Like, now I can.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right, exactly. Which, by the way, every Microsoft tool that is not publisher will become, by the Time publisher goes away.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, 100%. So I think that's. Yeah, that's fine.

[Paul Thurott]

It makes sense that all applications are converging on a single app.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? That app will be a messaging app.

[Leo Laporte]

They say that no software is done until it can get email.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe I'll do that to my app. I'll just make it an email app, see if anyone notices.

[Leo Laporte]

Proton's very secure. It has now made me prove I'm a human. I've given it my second factor. Now it wants my other password. It's very secure.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So in my case, yeah, I. It's like you. You can use your email address, but you can also use just your username.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm doing. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Urine sample.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yes. Password. And then I have two FA through, like, a authenticator app or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I did that. Now it wants my second. I don't know what my second.

[Richard Campbell]

What are you trying to do?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just trying to check out Proton Drive. And now what's another password?

[Richard Campbell]

I think you failed a very.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a human, apparently.

[Richard Campbell]

Proves to me that maybe OneDrive is more your speed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe. I need to know it. Can I use my Microsoft account for that, please?

[Richard Campbell]

Is there some reason you're not doing this with Edge? I mean, it would. I don't know what I'm talking. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I switched to Safari. It did give me the human test, which was a. A puzzle piece. Then I did my try.

[Richard Campbell]

What do you call it? A incognito window or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. It's just.

[Richard Campbell]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hopeless.

[Richard Campbell]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Hopeless. I got very secure, though. You can't deny that.

[Paul Thurott]

I know. I'm feeling good.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I feel like I'm safe from you right now.

[Leo Laporte]

So let's get anywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't do anything with your computer.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm on second password.

[Richard Campbell]

Your second password.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what it is.

[Richard Campbell]

You sure it's not the authenticator?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it says second. I did the authentic second password. This is another.

[Richard Campbell]

This is like. It has a second button.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. There it is. I see it. There is. I see in my notes a second password.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow. That's amazing.

[Paul Thurott]

It's the only thing better than one password.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got to be better, right? It's got to be better.

[Richard Campbell]

Password 1.5.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see if it works. Yes, it seems to be doing something.

[Paul Thurott]

Second password comes 11 z's.

[Leo Laporte]

How secure can that be, man? I had to do a puzzle.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you for following that up intelligently.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, two passwords.

[Richard Campbell]

I hate to even say this, but you understand you're going to go through this again when you actually install this product, right? I know, I know. I'm sorry. Okay. Some AI dev stuff, I guess. Mostly AI. A US District court judge has ruled that the New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft can continue forward.

[Paul Thurott]

Why is this not settled?

[Richard Campbell]

I know. Well, because of this next news item, because today Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media of the guy that prints the books with all the funny pictures on the covers did a study on OpenAI's content and I think using math, determined to something like an 88% probability they're stealing his content. They're just stealing it.

[Paul Thurott]

He probably just asked Chat gbt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. What's the. Yeah. What's the possibility? And they were like, oh, it's pretty high, man.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you steal my stuff bad? Well, is.

[Richard Campbell]

There are more. Yeah, it's higher than the percentage of people that should be using a Microsoft account. Yeah. So because of this story, I, Yeah, I wrote about it. I read his thing, I looked at the report they published. He linked. At the end of the report, there's a paragraph where they talk about the times that a high has been caught stealing. One of them was Meta was found to have stolen content from books from a, like a free pirated book service or whatever. And I'm like, what is this magical service I need to become a member of? No. So I went and looked at this thing, which actually, forget the name of it, maybe I don't want to broadcast what it is, but I pirated a book today because I wanted to see how easy it was and it says.

[Paul Thurott]

Pretty damn easy, remarkably easy.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, to be fair, I pirated a book that is 30 years old and that's easier.

[Paul Thurott]

For sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a Windows CE book that Microsoft Press put out just to kind of see. Yep, super easy. Like super easy. And yeah. So I'm not surprised to discover that Meta was able to do that. And it's a. I mean, as a author, it's like so, yeah, great. But good news, OpenAI is now worth over $300 billion. They just raised $40 billion, which is the most a private company has ever raised at one time. They're the third largest private company in the world by value after SpaceX. And I want to see ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. The interesting thing about this, though is that of the 40, which is not all guaranteed, but will happen this Year. If they go private, they'll get the full 40. 30 of it is coming from soft bank. Right. Which is the. I think they're still Japan based, previous owner of arm. Right. Which means unless my math is wrong, and I think I proved early, it often is, that by the end of this year, if not already, they will actually be the biggest Single investor in OpenAI. Not Microsoft. Right. Microsoft is part of a group of investors that constitute the other 10 billion. But even if Microsoft was 9 billion of that, which they're not. Right. But even if they were, 30 is still more than 13 plus 9 time. Right? Please verify that, Richard. But I think it is. That's right.

[Paul Thurott]

It's better. I don't know what your date, your. Your time zone math, but this is pretty good.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, good.

[Paul Thurott]

Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. I thought I did that one a couple times to make sure, but I thought that was true. And then just because it's open AI.

[Paul Thurott]

That all the tech companies are the ones you're talking about that are the most privately. Like I would think the group is up there, Cargill's up there, but nobody knows because they're privately held.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? This is based on like, because these companies typically go through like a vc.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, they do these private placements, so they advertise their presumed worth. But you know, that worth is supposed to be determined by certain accounting practices verified by the sec. Like how do you determine worth when you're privately held?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, that's what would happen if they acquired open AI, but it's not what happens when they invest, I guess. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Chat GPT. I'm sure everyone saw this Chat GPT put out this new image generation feature, or OpenAI did in chat GPT. And everyone's making these images that look like that. Japanese artists, you know, what do you call it?

[Leo Laporte]

Like wood cuts?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, no, it's like a cartoon style, like a anime kind of something.

[Leo Laporte]

Studio Ghibli. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm surprised there hasn't been more pushback on this. Sam Altman changed his avatar and X and everywhere else to. With one of those characters. What are you just making a middle? Like, what are you doing? Like, that's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, this has been a story for a while we talked about on Sunday, and it turns out there probably isn't any trademark protection for a style of art.

[Richard Campbell]

Is there anything like, is there like a human decency or.

[Leo Laporte]

No ethical something. And meanwhile, I'm going to steal all your books, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

I just want you to yeah, no, you should. Well, actually, I'm going to let everyone steal my books. That's at the end of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Richard Campbell]

So. Or almost. We'll get there. The other thing, you know, you guys definitely have heard of this thing called vibe coding, right? So this term bothered me the second I heard it.

[Leo Laporte]

Everyone loves it's almost there to annoy you. Yeah, the.

[Richard Campbell]

But I also realized it's not what I thought it was and it's clearly not what anyone else thinks it is either. The guy who coined this was a co founder of OpenAI. And I also have the wrong link for the story in the notes. That's hilarious. So I will fix that now. But what he was talking about was not a non developer describing the app or game they want and then having AI create it and have it just be perfect the first time somehow magically. That's not what he's describing. What he's saying is that if you are a experienced developer and know what you're doing, you could talk to AI and have it do most of the work for you, but you will still need to go back and fix things because it's never going to be right.

[Leo Laporte]

I misunderstood. I thought you didn't have a code.

[Richard Campbell]

Everyone misunderstood this. So using his own terms, he says a develop. He's specifically developer speaks to it. Like the developer knows that for example, like he's talking, I think in this case about JavaScript or HTML. But he says decrease the padding on the sidebar by half. Is that a language a non programmer would ever use? Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't understand what that means. But he also says you just accept all every time, review the changes. It's not perfect. It's going to produce bad code. Keep copying pasting error messages to it and it usually fixes it.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

He says it gets into a corner.

[Paul Thurott]

Sometimes and it's done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Then he says, you're talking about.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he says if it keeps doing that, ask it to keep making random changes until the problem goes away.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So he literally, there's a some point you switch over to the infinite number of monkeys mode.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just ridiculous.

[Paul Thurott]

So he says, right. It just became a meme.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. He says vibe coding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Is not coding, but it's not too bad for a throwaway weekend project. It's amusing.

[Leo Laporte]

True.

[Richard Campbell]

It is true. But who does throwaway weekend projects? Developers. It's for developers. Also, I think I mentioned this at some point, but Mark Brazinovich and Scott Hanselman do that podcast and in one of them there Was an amazing conversation where Scott said, well, it's not like, you know, you're gonna tell it to make Python code. You're never going to learn Python. He says, actually that's. Mark said, that is what I do. I don't know Python, but I just keep telling it, improve it, improve it, improve it. And I know what the inputs are, I know what the outputs are supposed to be. I know when it's working correctly. I don't actually have to know what the code does. But it's not like create a Mario game done or whatever. It's not that simple. Look, I'm not a real developer, but I think I know how developers actually think and work. And AI is a wonderful tool for developers. I described it as the Reese's peanut butter cup of tech industry. Like a. AI plus coding. It's perfect. They go together, you know, and it's great for getting over humps and whatnot. And by the way, it's. Obviously it keeps improving. It's going to be great. A lot of times, I'm sure now and then in the future AI can do the bulk of some work of a project, but you still have to go in as the guy who knows what's happening and fix things like the little padding thing he talked about or whatever. It's not. It's not. Not. It would be more tedious trying to describe to AI what you wanted in many cases than to just do it, you know yourself, depending on what it is. So anyway, yeah, Vibe coding. I think everyone's gotten vibe coding wrong. I don't that if you go and read what he wrote, he was not talking about regular people.

[Paul Thurott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Very much talking about developers.

[Paul Thurott]

And it really had the sense it's like this will be funny for other developers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Right. It was. It was aimed at that audience.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So anyway, yeah, he.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually. He coded it in a tweet or a.

[Richard Campbell]

What do you call.

[Leo Laporte]

Ever call an X?

[Richard Campbell]

We're going to call it a tweet.

[Leo Laporte]

Because no one else knows what the hell it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. Like we have to make things every. It was stupid enough as it was. We got used to it. Now you're going to change it. Come on.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. It's a social media message into a questionable matrix. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's Andre Karpathi's There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that code even exists. Dude, he was a founder at OpenAI. He worked at Tesla for a long time in AI and he has, by the way, one of the best videos on how LLMs work. Yeah, if you've got three and a.

[Richard Campbell]

Half, this one really took off. But a month or so earlier he tweeted again, kind of tongue in cheek, but he said the hottest new programming language is English. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I was kind of saying in this too. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I mean. That didn't catch on. So we kept going, you know. Yeah, I guess vibe coding is kind of a.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it's funnier.

[Richard Campbell]

It's caught on.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

For sure. It.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. Touched a nerve or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever it is that it did touch something was a. Not a good touch either.

[Paul Thurott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Follow on to that.

[Paul Thurott]

No, please show on the doll where the tweet does touched you.

[Richard Campbell]

That was the follow on I chose not to do. But okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it though.

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurott]

Well, I've got my catheter here so I should be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You got the Cory Booker commemorative Catholic.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh my goodness. What a. What a.

[Leo Laporte]

If you could do 25 hours, I could do six.

[Paul Thurott]

Incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think we're doing three. Well, we're doing right here.

[Leo Laporte]

I do three plus three most of the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There you go.

[Paul Thurott]

You're right.

[Richard Campbell]

You've been planning, you've been sort of practicing for this for a long time. You should.

[Leo Laporte]

I have been building up to it slowly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This is how you do it.

[Paul Thurott]

I am in Vegas. Right. So there's poker tournaments going downstairs and when someone does the full block, they call them a leather butt.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, Walter Cronkite when he used to anchor the space launches and they sometimes go and hold for hours. They call them old iron butt. So there is something there.

[Paul Thurott]

Just stay in the chair.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you watch it's time for the Xbox segment. Paul, did you watch the Nintendo Switch announcement? No. Switch to announcement.

[Richard Campbell]

I didn't watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

450 bucks.

[Richard Campbell]

I know. I thought I. I thought it was going to be 350 and at 350 that would have been a no brainer. At 450 I'm waiting for Black Friday, you know, or whatever. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How soon before it's discounted? Yeah, I don't know, it seems.

[Paul Thurott]

But it's steam decks. What, 800 bucks. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I mean if you're comparing it to the Steam deck.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but the oled, what was the OLED switch when it launched? Was it 350 at launch or was it more? I don't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't remember. I didn't buy that. I still have the original switch. But I'm thinking about buying this because, you know, you can't hook it up to your TV and get 4K I guess, on some games.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So it looks great, actually. It looks great. I, I, to me, the disappoint. Well, aside from the price, the, the system, it looks excellent. A lot of the games look great. I don't, I was, I really expected Microsoft or Xbox to be part of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh really?

[Richard Campbell]

That at the very least we would have seen Call of Duty. You know, I'm a little confused by that. So there were some third party games in there. I, I think, I don't. Laurent or Brad or someone told me that those Tony Hawk games were ragging on the other day are gonna be on there.

[Leo Laporte]

They're big man, we love skating.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, yep. Hey kids. Yeah. So I don't know. I look, Nintendo has their own way of doing things. I, they do have a kind of a weird track record when they follow up like a big hit. And I think the way they might get around this is that they're not really doing anything different. They've made what essentially is a new Switch. Right. Like it's, you know, like they went from OLED to 4K or whatever. So I think, you know, we'll see. But, but then again, I mean, is there some limit to the number of years that we can basically have the same exact system from these guys? I don't know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because most of the games, I mean on their compatibility games, there's only one game that doesn't work with it from the previous Switch and that's the Nintendo Labo toy Conor VR Kit.

[Richard Campbell]

Geez Louise. And then there are the games that don't work on the original that are new, like the new Mario Kart.

[Leo Laporte]

That's part of a whole bunch of new games. The Elden Ring gang has put together.

[Richard Campbell]

A game this kind of stands in sharp contrast to that Microsoft backward compatibility promise of sorts. Right. I mean it's not 100% obviously, but there's a real focus in Xbox on your library and bringing it forward as much as possible all the time to all the different endpoints and all that kind of stuff. So we'll see. This is an interesting test of this audience. They obviously have like an Apple slash Disney style, very loyal audience and that you can't, I mean the Switch by mid year or a couple of months later will be the best selling console in history. So I, and I guess you could throw this into the. This is the same, you know, it's just more of the same. Right.

[Paul Thurott]

It's still, you know, what Nintendo's really got going for it. Exclusive games.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Mario Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Mario, Mario, Zelda. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Pokemon.

[Paul Thurott]

They have stuck to the fundamentals.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean there's subscription services, multiple subscription services this time.

[Leo Laporte]

There's chat, group chat. There's even a camera. You can see the people you're chatting with.

[Richard Campbell]

Kevin, you're going to buy one or something.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to buy one. Kevin King, our producer and editor is.

[Paul Thurott]

I think not yet.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm probably going to wait till Black Friday. Like Paul, Kevin, you're kind of a childish geek. You're probably going to get one, huh? No, but it looks cool, right? I mean I, if it was 350, I think I would just get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's tough.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know why that hundred bucks is tough on me, but I, there's something about the number. It just, it's like if you're a.

[Leo Laporte]

Mario fan, I guess because you want the new Mario Kart and stuff. But I can wait. I can wait.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I know my buddy who immediately ordered the PS5 Pro. He's probably ordered two of these bloody things.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can't till next week. You gotta wait till the 9th. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Plus, did you see the pre. Well, you have to have owned a Switch and have used it. They're trying to prevent scalpers from stealing them all away.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so the initial pre order is going to be to people who can prove that they have a Switch with.

[Paul Thurott]

A current now on it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I can I order it from the Switch? Maybe that's how they'll, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

How it works but like, yeah, the initial pre orders are going to be for their most loyal customers, which by the way, you know. Sure.

[Paul Thurott]

That's actually really smart. What a great way to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I respect that.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Microsoft would do an event between now and then saying here's the Xbox games on Switch?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't know that it would be Switch specific, but they'll announce, you know, they've been announcing games for both or have they done Switch yet? I know they said they're going to Switch, but I feel like most of the games that they've ported have been PS5, but I think at least some.

[Paul Thurott]

We don't have E3 to go to anymore. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, you'll definitely see stuff, stuff on this. But I, I, I don't know, maybe my. They wanted to keep it in house mostly for this initial thing. I don't know, I just thought there was going to be something, you know, and there wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I could watch Nintendo direct on the Switch.

[Richard Campbell]

This event was apparently kind of a disaster too. I guess it glitched up a bunch and. Ah.

[Paul Thurott]

Oops. Boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they must have had Microsoft do it for him. Yeah, I don't know.

[Paul Thurott]

You sure, you sure it wasn't Twitter? Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I'm actually not. I could have been Twitter. Yeah, sure. I don't know.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, yeah, I don't care about Mario, but like I. I don't know some of this stuff.

[Paul Thurott]

But you care about Zelda, don't you? You have to care about.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't care about Zelda, but I. What I do care about is a screen with the controller stuff on the sides that I can actually see. You know, it's not like a phone.

[Paul Thurott]

Steam deck.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think this is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, I feel like this is better than the Steam deck. I feel like it's more.

[Richard Campbell]

Well this is that mainstream versus it depends on the gamer. Yeah, yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's. Anything bad about Nintendo? I think they have played the. They've played the video game industry smarter than any of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah, I agree with that.

[Paul Thurott]

If they stick to their knitting, they care about the kids and they always.

[Richard Campbell]

Go off they're Apple like in that way they do this kind of their take on something and it's always often sucked into the.

[Leo Laporte]

Into the arms before I can buy it. I have to register my interest.

[Richard Campbell]

You pre ordered the pre order. Congratulations.

[Paul Thurott]

Can you identify these fire hydrants to.

[Leo Laporte]

Scan the QR code? And I. Oh my gosh. Well that's when you're in charge. When you're powerful. Right. You can.

[Paul Thurott]

I gotta say this like I have some friends, friends whose kids actually are into Nintendo hacking.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh jeez.

[Paul Thurott]

They're. They're hacking. Old resistance is non trivial. Like it's.

[Richard Campbell]

What does it mean, Nintendo? Like what does that.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, you know that there's piratable games and that there's account changes. Like there's a bunch of things you can do in there, but they'll simply block your device. You know, if you get caught it's like boom. You can't.

[Richard Campbell]

Well this is so all the copy protection, drm, blah blah blah, whatever can all be traced back to the original Nest. And the reason they did that was because the video game market had collapsed and they didn't want all this low quality crap to appear on the console. Like it happened with the Atari 2600 especially. And it was. It was a quality thing. But what they really did was turn it into a. Well The App Store model. We have to. You know, you're. Everything's going to go through us if you want to publish on the system. And they did that in 19.

[Paul Thurott]

That was always.

[Richard Campbell]

Or whatever year that was. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that was. And it was in response to Atari, which allows so much crap.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. No, I. This is. This is. This is not just related to tech, but I mean there are a million examples of. We didn't do this to hurt the world. We did it for a good reason and. Yep. And you also hurt the world. You know, like McDonald's was a response to everyone's in cars. And we. And there's a need for this kind of a new kind of a restaurant that also killed us as a country. So they. They did both. Congratulations. Patience. You know, I guess it's like the unintended consequences thing or whatever. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You're saying that when he got his.

[Paul Thurott]

Device locked out, he told his father. His father passed it over to me and I chat him a bit. I'm like, there's really only one workaround. You have to get another one. Yeah. And then the father's like. And I am not buying it.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. I was. My kids both came home over the holidays and they both have a switch, which I.

[Paul Thurott]

It's not.

[Richard Campbell]

Was. I was like, what?

[Paul Thurott]

My 30 somethings both have switches.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're a student, you don't have room for a big game layout. I think that makes a lot of.

[Richard Campbell]

Sense in this apartment. Now in the corner.

[Paul Thurott]

Animal Crossing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they're always on, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the Animal crossing switch. That's the one I.

[Paul Thurott]

It's a cult, man.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a thing that saved me during COVID I played a lot of Animal Crossing.

[Paul Thurott]

Animal Crossing, Yeah. Just so nice and happy in there too.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. This was a happy country. Nobody was wearing masks. It was great.

[Richard Campbell]

I just. I'm pretty sure I was all Call of Duty during COVID I came out of it angrier than I was going in, you know? Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

We. We still are. Pandemic the only way. Maybe some of us are gardening, some of us are teabagging. It's the same, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, you're on fire today.

[Richard Campbell]

Some people hug some people.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm warming up for Intelligent Machine.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're gonna fit right in there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's a different way of doing things, that's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You say tomato.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I have to find my two factor authentication.

[Richard Campbell]

I knew it. Here we go. If I were to ask you if you knew what Fire Hardened looks like, would you be able to pick it out of a photo?

[Leo Laporte]

I can't see one in my head. All right, what else is new?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yes. Where are we? Oh yes. Other things have happened. You'll be delighted to know that Amazon Luna still exists and they have signed a multi year agreement with EA to bring many of their best games to that platform. And three of them are available now. More are on the way. You need that, you know, it's 10 bucks a month subscription plus, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I haven't looked at Luna in a while. I should probably take a look at this again. It just reminds me that if you're not doing this every month, like once or twice a month, you should do this, which is go to the Amazon prime gaming website and just grab the free games you want from there because some of them are really good every month. You know, it's kind of a crazy thing that they do, which is really nice. But yeah, Luna, I, I looked at this, it's probably a couple of years ago now, it's been a while. But if you use their controller and again, this is out of data information now, but it was a little bit like Stadia in that you had that kind of direct connection kind of effect where it was a little bit better than using an Xbox controller or whatever because it would connect to the service.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm really appreciating their partnering with Electronic Arts because those guys have done so well with online games.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. I don't play any of these games, but when you see the titles you're like, yeah, like you've heard of everyone.

[Paul Thurott]

Being very sarcastic because I think, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Well they do the, like all the canceled online games. Oh, I see. Well, they, but they do all the sports games and I, to me, like that's, I don't know if that's online or if you just play in person with people, but I think those are huge. They have the Star wars games, Dead Space, Death Stranding, which I think is a sequel coming soon. Yeah, the Metro games, those are kind of, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I have a very limited view of the online gaming space, so I'm not really sure. But anyway, so that's happening. And then Microsoft announced Backbone is this company that makes these controllers. Right. For phones. And so there's a new version of their controller for the Xbox that looks like an Xbox controller.

[Paul Thurott]

They're these new controllers. They're making the mobility, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Really controls. They're gorgeous and smart and 3D printable and like I'm just blown away by what they're making there.

[Richard Campbell]

I wish to God that this thing worked with a iPad mini. You know, I need like just like one size up would be great, but works with Androids and iPhones. So it's, you know, whatever, 110 bucks. USB, C based. Obviously it looks good. I don't know, I mean, I've heard of the company. I've seen these kind of things. I've always kind of wanted one. This, you know, this is the thing that will turn, well, I guess a phone, but better yet a tablet into a Switch or Steam Deck type thing. Right. With the, you know, the two halves of the controller on either side. It's a good idea. And finally today, because it is the beginning of April, we got a new list of game pass games across cloud, console and PC. And this time I actually recognize some of these games all the time. Yeah, well, this time actually pretty good, right? So Borderlands 3 Ultimate Editions in there. That's a good game. Still wakes the deep. Diablo 3 Ultimate Edition, Ultimate Evil Edition.

[Paul Thurott]

And then still wakes the deep, but Diablo for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurott]

And. And of course Borderlands is just a phenomenon.

[Richard Campbell]

Excellent.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, you know, it's one of those few games where it doesn't matter which version you play. They're all a riot.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they did something like Cross Strike was like this for a while. I'm not sure if it's still a thing or whatever. I know it's still a thing, but I'm not sure, you know, it's not big like it used to be, but like where they, they just adopted this kind of neat art style that was also technically easier to draw than actual complex graphics like you would get with a counter strike. Right, Counter strike. I'm sorry, what? I say cross strike. Sorry, I'm stuck on what's wrong. Sorry.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, the graph. The style of counter strike. Like and then they played it in with the whole cartoon sequence and the music. It was just, it was, it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Just really well done.

[Paul Thurott]

To kill people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Or kill, you know, electrons. There's no. It's software. Software.

[Richard Campbell]

I like it. And. Yeah, I think that's it.

[Paul Thurott]

That's all you got to say about that?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yep.

[Paul Thurott]

He's still trying to figure out what a hydrant is, isn't he?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

He's like, is it the plant? Oh, damn it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man.

[Paul Thurott]

What color are they painted?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I can't buy a switch too well. There you go.

[Paul Thurott]

Not this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Not you who you're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell. The Back of the book is just around the corner. That's the place where we get the tips, the apps, and the whiskey of the week. I know you want that, but before we get there. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna beg. I'm gonna beg for. For money for Club Twit. But I have to say, it's a very affordable club. 7 bucks a month is all you have to pay to join the club. Now you do it. I think I would encourage you do it because you think this programming, the stuff we do, like Windows Weekly and. And Twit and all the other shows we do, are worth it, because that's really the reason. It's to help support our programming. It's not to enrich anybody. It's not enough to enrich anybody. It doesn't go into my pocket at all. It goes into paying our hosts, paying our lighting bill, and all of that. Yeah, we have advertisers. Advertisers do cover the bulk of it, but there's still a shortfall, and without the club, we would have to cut a little bit more. So. So your. Your seven bucks is very much appreciated. We do give you some benefits. You get ad free versions of all the shows you're paying us. We don't need to show ads to you, including this pitch. You wouldn't be seeing this. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a really fun hang. There are great people in there talking about not just our shows, but all kinds of stuff. It's really my social network now. I just. I just really like hanging out in Club Twitter. Let's jump to the present and see what the Club Twitters are saying about all this. They also. We do special events inside the club. We've got some events coming up. Thursday. We're going to have our photo show with Chris Marquardt. We do that every month. We'll review your assignment, which was the word brilliant, and then we'll get some photography news. Paul does Hands on Windows. We have Hands on Mac with Micah. Hands on Tech with Micah. Home theater geeks with Scott Wilkinson. We all record in there. Micah does his crafting corner. He's building some little Lego succulents, I believe. But you can do any kind of craft. Knitting, crochet, painting, whatever you're building. A rocket ship, a monster. It's a great place to hang out and be cozy while you're doing it. Our coffee show is back this month, April 18th. Liz Happybeans joins us. Anthony's doing the AI user group. Please show up for that if you, if you want to talk about using AI. I'm sorry I missed the last couple of them, but I will be in the next one, I promise. And we've decided to do something new in the club. And you'll see this is brand new in our events. I don't know if you know this, but Apple has been taking us down on YouTube and now Twitch. Every time we talk about or rebroadcast the Apple streams, it's their right. It's their, what am I doing? I'm pressing the wrong button. There we go. It's their copyright stream. So they can say you're not allowed to cover it, but we still would like to cover it. And so what we're going to do is we're going to not stream it publicly, but we're going to stream it in the club. So Mike and I, this will be the first time we've done this. June 9, for the WWDC keynote. And because it's in the club, we want you to come in, talk with us, you can share the broadcast with us, give us your thoughts. And we're going to spend the whole day, it's all day Monday, June 9th. We're not only going to do the keynote, we're going to do something we don't usually cover, which is the State of the Union speech that follows immediately after. That's I think, maybe even more interesting. It's certainly more technical. So Micah and I will be back together again covering the WWC DC keynote. I think we'll start doing that with all of our keynotes. We'll just do them inside the club. So if you want to watch those rebroadcasts or live broadcasts with breaking news, another reason to join the club. For more information, TWiT TV Club, TWiT. And thanks in advance. We really appreciate it. It makes a big difference to us. As oh boy says in our discord, I love being part of the club. I wish I would have joined sooner. So there you go. Don't delay. Join the club. All right.

[D]

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[E]

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[Leo Laporte]

Now back we go to the show and Paul Thurat with his tip of the week. Paul?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So Bill Gates is giving away the source code to the PD. No, sorry. To the Altair Basic to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Microsoft. But I'm not a billionaire, so I can't give away stuff. But actually I tried. I was going to give away my books, but Lean Pub wouldn't let me do it. So for the next, for the, for the day, I guess for the next 24 hours anyway, the Windows 10, Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows Everywhere are all 99 cents.

[Leo Laporte]

You're insane, Paul. You're insane.

[Richard Campbell]

I tried to make them crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy. You could pay more if you want.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'd encourage you to do so. But the minimum price is now 99 cents.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I, I got. There is a service out there that will find these books for you for free, as I mentioned earlier. But, you know, plus you get the free updates at least on the two of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you could pay more. If you pay $20, the authors earn 16. That's a nice thing about LeanPub. You got a little slider there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm just trying to get rich, like 30 cents at a time.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the way to do it. That's the way to do it. Let me look for the entire Thorat catalog, all the books. Windows 11 Field Guide. I don't know why I was showing the Windows 10 field guide that's now included in the Windows 11 field guide and Windows Everywhere, which I think is really cool. The rise and fall of the most important software platform of all time. Now just 99 cents.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's bargain basement now. Just like Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very generous. That's only for today though.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Just for. I'll. I'll probably go through the end of tomorrow just to give people time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because it takes them a while. I mean some people hear the episode.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'll put something on my site about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Good. Eternal spring. Is there also your guy?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this is our Mexico City guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Before I go to Mexico City, I have to have this. Obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

Progress.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Just hit. Well, these are smaller pages because it's like guidebook size but it's like. It's just about 500 pages long now. So it's getting there.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a big, big city.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're still in. It's still a work in progress. 60% completely nice. Well, when I move there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna get a little place off the Zocalo and then just hang out with.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'd go a little further out than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a little too busy in there. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't afford Roma Norte. I mean that's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you can, but you should go down to one of the further out areas and just like escape all the. The noise.

[Leo Laporte]

But I want the junk man. I want the guava picker.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you're not going to escape that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's part of the fabric today.

[Leo Laporte]

Who needs gas? All right. App anyway. That's nice. It's [e-mail] just search for the thoracic library. Do you. You would ever. You can't do a humble bundle kind of thing, I guess with God knows.

[Richard Campbell]

What I can do on this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I tried to. It. There's a switch in it tells me I can make it zero and then I do it. It's like you can't make this thing zero.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was like you trying to do the capture, you know like.

[Leo Laporte]

I tried, I tried but I'm not a human.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I just didn't work.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway. Yeah, I tried. So if you watch hands on Windows we. We go back and forth between tweak apps that can like help you, you know, Windows 11 work the way you want it to work and then like AI plus new features in Windows 11. It's kind of become the. The normal theme. Like this is one I'll be Doing soon. This is a really good one. I'm not sure why I haven't ever covered this before, but it's called wintoys. It's free. You get it in the store if when you run it, you'll see. It's kind of a modern app that's got that sidebar with a bunch of stuff on it. You just go down the last one. Last one's called Tweaks. That's where everything is. It's all the great stuff using this. It reminded me of the personal hell that I'm stuck in, which is that I write about Windows as it is for the book. Right. Which I'm now giving away for 99 cents and also for my site. So I can't really do to Windows what I want to do with it. Which, no, it's not what you think, but rather disable some of the horrible behaviors. I have to see what they're doing.

[Paul Thurott]

And what regular people would see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And then a week or two ago, I think I discussed a File Explorer alternative. File Explorer is a big problem in Windows 11. Last year or so they've been bulking it up with winui. It's slow and buggy and the default home screen loads really slow. It's garbage. But the Files app that I talked about is pretty. But it also has same problem. One of the things that's available in this wintoys app, which you can also do other ways, I actually have a registry script for this is you get to switch to what they call the classic File Explorer. And what they mean by that is the pre WinUI version of File Explorer. It looks like the Windows 10 File Explorer. Let me tell you something, that one's really fast. I don't mean that it copies files faster. I mean it loads fast, does things fast, the UI changes fast. Like there's no garbage or it does what you ask. It's a File Explorer. Yeah. And so I'm like, you know what? I think I'm just gonna do this now. Like this is what I'm going to do. I. I just can't take it anymore. I can't. Like, I load the thing and it, it sits there drawing in real time and it's like, guys, it's 2025, come on. So like that's been one for me. I. I will say there's a bunch of stuff I recommend in the my little tip article. Like the stuff you should look at all of the start menu settings, like recommendations suggestions, turn all this stuff off that classic interface, File Explorer, etcetera You can disable telemetry with this thing, turn off all the ads everywhere in the system. You can do this otherwise. But there's a feature in Windows that is fairly recent where you right click an icon in the taskbar, and one of the choices there will be End Task, which is the equivalent of bringing up Task Manager and actually killing that thing. Like, it actually ends the task. Like, you know, sometimes. Yeah, it actually works. So you should enable that, too. Like, that actually is sadly necessary. I haven't looked at this last one too much. There's a single switch. It just says Digital Markets Act. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Dma.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So if you look this up. I wrote a story about this when it happened, but Microsoft has a website where they explain all of the changes they're making to Windows, but only in the European economic area to meet the legal requirements of the dma. So if you flip this switch, you can have those anywhere in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great. It just tells Windows that you're in the eu, probably.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You can uninstall Edge, for example. You can uninstall Bing. You can do all kinds of things you can't do here. So, like I said, I haven't looked at that one too much. I did enable it. I'm gonna. I am gonna screw around with this soon.

[Leo Laporte]

This is pretty sweet. It looks like these are all little registries.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That it's doing.

[Richard Campbell]

And I know. I know that is what it is because that's how I enable most of these things. And I've been thinking about writing an app like this. But the one thing I would add, like, if I ever do the app that I'm thinking of, it would be a little bit like the tweak section of this app. And the one thing I would add is that it would. Ironically, because I just complained about this, I would ask. You wouldn't just do this, but you could run something at every time the computer boots that would compare what was running and what setting certain settings were like. If you changed any settings in the app, it would look for those settings and see if they were still the same as you set them. If they're not, you could tell it to either show you a notification or just change it back. Because one of my strong suspicions, which is based on the fact that this really happens, is that you install a feature update which is annual, and it resets some settings.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you have to go in and figure out what those are and change them back. I think then this one, I'm not sure, but I believe now, because Microsoft is just updating Windows all the time, that there are cumulative updates that could arrive that might do that as well. So I'm really interested in something that would monitor Windows and then report back. Right. This is something I'm probably going to do unless somebody I keep mentioning, I'm kind of hoping someone else just does it. But someday either I or someone else will do this.

[Leo Laporte]

This.

[Richard Campbell]

I think this is a good idea because I feel like Windows does things behind your back.

[Leo Laporte]

Shameful.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Bogdan Petrosian, who wrote this. Windtoys is not a Microsoft tool, despite the kind of name might imply that.

[Richard Campbell]

And it looks. It looks like a modern Windows app. Like, it's nice, it's nicely done, it's got a nice design, it's a bunch of switches.

[Paul Thurott]

But yeah, you're thinking of PowerToys, which is a Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, someone was like, so this is just like PowerToys. Like, actually, this is nothing like PowerToy. It's like completely new. PowerToys are standalone utilities that improve Windows in whatever way. And sometimes they actually make their way into Windows, which granted is very cool, but. No, this is. There are. It's. Windows used to always have these like hidden APIs that like the developers at Microsoft would use or hidden features or whatever. This goes after these things that are built into the system. But. But Microsoft either doesn't have a UI for or does have ui and it's all over the place. Like, a lot of the privacy settings, for example, are in privacy settings in the Settings app, but they're here, here, here. You know, they're in a million different places and this thing is like click and it just does them all at one time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I wish I had? I wish I could get GitHub Copilot to write my DevOps scripts for me. I just feel like that would be so handy. I wish there were somewhere I could learn.

[Richard Campbell]

But Leo, AI can't write code.

[Leo Laporte]

I want a vibe. I want to do some vibes.

[Richard Campbell]

I just want to vibe code a setting. Like a admin script.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And guess what? Richard Campbell might just have an answer to my conundrum.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, I should have called this show vibe coding in PowerShell.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I love it. But now you can use it for later.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. Yes, you still can.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it's been. It had been five years since I had Jessica Dean on. Last time was like the fall of 2020. And back then she worked for Microsoft as a cloud advocate. Now she works for GitHub as a. As a developer advocate. So we ended up talking about GitHub copilot and she really went down her workflow for how she does automation as an administrator using GitHub Copilot. Rather than, you know, going to the search bar, it's like, first go to the LLM and talk about what automation you want to do, what script you want to write, even debate, should you do some powershell, are there other ways? That sort of thing. And then, you know, iterate through until you get to a place it really isn't that far off, the whole bytecode thing. Except let's be clear, we're talking sysadmins, and sysadmins are many things and Vibey's not one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurott]

You know, we're really concerned about consistency and reliability.

[Richard Campbell]

What is the opposite?

[Paul Thurott]

You know, that's why we wanted automation in the first place.

[Leo Laporte]

Hard coding.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. No, we want stuff to be correct because there are consequences when it's incorrect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurott]

And so we went through some of the settings you can play with on get on GitHub copilot and the chat modes using Visual Studio code and the various extensions to really get advantages of making all that stuff work well. Well, and great conversation, really. I. I talked, we talked about GitHub co pilot in the system in context before. But it's 2025 and things have moved on and so it was good to get to the latest bits and that's what Jess was all in on.

[Leo Laporte]

Run his radio episode [e-mail] staring 1000 in the face. What are you gonna do for your thousandth?

[Paul Thurott]

I think I'm just gonna throw a party.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

For 6,500 people at the T Mobile arena in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada.

[Paul Thurott]

That was this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's been done.

[Paul Thurott]

The summertime.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think it's time to talk about the water of life, if you don't.

[Paul Thurott]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Better than testicles.

[Paul Thurott]

Anyway, I may have mentioned last week as much as I was having glitchy problems in Microsoft Studio, that because it was during the MVP summit, I had been brought a lot of bottles of whiskey, which I did not bring with me to Vegas. I took them home. But I had been meaning to talk about Highland park for a while, so I've, you know, prepared that conversation for this. It's another very popular whiskey, without a doubt, and it's one of the island whiskies you know, we talked about the different regions of Scottish whiskey, but the islands is kind of a misnomer because generally when I say island whiskey, you mean Islay or Jura, maybe sky, which is in a very different location. But this is the Orkneys, and the.

[Leo Laporte]

Orkneys are the old, good old Orkneys.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. So the Shetland Islands, of course, are even farther in the Faro Islands, even farther than that. But the Orkneys are the ones relatively up close. They're actually a group of about 70 islands, of which only three are, are, you know, really big. The largest one's called Mainland, which is hilarious. Maybe 20, 000 people live total on the islands. Three quarters of them live on mainland, which is about 500 square kilometers. And there's only three towns across the whole set of islands that have more than 500 people in them. So it is very distributed there. The big town is Kirkwall. There's an overnight ferry from Aberdeen you can take, although there are other ferries, mostly just passenger ferries that come from great places like Scrabster and gills and John O'Groats which is all on Caithness, which is the northern part of the mainland of Scotland. Why are people there? Well, very fertile soils. Also an incredibly mild climate. The temperatures in the wintertime are about 4 degrees centigrade, maybe 39 Fahrenheit. And the highs in the, you know, summertime average about 12 degrees, only like 55. So it's never that cold and it's never that hot. Yeah, they dip below freezing sometimes, but the Gulf Stream keeps it pretty steady there. But the wind is constant. There are virtually no trees of any kind. But there's been people there for a really long time. They make more than their, their total power consumption, electricity. Even though they're connected to the mainland, they actually dumping electricity into Scotland for the most part. And they're far enough north north that at the summer stoles this. It doesn't get dark at night. They call it the simmerdim when that. When it gets that bright. So it. The. It's an island. The islands are about farming, mostly sheep and cattle. There's still some grain growing there, of course, there's lots of fishing. And then tourism is huge. Obviously took a blow during the pandemic, but it's already back in the swing. And that's Highland park is located up there. It's not the only distillery up there. There's also Scapa. And a couple of years ago the Dearness Distillery opened as well. Their big tourism attraction is Neolithic structures. So there's evidence that humans have been living on the Orkneys from as soon as the ice retreated back from there. So there's been artifacts found that are from 9,000 BC and there are standing buildings from 5,000 BC. So this is Mesolithic, not even Neolithic, like the Middle Stone Age. And then of course the Neolithic peoples, which were part of the Daggerlands and all of that area when they water was much lower because the ice was still retreating. And they were the megaliths, the folks who built standing stone structures. And there's a ton of them on the Orkneys. For as small as they are. The must see is like the ring of Brogdar, which is 90 or 60 standing stones in a ring. There's also the stones of Stennis, which includes the, the Odin stone, just in case you weren't sure. The Norse connects and Meshao. And of course I mentioned the Neolithic village that's in Scarabre and there are literally still standing. They were buried, you know, under sands and things. 5000 year old Neolithic homes. Absolutely worth the look. The Romans knew about the Orlands. They call them the Arcades or the Latin, which was actually derived from the earlier Celtic names before the Norwegians showed up. The name itself is kind of funny, the word orc. There's actually a Celtic word orc, which means pig. So there's a theory that the old name was the island of the Young Pigs. But then when the Picts take control of it for the most part after that, although occasionally the Gauls come through and then ultimately the Norse are in control by about 900 AD and the Orkneys were really the base of operations for the Nordic attacks throughout the UK islands for several hundred years. And of course the Norse word orc means seal. So suddenly it was the island of Seals, which the Orkneys have plenty of. And then finally, you know, as the Norse movements fade off, by the 1472, it's declared part of Scotland, like most of the rest of Scotland, and it's the kingdom of Scotland thereafter. So Highland park, as I mentioned, was near Kirkwall. It's just off the A961 if you want to drive there. It's in the southern part of the town. Highland park is not named for the Highlands of Scotland, which is on the mainland. It's actually named for High park, which is where it's located. So the grounds of Orkney are pretty low everywhere there's a few sandstone hills and things, but this one raised area south of Kirkland is called High park. And that's why it's called Highland Park. The actual origins of the place are kind of fun because it goes far enough back into the 1700s that the historical records are not great. My personal favorite version of it, many other people like it, is a character named Magnus Unison, which again, very Norwegian name, who was both a priest and possibly a butcher by day, but was also an illegal distiller and smuggler by night. And in the record of him existing comes from a. A criminal charge in 1798 of illegal distillering up in High Park. We really don't really hear about it much again, but that same location gets an official license as a distillery in 1826 by one Robert Borwick. Don't know if he was related or not. It's all getting a bit fuzzy. It was one. It was the. One of the very first legal distillery license issued certainly in the Orkneys, but in most of Scotland, 1826 was pretty early on. And for about 70 years it stays in the Borwick family through a couple of generations until it's eventually sold in 1895 to James Grant, and that's Glenn Livitt. So back in the Speyside and they continue to operate it, things get shuffled around for a few years. Towards the end of Prohibition in 1937, it's acquired by Highland Distillers. So Highland Distillers have been operating since the 18. Late 1880s, 1887 or so, and they operated the Bonhaven and the Glen Rothies distillery, which we talked about a few weeks ago. And Highland Distillers also acquired Glenn Glassau, Tam Do, Famous Grouse Parkmore, Glenn Turret and the McAllen. And then in 1999 were, quote unquote, bought by the Edrington Group, which is not really what happened. What happened is after so many generations of the family that owned Highland Distillers, moving on, they decided to create a trust to protect these distilleries. You know, in the 90s was when Diageo was emerging and trying to take everything. And so they built this legal structure to keep the group together and then transferred over shipping into the Edgerton Group. So still the same family is just a new entity in a different structure to keep the distilleries together. Highland park is best known for getting the first perfect 100 point score in the Ultimate Whiskeys Challenge tonight in 2013 for their Highland Park Park 25. I have never tasted it. You probably never will. Then the 2013 edition of a Highland park, if you can find one last Sold at auction for about 1200 US. Now if you're going to make whiskey in a windy farming area north of Scotland, you are not going to use wood and you're not going to use coal. You're going to use peat because that's what you got. But, but not all peat is made equal. So most of the peat that we think about is from Islay, which is down in the southwest, which has a very strong sort of seaweed component to it. It tends to be more tarry and resinous. Even the mainland peats that have more lignin in from because they're just decayed plants. So they have more trees in them, have stronger flavors. There are no trees on the Orkneys and so their peat is primarily sphagnum moss and heather. That's what grows there, that's what decays there, that's what becomes peat bog there. And so it actually has a different scent and a different flavor. Now that being said, only 20% of the barley that's used in a Highland park is actually the peated malt from the island. In fact, Highland still does their own maltings unlike almost any other distillery. Although the majority of the barley in a Highland park park comes from the commercial processors. Highland park talks about five Keystones in the way they make their whiskey. That they do hand turn floor modelings like I just described with their peated barley. That they use what they call Hobster Moore peat, which is from the Hobster Moore, which is this heather peat. And that they use sherry casks, cool maturation and cask carbonization. Those are the five keystones. So 20% of the barley is this still hand turned peated barley that they do themselves because none of the rest of them do this anymore. And then they use commercial pre prepared grist for the rest. That means their PPM levels lower than most. You know your typical lagavulin's running about 50, 60 ppm. This is more like 12. So it's an intro to Pete. Like it's really quite gentle and it's a sweeter Pete. Anyway, so they do their big batch in the mash ton. They do their wardrobe quartz into Oregon pine washbacks. I got a dozen of those. It's a 60 hour fermentation which is not particularly long. It's not warm there so they don't have the time battles. They've only got four stills. Two wash stills at 18,000 liters, two spirit stills at 12,000 liters. Relatively short with flat lie arms. Nothing fancy about the still. It's this mixed peat and the mild Pete that's sort of the claim to fame for Highland Park. But there's one other thing that Highland park does that's fairly unique and that is that they do not use third party barrels. They don't use any bourbon barrels. They don't even really use sherry barrels. But they do age in sherry. But here's how they do it. Highland Distillers for many years has owned forests in both Missouri and in Spain. And so they cut their own oak for their own barrels and then they age them with sherry. So they buy sherry for the purpose and they soak these new make barrels in cherry for two years before they put their own fill in it. They fill at a fairly high level at 69.5, but that's because the wood is new and so there's more ability to extract on that. They're not as being. They're not dealing with the fact that there's been previous spirit in the barrel. So they have more options on how they do that. They do very traditional storage, so concrete floors, but only three high horizontal racking. Because the climate is so mild there, they don't have all those same problems. It's just wooden rack houses and. And then they combine their barrels into that cask combination to get to their flavor points. And a 12 year is they don't do any barrel mixing per se. It's all the same kinds of barrels across the board. Except for the bit they're both sherry barrels. Just some Spanish oak and some American oak. And you can buy this. The bevmos I got them, they're about 43 alcohol, $50. So not extreme for a 12 year old. It's kind of a bargain. You know, you can. You'll spend more on a. On a 12 year old Macallan for sure. And you're gonna get a nice intro to Pete. It's pretty light and sweet. It's very drinkable. And it's one of the pot, one of the components that goes into making famous grouse alongside the Macallan. So it's. It's a special kind of whiskey. It's. It won its titles for a reason and it's not a normal pick. If you've got a friend who likes whiskey who's never tried it before, you should get it for the great gift.

[Leo Laporte]

It apparently goes very well with sweet chili crisps. So that's another thing going for it.

[Richard Campbell]

I like the idea of a starter. Pete.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. Yeah, this is where you start, right. This is the whiskey you Start with it's. It's a fresh face. Zesty whiskey.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And again, it doesn't hit you too hard, Right. But it does have some peat in it. So lots of people don't like Pete. You know, if the first whiskey you ever tasted with a Lagavulin, no wonder you're upset.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's very Petey. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So you know, then you went over to Space Nights and you were happy, right? You were drinking McAllen or you're drinking Abalore or something like that. And then somebody said, well you want to move a little more stronger flavors. Highland Park's a good direction to go in.

[Leo Laporte]

I did also want to mention somebody in our discord mentioned that the book I was talking about, Programmers at Work, is now available online on the Internet Archive. So I don't. I would assume that that's on Kindle.

[Richard Campbell]

It's so weird. Like. Yeah, you know, it's a. Yeah, it was one of the first ones I bought, you know, a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Like I really want to reread it because it's, I mean it's got, got dan Bricklin on VisiCalc.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Bob Frankston on Visit Calc. It's got.

[Richard Campbell]

This was all stuff at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Watani.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy Herzfeld and the Mac operating system.

[Richard Campbell]

John Warnock.

[Leo Laporte]

Wayne.

[Richard Campbell]

Postscript.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I know this is, this is a. An artifact.

[Richard Campbell]

This should be. I know, I, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Somewhat better.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to pirate it. No, I'm just kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

The other thing I like on the back of it, it's got an ad for Peter Norton programming the IBM.

[Richard Campbell]

That is amazing. That is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Which I owned actually was a pretty good book.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I had a bunch of Peter Norton books.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think I ever owned a Norton product, but I bought a lot of his books. He had one on IBM, came into my brain. IBM PC assembly language.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Excellent. I know he was. He or his co authors were.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure whoever really wrote it. But whatever. I mean like, like, but yeah. Norton. God, that's so weird.

[Leo Laporte]

He's now a rich fellow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Investing in art. He's an art connoisseur.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, look at him.

[Paul Thurott]

Seems like a rich fellow thing to do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Somebody on the channels was asking about the Depletion of Pete and then they're not wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not making more.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, well, they're, they're also making.

[Paul Thurott]

Sure they don't drain the wetlands. So they're protecting the peat that they have.

[Richard Campbell]

They should.

[Paul Thurott]

They've also Learned to extract the flavors of peat. So a lot of the industrial production of peated whiskey doesn't involve burning as much peat. So you get the flavor without depleting the peat box themselves. And they are making more. It just takes millennia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the problem.

[Richard Campbell]

We just need a couple of dinosaurs to slow.

[Leo Laporte]

Slow process.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. An anaerobic digestion of plant matter.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Bill Gates.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

Picture that in the Wall Street Journal dot style.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's, you know that people had that picture up on a wall and were throwing darts at it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he's redeemed himself like Andrew Carnegie did with his good works later in life.

[Richard Campbell]

Leo, if the Nazis had won World War II and cured cancer, would he we be having this conversation?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me think about that. Actually, that's. That's a mind.

[Richard Campbell]

That's my horribly exaggerated response to that kind of thing. I'm sorry, Paul, go.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to your favorite taco bar and.

[Richard Campbell]

I know a little something. I need some. I need to settle down. I don't know. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat is atthe.com where you currently can get his books for 99 cents should you choose. But pay a little more. He's worth it.

[Richard Campbell]

Two bucks. I mean, come on, man. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

It was everywhere. He filled Windows 11, Eternal Spring Guide to Mexico City. He's also of [e-mail], his blog and posts regularly there. If you become a premium member, there's some wonderful stuff including the first drafts of all those books behind the paywall. So maybe spend the money there instead.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, whatever. However you want to do it is fine. It's all good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Filthy bastards.

[Richard Campbell]

You dirty animals.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell'[e-mail] and of course.net rocks is also there. The show he does with Carl Franklin and he will be sticking around. We're going to give you about 20 minutes. Minutes to re recoup, to hydrate and recoup and we will be. He'll be back on the air with intelligent machines, which is great. Thank you so much.

[Richard Campbell]

My butt is killing me.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a fine gaming chair. That's the key.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm going to be spending about 20 minutes standing up.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Man, I could get the blood to go back down, you know. Yeah. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Windows weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. That would be 1800 UTC. And I mention when we do it because you can watch us produce a show Live, including all the digressions, the swearing at one another, the fist fights. All of that available only on the live streams.

[Richard Campbell]

The misunderstandings, misunderstandings, later, makeups.

[Leo Laporte]

Old leather but himself. Just watch us if you're in the club, on the club, Twit, Discord or YouTube if you're not YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We're all over the place after the fact. On demand versions of the show, audio or video are available at our website, Twit TV WW. And you can also go to the YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share a little clip clips like maybe this Highland park recommendation. Actually we turn all of Richard's whiskey stories into a playlist which is available on the Twit YouTube channel.

[Paul Thurott]

YouTube or something weird from my closet.com.

[Leo Laporte]

Or something weird for my closet.com I love that you kept that site. That's great.

[Paul Thurott]

Just maps to the YouTube feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Goes right to the feed.

[Paul Thurott]

That's easy.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes it easy. We will see you all next week. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. I'll see you in a few minutes, Richard.

[Paul Thurott]

You bet.

[Leo Laporte]

See you next time all you winners and dozers on Windows Weekly. Bye.

[E]

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[Leo Laporte]

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