Windows Weekly 921 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about Week D, the releases from Microsoft, new versions of Windows. We'll also talk about putting AI to work. The Amazon Echo now has an AI era. And then, no, you're not going to be able to get Office for free, supported by ads, or are you? I don't know. Paul will explain next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:41
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorada and Richard Campbell, Episode 921, recorded Wednesday, February 26th 2025. Regrets has a service. Hey, all you winners and dozers gather round. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Microsoft news. Week D version. Not Week D version. Week D version. Cover the latest uh microsoft news week d version not that's kind of version. Week d version. Paul thorat is here from thoratcom.

01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello, paulie I'm afraid to say anything. This is like the eighth time we've tried to start this recording.

01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one knows that, except everybody watching also from uh beautiful madeira park, british columbia. Mr richard campbell, hello, richard hello and say it is beautiful.

01:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll give you the outside shot.

01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this, I this, I always, I feel, I always am so jealous. There you go oh it is.

01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a pretty day, beautiful day, and there, if you look close, the sea lions are out there. They've been eating herring and they're rafting. At the moment they're all holding on to each other in a big bowl how fun. And they regulate their heat by holding one flipper up in the air, so they all look like sharks.

01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's weird well, that's a beautiful few, richard. Thank you for sharing that with us. And now on with the show very naturally.

02:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, thank you, that is the best segue I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, you are the master at this. As good as you get uh, welcome to week d?

02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um. Is there a week e ever?

02:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, yeah, there can be right couple of weeks a year where you have a four times a year.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How does microsoft judge that? Do they start the weeks on sunday or monday?

02:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's either monday or sunday, I'm not actually sure, but um either one works and well yes, but well, I mean, that's how we you know, either one's fine getting a fifth week would require extending into a monday, I would think okay, yeah, so maybe it is Monday. I don't really know. Actually, no one knows. You have stumped me. Yeah, I will ask ChatGPT what it thinks about that.

02:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's go ask ChatGPT For purposes of the service lifecycle.

02:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does Microsoft begin?

02:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
its week on a Sunday. Seriously, it's probably Tuesday. I guess that's when the thing's supposed to deploy Right. Yeah, I guess that's when the thing's supposed to deploy Right.

03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, no, okay. Actually, it kind of doesn't matter, because it's the fifth Tuesday of the month. So the month is a thing and it doesn't matter what the week starts on.

03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Tuesday.

03:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That will always be the fifth Tuesday regardless of how they measure weeks, but not every month has five Tuesdays. You have not stumped me, mr Lepore.

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I figured it out there will only be four of them, I see you have the new ai enabled, amazon echo.

03:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why, right? No, this is the. Actually that's a non-ai, engineered.

03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh yeah, google, whatever it is yeah, I'm looking at where, as we speak, every third picture is a black screen that shows nothing.

03:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and then when I say to it, hey, jay, I'd like to not see that photo again, it says I'm sorry, we don't know how to do that on this device.

03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well you just have to enjoy the blackness. It's a brief period of rest. So there was let's see a week D preview update. Am I wrong on that? You're correct.

04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you're correct, unless you actually wanted to get it. I have yet to see it on any of my computers, but 23, 24h2 are getting the same set of updates, essentially, and it's what we talked about before. So this has made its way into the release preview channel in the Insider Program and now it's here in preview form and then in two weeks, on patch tuesday in march I can't believe it's already march or almost march um, we'll get these in stable. So for now you can avoid it, but then, you know, in about two weeks you can not avoid it. So, in keeping with the patch tuesday from this past month, I guess technically from this month, minor updates.

04:45
I did a little episode on hands-on windows about the patch Tuesday updates from, I guess it's February and March and potentially beyond. You know, probably June by the time you see that. But you know at some point we'll be able to go through that. So there's not anything dramatic, like I said. So, sharing from the taskbar if you have an app that's open or pinned to the taskbar and you right click and it has a jump list with documents, you'll see a share item next to those documents, so you can share right from there.

05:17
It's a nice feature. Yeah, that's about it. That's important. I mean the spotlight has changed in a minimal way both on the lock screen and on the desktop, just for ease of access to identifying that image that you're seeing. You can snooze Windows Backup in File Explorer. So if you've chosen to turn off folder backup for one or more of those folders, it has that kind of annoying little icon like start backup. You can say, hey, turn this off for a little while. You can't turn it off, but you can snooze it. So better than nothing, and that's most of it.

05:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it's more obviously, but most of it's just fixes and minor changes, so nothing dramatic, which is a good way to start the year. And, just in the air of completeness, there are fiveuesdays in april, july, september and december this year, so I'm glad you did the math, I'm just. I want to double check ask emax for that, or was that? No, I did. I looked at a calendar. It's weird, I know oh, that's a weird.

06:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's jesus man. What do you? Do you not use?

06:20
technology I flipped through through a paper calendar like a caveman and then I burned it for fire because I'm dying over here. So yeah, actually, in terms of Windows servicing, if you think about it, the months that follow, the months that Richard just noted, are a little bit of a break, right, because those weeks there's actually a three-week break, if you will, between week D and Patch Tuesday. There, you go yeah, so I guess we'll get the first one of those. In what May? I think you said April was the first one, yeah.

06:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
April's the first, the first, fifth Tuesday, so yeah may I'll have an extra. It'll be a little delayed.

07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'm going to watch you.

07:06
We'll muddle through it somehow. So increasingly, thanks to Microsoft, I feel like I occasionally have to say things that I feel like people will be listening to, maybe in their car or walking, and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about. Right, but I'm going to launch into it anyway, because what else are you going to do? So in the Insider Program we are still in this window where, if you have a machine enrolled in the beta channel, you have the option you don't have to to accept updates for 24 H two instead of 23 H two, and what that means is people in the beta channel, depending on what they've done, will see different updates going forward. So if you have moved forward into 24H2, you are getting the same builds that we get in the dev channel.

07:56
And I've signed onto the dev channel myself on my Surface laptop because I'm trying to test these features that are unique in some of them to Copilot plus PCs right Like recall and click to do and so forth, and then you know you also just get whatever features that are coming down the pike. So I'm a little forward from most, I guess, in this capacity. I'm actually behind most in other capacities. But whatever capacity, I'm actually behind most in other capacities, but whatever. So, uh, dev and beta. If you're in 24h2, this past week got an update to what microsoft is not actually now calling semantic search. That was the name for a little while, but we don't know what the name is going to be, but I'll keep using that term until I can't imagine how they didn't use the word ai.

08:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like it's insane to me.

08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Co-pilot search um yeah, so obvious, yeah so I, I think, possibly going back as far as within a couple of months of the initial what was then called bing chat introduction, microsoft started talking about this thing, which has different names now. Um, its names are legion. Uh, custom gpt was the initial name. It's a little technical of a name. Some of the AI vendors are calling these things apps, you know. But the idea is that you are grounding the AI in a specific set of documents or maybe a folder on a computer, whatever it might be. And, of course, as soon as I heard that, I thought well, I'm going to do this, because I have this ginormous hundreds of gigabytes archive of work data going back 30 years-ish, and I often have to find things and I can't right. And so now you'll be able to prompt a query AI, whatever the AI is when this system is enacted, and get information out of it, right. So I feel like this is technically possible somewhere today, somehow, something, something.

09:50
But in Windows directly, what they're doing is they're adding this feature, which again may or may not be called semantic search, so you can search from the search box on the taskbar, which opens the search pane, which is now Windows key plus S. Right, I got to make sure here. Yeah, and this computer, I have the wrong computers. Yeah, so up through 24H2, up through Copilot plus PCs. Windows key plus Q or S would launch the search pane right With search highlights, et cetera, et cetera, this I don't know why I'm looking this. I already know this one doesn't have it. And then you can search in the file explorer, right.

10:22
And if you've used this search, you know that neither one of these things works worth a damn.

10:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's search on Windows. Don't be silly, it doesn't work at all.

10:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I mean Steve Jobs made fun of this with Mac OS Tiger like 25 years ago, and we still haven't caught up.

10:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The guy's been dead for a decade and it's still funny. He's still right. Yeah, yeah.

10:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, unbelievable, but you know that's the. I guess that's what we live with here in the Windows world. So semantic search is one method by which I might solve this problem for us. Right, it's the technique basically behind recall. You know this notion of you're not actually searching. Well, technically it is metadata, right, but it's not metadata in the files. Like you have a photograph and maybe the metadata has, like, the date taken and if you were an idiot you might have went in there and typed names of people that are something we're not going to do that but no, no one does this right.

11:12
So what it does is some combination of image recognition in the case of images.

11:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know how it's doing this with text, but I mean it would make sense for when it takes the snapshots, for do as much analysis at the time, to create a set of tags, essentially to make that search Exactly To make the search fast.

11:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. Yeah, I don't actually know that. That's how it does it. It kind of doesn't matter. But integrating this type of search into Windows search right, which again you could access in those two different places, is a good idea. Um, in, if it works, I mean it's a good idea. We never really solve the index problem right. So on my own computers I I do the full disk index thing. You can turn that on.

11:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's something that most people don't do if you have an urge to have your computer up to stuff when you're not using it, and it's a way before we moved to ssds.

12:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was a way to create like a chattering sound, because you're constantly you know. Now all it does is speed up the this, the demise of your ssds yeah, now, now we have ssds that are played enough to die silently, so we don't have to worry about that's fine yeah, so they've been rolling this out slowly and of course it's copilot plus pc only right, because it's using these on um disk.

12:24
I keep wanting to look at the wrong computer here, so I'm sorry. So if you have a Copilot plus PC Snapdragon or x86, you can go into your Windows Update history and you'll see the four. They're LLMs or SLMs, they don't call it that, they're called AI updates. That constitute the models used for this purpose and also for recall. There were many more models on the computer. I actually don't know how to find any of them, but those four are in. You can see them in Windows Update. So it is using those.

12:54
I do know that and I also know that it does not work for me. I have not gotten this to work. It is slowly rolling out To see if you have it. You have to meet those qualifications. But if you go to File Explorer and go to that little search box up in the corner, or if you bring up the search interface there's a search bar at the top it will have that little pink, purple, glittery thing we were always doing for AI, because apparently this is a musical theater from the 1970s, I don't, but. But whatever, we've settled on this scholar scheme?

13:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know it could be, you know, the technicolor dream coat, or coat exactly the whiz.

13:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know something like that you know. So I look, I think I I have to say this in sort of a theoretical sense. I think this is a cool idea. I think this, I hope this solves the the you know. The other way would be literally to use an AI and not train it, but have it assess this data and index it. Essentially, I don't think.

13:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No retrieval. Augmented generation RAG is the, is the mechanism for having it available without having to retrain the model over and over again.

14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so we're going to talk about this a little bit later in the show, a combination of RAG and semantic search together is supposed to be the magic right, yeah yep, the simplest version of this is you could open copilot anywhere, you get copilot or go to chat gpt or whatever, and you upload a document and then you start asking the questions. Right, yeah, so imagine that, but for your whole you know file system kind of.

14:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know kind of kind of cool, this kind of thing something we'd actually want, right Like something I want for sure. Yeah, tell me more about my stuff.

14:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yep, and I listen. I I spend so much time looking for something I wrote. You know I've. I've been doing this for 30 plus years now. I have a lot of documents. I have the entire books I've written over many years.

14:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, know, we used to have used to be able to buy a google appliance. It was a one year. We used blue box. I got a few of them over the back in the day. You stick in a rack and it would do indexing on your file store.

14:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was what we wanted yeah, they all said they had us briefly had a browser plugin for individuals that would do something like that as well. Right, in addition, in addition to, you know, internet search.

15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But now these companies have those desktop clients for the storage, things they do and whatever that kind of went away. It's coming back now. It's just software we call it. You know large language models and RAG and semantic search, but it's just software.

15:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. And the language of AI is so foreign that now I know what it's like to listen to me talk to someone else about tech topics, because I'm like what? What are you talking about? You sound like you're speaking Dutch.

15:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, recognize every one of the words you're saying. I just don't know what they mean in the combination. But they don't mean anything together and I wish you would stop doing that.

15:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're freaking me out and yeah. So anyway, this is in the Devon beta channel on 24H2 if you're in that, but it's CFR so it's rolling out over time. You'll get it when you get it.

15:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have it partially on my service, but I like this idea that it's almost an element of recall which is really doing photo scanning of your screen captures. Now, actually scan the photos in my OneDrive so that there's information available to them. That's right.

16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that's how that, right. So I should say this is what it should have been all along. You mentioned a crucial part of the story, which is that the initial release of this, which you know, this is its preview. It's not even I don't even call it a beta, right, but uh, was for text and now, and for different document types, and now the, the update they added this past week is for um, photos that are in your one drive, right, that's exactly right.

16:26
Yeah, so you might, you know, you go to search and it's just like the. You know I have to make things up, but uh, green sweater, and then it will look through your photos now and in addition to whatever documents you might have and, um, you know, and of course, in windows search, you can confine it, say, I just want this to be files, and it will find things that match and it's, it's interesting to do. It's again, I'm, I'm eager. What I really want is that rag functionality that Richard is talking about, where I can point an AI at something, and you know what. I'm sorry we're going to talk about this a little bit later. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but this is something I'm I've always been interested in.

17:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I feel like we're right on the cusp of we're getting to. After two and a half years of hardcore hype, we're getting to features people will actually benefit from. That's right. It's taken a while, but we're getting there. Yeah.

17:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So two weeks-ish ago, some time ago, they issued an update also to Devon Beta. I think it might have been the first of those releases that went out to both where they said hey, you know all that recall data you have that you were storing so you could find stuff. We're going to delete all of it. And it's because we're going to make a big update under the covers to recall, and we'll talk about that later. Okay.

17:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this one has that big update to recall which they have not discussed in the slightest.

17:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I have no idea what it is, because not explaining recall has gone so well for them so far. It's like, wait, guys, you got to start talking about it, like, so I'm sure they will have a separate post at some point. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe what they're actually waiting for is build and where they want to do some you know set of announcements, whatever it might be. But yeah, I mean, it's fair to say that the recall they announced last June has appeared very slowly and has changed and has been updated and you know, know is better and all that stuff. But, um, I also will say, you know, having defended it, uh, as much as any human could, I also find myself never using it. And right, this is all. This may be tied to something again that topic I keep alluding to.

18:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I apologize for, uh, doing that continuously, but you know, I struggle to find I, I struggle to use ai on kind of a day-to-day basis, which I think um sure, and I can advocate once again, for recall is the perfect tool for just enough administration, where, when you're in an elevated privilege level, you want screenshots of everything you're doing because you don't want to be there longer. You absolutely need to and you want absolute proof of what you did yeah, I.

19:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think the best thing that's happened to recall um, this is going to sound a little ironic is taking features out of it and putting those features elsewhere. So like click to do. When they first announced it was a feature of recall where you could bring up a shot from the past and then do things with the text and images you could see on that screen, and that's fine. But I want to do that live. I want to do that in the system and now you can, again, only in preview. It's not in stable yet, or anything like that. So they pulled that out and I think that this semantic search is a little bit like that as well. They started it with recall. I think I can only imagine or conject what they were thinking, but I'm sure at the time they were at kind of a rush schedule. We want to have something that's cool that we could announce with these new PCs.

19:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everything around that whole Snapdragon launch was botched. The dev kits were late, nobody really defined a useful feature.

19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Late or non-existent, so late it became irrelevant.

20:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was on Qualcomm, by the way. But yeah, you're right. I mean the whole it's unfortunate, it's too bad, because the landed on Microsoft to like honest to goodness.

20:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I meant just indexing content in OneDrive and stuff. Like, just start with that, something that everybody already has the problem, I think.

20:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it was a time to market thing and I thought, and because we're only getting remember, this is a long time late, really, we're just starting to get these things. Yeah, um, they also, at that same show, announced the um uh, what do you call? The windows copilot runtime and then never released it right, and so now it's in a very it's in an experimental version of the windows app sdk, um, and honestly, it's in really good shape. It's just not available to everybody. So this stuff takes a while. I think they were looking for a little bit of a win, and the thing that makes me feel bad about that is that we've kind of lost track of the fact that, like the computers these guys shipped were awesome, like they're yeah, they're good, awesome battery life, great performance you know, I just wish I could get a desktop in that with.

21:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. I know, I know I'm really itching to build a machine and they're just not making it easy for me to do. What process do you pick?

21:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right now? Yep, well, and then to me the next step. Here and again, I do this every year, richard, so you get used to this in time, but I always say, maybe at Build they will announce that they're bringing these copilot plus PC capabilities to computers with GPUs. Yeah what?

21:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
a concept.

21:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know that'd be nice.

21:31
1500 tops please, yeah, right, because it feels like that's the time for that kind of announcement. But I don't know anything about that and I would say, if you were to go back and find, every time I said something like maybe at build I was wrong, like 97 percent of the time, or something like it's, it just doesn't seem to ever happen. So, yeah, uh, copilot plus pc and uh, this stuff, it just seems like it's on a slow boil. So, anyway, sorry, um, and then one, one minor update to the snipping tool in canary and dev, but it doesn't say beta, but they're on the same I, I don't know. Anyway, it's just, it's an app, so you update that app through the store. So snipping tool takes screenshots, but it also does screen recordings and they're adding the ability to it's the most basic and obvious thing in the world to trim the beginning and end of the video, right? So a lot of times when you record the screen, you're trying to capture whatever it is.

22:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have that couple of seconds when you turned it on and get yourself in position. You want to cut that off and you want to just cut it right. So by the way, talk about a machine learning model make everybody happy to automatically default to hey, can I just trim this to this for you, is that good?

22:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know that's coming, I mean, and it's probably in some tools already.

22:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yes, absolutely so just we'll get the low-hanging fruit for folks right yep, so, um, in the beta channel.

22:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, this is for the people on 23h2. Um, if I could editorialize for two seconds, um, back in, I'm done. That's two seconds, no. So back in windows 8. Um, they added a bunch of new features, a lot of which kind of disappeared, obviously, but some but some of which persisted, and one of them was this notion of system-wide share, and for share to work, especially back in the beginning, what you needed was apps that would communicate to the system that they were targets for certain types of sharing, right?

23:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is no different than cut and paste, right Like cut and paste is actually Yeah's, it's kind of yeah, next gen cut and paste, I guess you can call it or whatever.

23:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but you know the idea was um, I have this image, right click share. Maybe I want to share it via whatsapp, which is an app you might share with, or, uh, outlook, or whatever, right? Um, you might want to share it to an image um editing app and that would be one. You know that's one. Okay, so this is a common thing we do on phones and mobile devices. Um, microsoft, obviously years long, uh, attempt to make windows simple, like that, work similarly and share for whatever it's where I share what used to be a, you know, remember over on the side, but the um that was, I just forgot the charm bar. I almost called it the Captain Crunch bar, the Lucky Charms bar there in the corner, so that disappeared. So now in Windows 10 and now 11, it shares more of a pane or window that pops up.

24:15
They've added things like nearby sharing, so if you have computers on a local network, you can share from computer to computer, which I do a lot. They added to Richard's point copy and paste to this interface. Right, they've done a lot to try to get people to use this thing. It's pretty clear that no one's really using it because they keep trying. So they took all the meta apps like WhatsApp and Facebook or whatever, and made them share targets for things that are compatible with those apps. This is something meta did not do.

24:43
Microsoft was just like. You know, we think people will use this, we'd like to do this, so they added it for meta, probably for free, right, just to get it going. You can share it to your phone, right? So no one's using this. So in the beta channel in 23 H two, not in 24 H two, curiously, they're testing a new way to share. They're not getting rid of the old way, but in the same way that you drag a window around and you get that little bar at the top for snap where you can pull it up, and you get the layouts and you can use one of the layouts. If you, uh, you can drag a file. And if you drag a file now, instead of a window, you'll get a different pane and this is a drop target for share. So it's a different way to share. They will get you to share somehow.

25:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The joke is that everybody wants this right. Like you, always have this problem. It's just that you don't think to use it, and every time you try and use it, it doesn't work.

25:38
Yes, and I think this is to me is a bad I think that companion app in Windows to connect to my pixel 9 phone any given time. That's doing something different. Mostly it's annoying me because I haven't configured the way it wants it configured. It wants to notify me all the time about everything. Yeah, it's um sorry, but but it's very much that dynamic of hey, I just want to throw a picture over here and it turns out easier to just go to google photos and go download it than it is to try and make the tried and true email yourself which, by the way, is one of the options and share hilariously, which is sort of a capitulation of sorts.

26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I. The issue I have with this is not that I don't think it's a good idea or whatever. I feel like this should be one way to do these things. You know and, um, you know, if you think back to the original version of windows 11, when you did a right click on a file or folder or whatever, or you looked at the command bar in the file explorer, the common actions that you might use on files, like cut, copy, paste and share, didn't have captions, right, so no one knew what they meant they were were like Egyptian.

26:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were little random icons. It could be the top or the bottom of the dialogue, so those are easy to ignore.

26:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So now 24H2, they've added those back. They've added them to the, at least to the context menu, but I don't think they're in file explorer, in the command bar, but whatever. And they've improved share innumerable times. I don't, like I said, I don't think anyone's using them, using the feature whatever, but I I don't. I don't like having too many ways to do the same thing.

27:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I I kind of feel like they should standardize I think you've been talking about microsoft for many decades and you have a problem with too many ways to do things like this is a good way, well traded yep so, look, one of the goals of windows 11 was to reduce that kind of thing.

27:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, it's a support nightmare too, right? Not just for the people that support you know users, but also just for microsoft itself. I mean, you have all these different uis for the same thing and it's like, guys, you know something?

27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
larry wall calls that good in pearl it's uh, they call it tim toady. Right, there's more than one way to do it yeah yeah, well, yeah, but that's pearl, and nobody really wants to use pearls, right?

27:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so it clearly worked out fine for them. Well, I mean, maybe I don't know.

27:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, I I will see what happens. It's possible. They'll test this. People won't like it, they might not put. See what happens. It's possible. They'll test this. People won't like it, they might not put it in Windows. Then again, knowing Windows, they'll absolutely put it in Windows. They're also screwing around with the all apps view in the start menu, right. And so now there's a grid view, which to me isn't really much of a grid, but instead of having like one app per line, all the apps in A and c and e, whatever the letters are, just like in windows phone, right back in the day. And then there's a view that's much like what's it called the app library and ios, where, um, everything's out of order. Well, they're in, they're grouped logically to somebody, um and you, and, just like on ios, you don't get to screw with it, you can't decide what goes where or where they are.

28:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know yeah, like I put my stuff in folders on ios, but it's never those folders. No, those folders are suggestions, recently added social productivity, utilities, creativity, I mean it's just they're right.

28:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what you just read was a non-alphabetical list of folders. It's unclear why those things are first. So I'm telling you, microsoft emulated that almost perfectly nice job, because in their screenshot it's productivity, social creativity, utilities, that goes on.

29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe there's a standard uh yep, taxonomy that we just don't, that you and I just don't know I can tell you what the standard is is uh, it's not.

29:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't do what I want. Do you always use alphabetical. In what way? You mean? Like on a home screen or something? Yeah, like well, or in?

29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your start menu you like alphabetical right.

29:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I don't care about that. Honestly, I'm more of a visual ADHD. I kind of like having the office icons together.

29:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so you do like categories then?

29:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that kind of thing. But as far as the all apps view goes, whether it's an Android, iphone, whatever Windows, that should be alphabetical. And if you're going to use groups like categories with look like folders, I think that should be alphabetical as well, other than maybe the most recently used thing you might have at the beginning or whatever. But yeah as well, other than maybe the most recently used thing you might have at the beginning or whatever. Um, but yeah, they're apparently going in our own little direction and they were very specific. Like no, you're not gonna be able to customize this. You either turn it on or turn it off, it's up to you. But, um, okay, I don't know. Look, we're still messing around with this windows. What windows? Computing?

30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a new paradigm for all of us it'll catch.

30:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Catch on one of these days. One of these days.

30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to go back to Vizion and, like you know, text mode windowing. I just don't, I can't, I don't know what's going on.

30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To make it extra bad for me on the iPhone anyway, I've turned off labels on the icons. So it's very hip these days Now. I just don't know what the hell.

30:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm looking at.

30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could never.

30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a pile of crap.

30:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the biggest mistake I just did this I've been screwing around my home screen on the phone. So on my phone I went in and said I want the background to change every hour and I want it to be like nature. Photos from my collection.

31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

31:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice. So then, 10 hours in a row, some picture came up and I'm like I have no idea where that is. So I was like, all right, fine, I'm going to change it a little bit. I'll add cities to it too. I think cities and nature right, I think I'm hitting about a 30%. I'll show it to my wife. I'll be like do you have any idea where this is? And she's like, nope, is that one of your photos? I'm like, yeah, no, we went there. I don't know what this is.

31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They picked the most obscure photos and there's no way to like long. Press it and see what it is Right.

31:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I glossed over this earlier. But in this week D update, one of the updates is to spotlight, so you can more easily see what that picture is. Perfect, what an idea.

31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can't do that on iOS. It's just a picture. Why do you need to? What do you want? It's your picture how come? You don't know I don't know that I don't know.

31:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I have recall.

31:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know I'm lucky I could find I was going to remember stuff. That's not a thing that's why I took a picture.

31:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm never going to remember it otherwise.

31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I still can't all right, I want to ask you about the new framework laptop. There's some more hardware and stuff, but we're going to take a break and come back. You're watching windows weekly with paul thurott and richard campbell. One hopes their lips are synchronized. Don't get crazy now, not not together oh, I say independently. My mistake, yeah well, if you want to sync lips while we're doing the ad you go right ahead, paul we are close, we're going.

32:25
I'm sorry, actually, did you see the uh video? Who made that? The pika video of you and richard in puerto vallarta and they did an ai and you like reach over.

32:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, geez, oh, I showed that to my wife. It's this split shot too. So he's in mexico I'm, and we reach across the and he reaches across. Yeah, it's wild. Did you do that, anthony? Somebody did it. Don't do you dare show that. He showed it to me and then I.

32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he's in mexico I'm and we reach across the and it reaches across. Yeah, it's wild, it's not creepy. Did you do that, anthony? Somebody did it.

32:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't do dare show that he showed it to me and then I oh, this is ai generated.

32:53 - Bee AI (Announcement)
They're in different, ones in canada, ones in mexico, but they love each other.

32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does. Fortunately, neither of you look like yourselves in it.

33:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's no, and the objects in the background are not my objects like you're almost like a steve buscemi.

33:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you had like an older brother or something, yeah something like that.

33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so, um, unfortunately, anthony said oh, there's a new ai thing you're gonna have to get and he told me about this and he showed me that and I did. I spent 200 bucks for a year, tried it about eight times, got terrible results. I deeply regret that purchase.

33:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, that's what AI is all about. Regret, yeah, regret it's about generating regret. Yeah, generative regret as a service, lasting regret as a service.

33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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34:39
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35:28
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36:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it might be Pittsburgh. It's either France or Pittsburgh.

36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paris or Pittsburgh. That would be a fun game.

36:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We play this game with people here. It's like Mexican or American. And I know it sounds like this would be horribly obvious, but honestly, sometimes you'd be surprised.

37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we have two really good show titles.

37:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Regret also service and paris as or pittsburgh the other game my wife and I play when we're out all the time, but it's especially good here because the language barrier is are they on a date?

37:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh I love doing that, that's a great one and I just love doing that you hear, and then you have to say which date first date.

37:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah you, you hear people talking about themselves in a way that you would never know, with a girlfriend or spouse or whatever. Right, exactly, and uh, it's really.

37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I love that. At least then I do that too.

37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I would be good for this is this these are the deep learning problems that ai is solving, and I don't understand the resistance.

37:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I would never be able to do that, I think sad to say. Yeah, anyway, lenovo has a new uh thing about jigger.

37:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, lenovo and hp both, uh announced their earnings kind of late in the cycle. You know we go through this every quarter. I we still don't have HPs. I would imagine by next week we will. But Lenovo actually had kind of a blowout quarter, which is interesting. These are big numbers. Yeah, these are good numbers. So their revenues and net income, which is profits, are both up 20% year over year. Part of the business that's responsible for PC and smartphone sales, but mostly PCs right Operating profit of a billion dollars up almost 10% year over year. Revenues. There were $13.8 billion, which is I didn't do the math on this but their total revenues were $18.8. So $13.8 of info.

38:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing, yeah 13.8 of foe.

38:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's amazing. Yeah, they are. I mean the, the world's biggest maker of PCs.

38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by, I almost said by volume, by weight by unit sales, by weight by nubbies, by little by Numan.

38:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I mean they, and they had some stuff to say about AI PCs, which include copilot plus PCs.

39:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They said that 50% it couldn't have been Copilot Plus PCs that made the difference here.

39:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, not overall, but PCs that have MPUs right. So 15% of total notebook sales were AI PCs in the quarter. They expect AI PCs to be over half of all of their global shipments by late this year Wow, and over 80% by 2027. So that's what they expect. But overall revenues from PCs were up 10% in the quarter. They have hit a high for market share 24.3%. And also gaming PCs are doing pretty great for them. Um, and this one I can't. There's no data to support this, but they said that commercial pc sales benefited from the windows 11 refresh uh, driving recovery in that segment, and maybe I don't know is that?

40:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is that a tap to microsoft wanted them to say? That is that, that, what that?

40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what it feels, yeah it feels like that, it feels like a relationship, quote you know. Yeah, I don't know how much you mean to me, richard, I just wanted to say PC sales. So, I don't know Something, something.

40:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But their AI server sales are up huge too. Yeah, like almost 60%. That seems like the big driver. I mean it sales are up huge too. Yeah, like almost 60. That seems like the big driver. I mean it's good that all the numbers are up. But the.

40:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is huge yep so this is is this vendors desperate to buy anything called ai in the server space and all of these companies buying the third or fourth stringer look, you're a pc maker, right, you're hp, you're lenovo, whatever, unless you're apple, this is not a business that seems like a big growth area, right you're? You've kind of plateaued here. So, yeah, we're gonna have ups and downs, like we're seeing here, a bit of an up, which is nice, but, um, yeah, so obviously, you know, lenovo has been very active in the phone space. I can't say that they've been super successful, but motorola is probably in the top. Well, now that we have chinese, that they've been super successful, but Motorola is probably in the top.

41:07
Well, now that we have Chinese companies, maybe not anymore, but outside of China certainly would be in the top five, but not generating a lot of news, a lot of interest, right, and they're getting into servers, right, and you see that with the chip makers too. So Intel not doing so great, but AMD going gangbusters there, going after nvidia. So yeah, I mean, these companies are trying to all be part of that. So 59 is great, but then again it's 3.9 billion in revenue, so it's also relatively small, small compared to the rest of the business. So it's growing fast, but, but growing your big units are growing a bit.

41:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Your small units are growing a lot, like somebody needs a bonus here, like they've had a very good year.

41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're doing good, yeah, and for you know, for them to be as dominant as they are in whatever the small pond that piece is is, they definitely have got the red nub cornered, they get the rhythm do they still use this, still put?

42:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
them, yeah, so all mainstream thinkpads still use it.

42:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, they just announced a. I think I might be reviewing it soon. I don't remember the name. I think it's a ThinkPad X9, which has a slightly different design. I believe that one does not have an oven. We'll see. These are the things that are. Lenovo always had the function key and the control key flipped and they didn't move it for a long time because that's what their diehard customers expected. But if you want to grow and you know it's weird and I know they have a software switch where you can flip them around. But my argument was always make the weirdos that like those in the wrong place, flip them around Like they should be in the normal place for everyone else. So they finally did fix that. So we'll see. Anyway, obviously they make great computers and we've got mobile world congress coming up, so you're not going more.

42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just bought a uh, a knuck, a knock, like an actual knock, which, well, it's from system 76, but it's a knock, it's, you know, it's um and it's going to be a server. It's not even going to have a gui on, it's going to be headless um move, wow. Well, I want to run emacs on my ip and I think that's the only way I can do it. Listen.

43:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I talk a lot about mental health and ADHD. I don't know if you've ever been diagnosed or anything, but Shouldn't Well wait a?

43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
minute. Shouldn't every home have a server? Yeah, yeah, right, wait a minute. Shouldn't every home have a server? Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, and I have the. My setup is, I mean?

43:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's a NAS. Maybe we go NAS. Well, I have a NAS, yeah.

43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's not got the most powerful processor. That's true.

43:37
That's true, I have the nice Synology NAS, but I don't really and I also don't want to expose it to the public, to the public, to the outside world either. So I have, because I have a business class ISP, I have a static IP that can be kind of DMZ from the rest of it, and so I want to put a server on that, on that. Yeah, so that's. But then, you know, framework announced their little, I know little baby computer and I thought, oh crap, did I buy the buy the wrong one?

44:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but then, but 76, is it like an ubuntu guy right?

44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like yes and yeah, they have their own. I think that's interesting because they're.

44:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're gonna make sure everything works properly with the os it's.

44:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah it's, that's a big deal yeah, is it pop os? No, it is pop os yeah, but that's based on what like ubuntu. It's an ubuntu downstream, but you can run. I'm gonna take it off and put arch on it, yeah you can run barabuntu on it too, right like, yeah, I mean, that's the thing it's.

44:32
If it supports linux in any flavor, supports all the linux, it supports linux, right, so, and I? There's nothing wrong with pop os, I just don't need a gui, yeah, yeah, and I want a rolling distro, because, god, it's a nightmare that we're back to the note.

44:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, no adult needs a mouse. Conversations of the early 1980s.

44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not only do I not need a mouse. It doesn't have a keyboard mouse or monitor.

44:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to be headless. It's going to be headless.

44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I just feel like I don't know, maybe that's old fashioned. I feel like everybody should have a server in their house and I want to publicly expose it so I can put I don't know what something on it you want to have it from your devices when you're out in the world.

45:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's um.

45:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that crazy yeah the cloud does that, but it's no, but it's very old-fashioned.

45:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm not even sure that's the right term, it's very technical well, yeah, I mean, not a normal person wouldn't do it, yeah.

45:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I'm supposedly technical, but I'm with you, leo. Like I'm not going to expose my Synology even though it's got lots of room to run more docker instances and stuff. Yeah, and I don't really control its updates.

45:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If I'm going to put a machine in the DMZ, it's going to be doing only DMZ things, yeah.

45:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's been a while, but let me see what windows home server is doing these days. Oh well, you love that, paul I was great.

45:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was great back in the day.

45:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a great product. I mean, this thing could be a plex server. I mean if, if, if need be and I was thinking audio books. You know, we were talking before the show cause. Today's the last day that Amazon lets you download your Kindle books, so you can.

46:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love all these uh how to articles, but how easy it is. You know it isn't too straight, it is not easy.

46:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And let me tell you something you need an article. It's not easy.

46:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm trying to understand the cross section Like you make a Venn diagram. You're like here are the people who buy books on Kindle, here are the people that want to strip DRM from any content so they can put it in a different service. And here's the little. Those two circles are way over here.

46:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Then there's no there's so many articles for those. I know that intersection point on the Venn diagram.

46:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it's people like us who really want amazon to pay for making this impossible right look at what's gonna happen.

46:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look I. There are examples of uh, content changing. For example, one of the big ones for me was the james bond books which if you go back and re-read like oh, they took stuff in the past 10 years. Well, the, the originals are kind of offensive in many ways.

47:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, they made them woke, but I think, as the owner of the book or whatever, it's weird. If Ian Fleming was a racist, that's Ian Fleming, we got to.

47:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, I remember literally at the time. Next, you're going to tell me that Han shot first.

47:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No Same thing, right? Actually, that's a good example.

47:25 - Bee AI (Announcement)
That's a more modern example it's the same, no same thing, right?

47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so actually that's a good example. That's a more modern example same thing, and so the the content maker, I guess it has just. This is what we're doing, and you have this thing on a device and if you put it online, you're going to get the update. I'm sorry, you're getting the woke version of james bond, which I think we can all agree is fantastic you know, the good news is we're rolling all that stuff back.

47:47
I know, yeah it's back to the 50s baby exactly so, yeah, the other thing, but I mean not to rip on this topic, but I mean this feature comes out of a time when the kindle first came out, which was the case of with the iphone as well. At that time, where it couldn't do all the stuff itself, you had the. The computer was at the center, so you would download things to the computer and sync it to the device. So now we use it for piracy and now we're outraged that amazon is getting rid of this. Yeah yo, it's crazy.

48:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I just but that's the kind of thing I want to put. I want to have a server that's going to have my kindle books on it and I can. Uh, that's going to have my music on it, it's gonna have my audiobooks, it's gonna have all that stuff and really, and they could all be in plex, but not if it's drm'd and right, etc. Etc. So I just I feel like, um, it all goes hand in hand, doesn't it?

48:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, no, this is what I'm talking about with that. Uh, that I mean I'm doing the nasty thing this year again and I'm working around all the stuff you're talking about. It's the same thing I'm not the.

48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not the guy who's saying I'll never use the cloud. You can't trust the cloud. The clouds, not the.

48:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know no, not at all no, I'm a heavy no, my deal is I I'm gonna keep using that stuff, but I want that to be secondary, I want my primary. I don't recall source of truth, what's the right term. We can't use master anything anymore. But whatever that word is my main, yeah, our main bathroom. I'm like right, you know, kind of just think of it as my.

49:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had that conversation the other day. She says you know, you can't call it the master bedroom anymore. No right, I said, but where am I supposed to sleep if it's not the master bedroom you're?

49:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like, but I am wearing robes. I don't understand where will they? Where will they lower me into the honey bath?

49:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, um, uh, yeah. So then, after I did it, I I thought oh, I crap, and anthony's telling me this too I should have bought an ai nook, like something uh, with more ai capability, because then I could have my home ai server.

49:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And actually that's why this ryzen framework or you could use a external gpu, by the way, which probably work.

49:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, right yeah, this is an intel core ultra 5 on this thing yeah, so I got a lot of ram but I you know, in hindsight maybe I should have bought something like I think you're early on.

50:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we're a little early on the curve for that stuff. But yeah, yes too. Yeah, it's too early.

50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. In a couple of years. I feel like I and I know Richard will have a home AI server Right? Yeah, you probably already do, richard.

50:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean, if I can get around to actually bothering to configure it, but that's what that Snapdragon is going to end up being right? Yeah, I know.

50:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it would my M4. My iPad Pro that runs Lama locally.

50:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it runs it quite credibly. That's great, that's funny. I went with a 64-gig iPad, so I can't really use anything.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But with an increasing number of open-source AIs and increasing hardware, better and better hardware Do you think you have to have an nvidia gpu to do this?

50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that's the streamlined way to do it, because it just works with everything right I mean, if you want to run a llama, whatever it is, and you want it to run effectively and everything you want to work, yeah, I mean I think the nvidia is the best choice.

51:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's sad because this, this new Mac mini that I got Right, has a lot of RAM directly accessible to an AI model. Has the AI stuff, those will work, but it doesn't do CUDA cores and all this AI stuff needs CUDA. Oh, I see what you're saying.

51:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, a lot of those open source AIs local. Ais do work on Macs, because those guys are all using Macs, right. So that's another, probably reasonable choice. I mean, it might not have the performance that one could be the inside server.

51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, make that the inside a.

51:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, like you, have multiple, richard, let me know when you said you have a server front not. Your next statement will be every home needs a server farm and uh, every server has to have a very specific use case.

51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You you know, I've got a cluster in the basement, so you have a DMZ and that has maybe three servers. And Richard's going. I just shut down my exchange server. What are you doing to me?

51:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I de-racked my life and I'm happier for it Is it being funny because I actually have that in my house, yeah,

52:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe we're crazy. Richard, you can talk me off the ledge anytime.

52:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, no, I'm with you. Every home does need a server right, at least for home automation I have some kind of green.

52:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You told me to get the home assistant.

52:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love it and then the file store, which is your synology, like. Those are the fundamentals, and just because the llm workload is so heavy right now, you need a dedicated machine for that.

52:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's got the gpu in it, that's a public facing computer, they're gonna play the dmz game and I'm going on that one just because you know slightly different direction, but yeah, I mean that's one strategy.

52:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So um in the in the pc space.

52:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to say if all of a sudden the lip sync on these shows goes to hell, yeah, it's because I got that server, oh there you go.

52:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm eating up all of it. Well then, we'll just do fake lips anyway and it'll just be like an AI talking Clutch cargo.

52:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, anyway, go ahead. We haven't talked about the framework.

52:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No. So one of the big things that happened this past year was right around the fall timeframe at IFA, intel and, to a greater degree, amd released new chips for PCs that have incredible integrated graphics and GPUs that merit the copilot plus PC spec. So good, the AMD ones are incredible. And then Christmas came, or the holidays came, and ES came around and then they were like, hey, we're not done, we have even better ones. It was like guys, what are you doing Like they're on a tear? We have even better ones. It was like guys, what are you doing? Like they're, they're on a tear.

53:27
So framework I think most people know hopefully is uh, they're, they're really driving the. The right to it's not even right to repair, it's like right to upgrade, like so completely componentized pcs. The big one is a laptop 13, which is a 3, 13 point inch, a 13.5 inch screen, but you know everything's a module so you can pop, pop up the processor, the ram, the whatever, except you know usb or whatever ports you might want to have, um, screen, keyboard, whatever, right. So it colors the panels, everything. You know it's everything can be replaced, neat. So they've been slowly expanding.

53:57
And then yesterday they went on a tear. They announced three new products. So for their classic uh laptop 13, they have the Ryzen AI-based module now and you know, build your own systems and complete systems, right, and this is the latest gen Ryzen stuff, which is awesome. So if you bought an Intel whatever 13th gen or newer whatever module in a framework laptop, you could pop it out and spend whatever. That amount of money is $400 or $500, I would imagine and have a completely new experience, which might be doing, by the way. So that's cool, although this new framework.

54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is a rack mount of four of them has soldered in ram and soldered in cpu and gb, so it's not upgradable which is well very soldered into that module, though right, so it's not onto the motherboard, so you can replace the motherboard you can replace the yeah so that's how the itx motherboard. You could always replace that yep, they, they explain this.

54:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has to do with the design of those ryzen chips, and that's you know. We've seen this in the copilot plus pc pc.

54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say they really tried to make the ram upgradable. But of course you don't get the bandwidth unless you solder it, and that's what apple's done too.

55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's, that's apple's integrated it, I would say right, I mean, I phone started it. But as far as making it mainstream in the pc space, apple absolutely was the inspiration for that.

55:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, you see, um laptops that used to have two ram slots maybe done, it's all soldered on, you know on this and it used to be saving costs, but then when you actually got performance benefits from it as well, it's like okay, yeah, because odds are, you're not lighter um less heat it's you know. Yes, there's a bunch of good things about that and it does.

55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The heat sink solution is a big part of that. I have 128 gigabyte.

55:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, skew, yeah, you can but you have to know what you want you know, buy it at purchase time, right? So yeah, there's that thing. They also introduced their and this won't be shipping I don't think until mid-year their first 12-inch laptop. This is Intel-based, so you're going to get the Core Ultra 2, I would imagine, on that one, and then their first desktop computer. And their description of this is really interesting to me because they say, you know, it's a mini itx, so it's fairly small for a desktop but has expansion cards and all the modular stuff. And you know, their thing there was. Well, you know people, some, some people are going to ask well, I mean, desktop pcs are inherently modular in a way, not maybe not like a knock or a. Well, knocks are fairly modular, but not maybe not like a knock or a. Uh, well, not really modular, but not maybe not like a mac mini or something like that. But you know, this is kind of the next. It's not really small form factor, it's, you know, I mini itx.

56:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But um, any idea is like eight by eight.

56:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's pretty small yeah, it's pretty small but it's, but it's fully modular modular, sorry. So I I think this is gonna do pretty good and I think it's gonna do do good with people who want to play games especially, and I would even work as an AI workstation kind of a thing because of the almost infinite upgradeability of it. I think it's kind of interesting. So they're expanding pretty well.

57:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So here's a question when you go to upgrade this mini itx machine? So you're really just going to get a new mini itx board. They're going to make a new generation.

57:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going to want it, yeah what do you do with the old one? Oh, that's a good question. I'm knowing this company. I would imagine they allow you to sell it back to them to recycle a core swap would be awesome yeah, like we get a credit.

57:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a practice of mine to find a kid who needs a computer and have the computer with my spares.

57:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's tough with a module because not everyone has this. Yeah, you'd have to be all in on the module right, right, right. I don't know. I don't know if Leo knows how they handle that.

57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I used to have the framework uh 13 and I loved it right, loved it and did do the upgrades and you could upgrade the ram and upgrade the cpu yeah, yeah.

57:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the other thing this betrays, by the way, is one of my big complaints. I have several, I guess, with modern computers, laptops, that I review is you'll have a situation where you don't have at least one USB-C port on each side. That's starting to shift finally, with years into this, whatever. But the bigger problem is you might have, you can have, as many as three or four different types of USB ports. So you have, like, a USB-C that's Thunderbolt 4, you get one that's only USB-C 3.2, blah, blah, blah, whatever that has less bandwidth. You might have USB-A that's literally a 2.0, like a what is that? 480, you know? Uh, the old school, the old, yeah, just slow but designed to charge a phone or something.

58:34
And you know, my argument has always been like, guys, just use the best one all the time everywhere. I don't understand why you would have what's the downside supports. So the difference is that for a pc maker, they sell, they save 13 cents or something. Right, yeah, and if you buy these usb modules from framework for your framework laptop or desktop, I would imagine, um, they're all the same price. So they they're not making money on that like, and in fact I think they mostly just sell the best one there is. So, yeah, or it's some combination of that, but you won't pay more for a thunderbolt 4 than you would for well, and you'll pay less for one of those modules, and a bloody dongle too.

59:12
So you might as well get the ones you want, even the spares, because you can change so in other words, like I would want at least one on each side, and I probably want two on each side, honestly, for whatever. But um, I being able to configure it the way you want it, I I'm surprised this isn't more of a thing. I I've said this to um, well, it's a Lenovo and HP. You know, you've got these big laptops. You always put a, almost always put a numeric keyboard. I don't want that. Make that modular. You know, let the person buying it shoes if they want that or not, and if they don't, maybe they get better speakers, maybe they just get a flat plane, whatever it is in the keyboards, in the metal. Um, but give, you know you're the one of the biggest pc makers, or the biggest on earth. Like, why can't you do this? You know, um, but they're always I think it's a margin thing for them and you know they're always kind of I don't know, it's kind of a tough business, I guess.

01:00:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's an interesting idea and they their site just about tipped over yesterday. They clearly oh it absolutely.

01:00:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It did tip over. I didn't get in yesterday, so I was put in a waiting. I tried a couple of times. It's like you're. You're on the list. I'm on the list To the website To get to the website, Like I remember when they did that for like buying world series tickets but right now they're doing this. Yeah, I've never.

01:00:29 - Bee AI (Announcement)
I haven't seen something like that and, yeah, interesting, good for them I think, it's great.

01:00:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love what they're doing. At least they're doing something different in this space.

01:00:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and um, hopefully having an impact. Like I, you know a piece the. The big pc makers are good about recycling and using recycled materials, but yeah, I'd like to modular.

01:00:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, If they start core swapping boards out and and kicking out inexpensive as a by-product, then more power to them. I'd buy them like in a second for that.

01:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, compared to a what I would call a mainstream ultra book style laptop, the framework doesn't weigh a lot more. I mean you could could it's like I think it's about 3.1 pounds, if I remember, for like a laptop 13. So yeah, you could get a thinkpad x1 carbon, which is in using alien technology, and somehow it was only 2.4 pounds now, which is crazy, but that thing costs like two to three thousand dollars, like they're. You know, you're paying for that, um, I, these guys line up really well with what I would call mainstream, you know, business class, whatever. Ultra books. It's good. Okay, so that's the hardware bit.

01:01:38
And then just on apps, uh, I, just I mentioned this when it was in preview, but now in stable, on opera one, you can get those um side sidebar apps. I think they call them add-ins for blue sky, discord and slack, and this allows you to have kind of a push model for notifications without having to leave a tab open, right, right, so it's probably for now. It's a little weird because some things you'll have in a tab and some might be in the sidebar, um, but I, you know, as someone who uses a lot of browser tabs and keeps several pinned all the time, I actually really like this model and um it's an interesting idea so okay, which opera trying to be distinct now?

01:02:16
yeah, well, you should. I don't know if you looked at the opera um what's the art?

01:02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the light version of the opera calm edition.

01:02:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, it's actually really pretty, like, I really like it.

01:02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, that's one of the things I like about ARC is that it is kind of clean. It's so clean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's nice. Okay, a bit of confusion. Yesterday, or the day before, I guess, maybe the day before, there was a website had an article about yeah, I saw this.

01:02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so saw this. Yeah, you see it. Download office and that supported free version of office, yeah.

01:02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm like I have to try this right, I have to see this. I've never used this myself, but I'm. You know this is an interesting kind of a thing and it happening on the back end of Microsoft switching to this AI credit mode where you, as a subscriber to Microsoft 365, can use a lot of these co-pilot features. You know, for the month I was like, oh, maybe this is, you know, tied together somehow, whatever it was. So I tried this on two different computers. I never got it to come up like this. Um I. So I, when I wrote about it, I was like, well, I'm sure it's coming, or whatever these guys write about it, they have pictures. But it didn't work on the systems that I tried. And then Microsoft got back to me and said, yeah, we're not actually doing this. Well, we're testing it, which I think means they are going to do it.

01:03:33
But if you think about the mainstream versions of Office today, for, like, desktop, obviously you have the desktop apps that you download from Microsoft as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription and that's the full suite. And then you have the web apps, right, and it's mostly core apps. So it's like Word, excel, powerpoint and actually I think OneNote still has a web client, I think. But, ok, fine, so this was sort of in the middle right? You're not paying for Microsoft 365. You download the suite from them. You only get those three core apps. They have a persistent advertisement pane over the side, according to that site. They throws up a video, sometimes like an ad video, whatever, but it's free and it's not the full, 100% set of functionality. Some of the more advanced features for each of those apps is not available in the free version.

01:04:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I, it's like excel pivot tables and things like that.

01:04:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly that. That is one of them. Yep, um, yep, and you know, varies by app, obviously, and then I probably more features that are in the web app, which everyone's wondered why they don't make these into fully installable apps that people can use. Nobody knows um, not as full featured, but also not as expensive, obviously, as the full suite.

01:04:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So isn't the main ad they're going to run. You should buy office. Yeah, yeah, it's a house ad. Exactly this is a lost leader for getting you into an m365 you know they're trying to. I get it. I'm trying to find a vehicle.

01:05:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, yeah, I mean they're doing it with Outlook. Everyone loves that app, so why not? Why not screw with the other ones? So anyway, we'll see, we'll see.

01:05:16
Amazon had a set of services that were meant to compete with Microsoft 365. I think one of them it wasn't called Workspace, but it was something like Workspace they killed that last year, workspace, but it was something like Workspace. They killed that last year, workday. Maybe I don't remember, it doesn't matter, nobody used it, who cares. And then they had this communication service called Chime, which is basically their version of Zoom. So if you were to take all of the people who worked at Amazon that used this product away, you had a negative number of users, so they got rid of it.

01:05:44
Amazon had quietly also contracted with Microsoft for Microsoft 365. So they've been moving to that. They paused it, remember, at the end of last year Internally Out of concerns about security and whatever. So they've figured that out. Microsoft obviously jumped all over that. Whatever their concerns were, have been met. So that rollout is continuing. It's weird to me because they're paying for Microsoft 365 and get Teams, but they're going to use Zoom internally. They will use Teams for their customers that do use Teams. So when employees want to communicate externally, they'll be using Teams, which I would say, well, just use one of them, I mean. But then again, if you think about it and Richard knows this better than better than anybody I bet you have every one of these things installed, because you talk to different people from different places and they use different things, and so, in in my case, like in any given week, I use zoom, I use teams, I use slack. You know, it depends right.

01:06:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's usually zoom or teams. I mean the point being if you're in the teams ecosystem, then you want to use being. If you're in the Teams ecosystem, then you want to use Teams, and if you're not, you are not installing Teams, so you'll use Zoom, mike BARNES.

01:06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they're going through this complexity because I think they're going to install both. I don't know if that's the way I took it. It's kind of a little strange. But Amazon, whatever they made something called Chime. I mean, come on, what's trying?

01:07:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
to make their own work. Dogs was the um, was the work docs there?

01:07:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, and it was work something okay, obviously, yep, I'm surprised, I don't remember it, it was such a huge hit.

01:07:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Such a hit. Yeah, listen, both guys who used it really liked it in there.

01:07:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and yeah, and then they switched from that to the thing meta was doing, surprise, um, yeah, so same problem, right? Um, this reminds me of the early 90s or whatever, when everyone was trying to compete with uh, you know, office, right at the time, like they need their own Ray Nuda, norta whatever his name was at a Novell. Uh partnered with her and or bought it on Novell so they could have a suite that would compete with office and, uh, I think that killed him. Actually, I think that might have put him in the grave, but didn't work out great. Um, yeah, so that everyone tried this for a little while.

01:07:46
I think we've we kind of accepted the the old world order. I guess we'll call it. Um, this is related to nothing other than amazon, but amazon also this past week killed the app store for android, which raises some interesting questions. I to be clear, not on kindle devices, right? So if you have a kindle, a fire tablet or a kind tablet or a Fire TV device, they're still using their own stupid app store for that, the one no one wants, but that's what they use.

01:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, notably used the Kindle app store was Microsoft for its long-lost, long-departed Android subsystem for Windows and nobody wanted it there either right, yeah, right.

01:08:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is what's, weird.

01:08:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look, I don't think many people. This seems like it's part of the whole Kindle realignment across the board.

01:08:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I wonder right. So I'm kind of wondering chicken and egg on this. Like, did Microsoft get some kind of advanced view that maybe we're walking away from this outside of our own little ecosystem? Or was Microsoft maybe one of the nails in that coffin and um it, you know? Whatever it happened, you have to think that people out in the world with like a samsung phone or whatever normal android phone were not installing this app, so they had yet another way to install apps like they. Those guys already have two ways to install apps, so it's not surprising that didn't do well. I think, if I remember correctly when I first, you would get like a free app every day or something that was. You know, like you could build up an app collection pretty easily, but I don't think this thing had any support at all.

01:09:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm betting they got the heads up and that's why they killed it in advance?

01:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's my guess too.

01:09:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The heads up from. Amazon has made a plan here to realign this.

01:09:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, but that was like a year ago, wasn't it, I know. But well, Amazon moves pretty slow sometimes. I mean so Amazon?

01:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
said guys, maybe you don't want to use the App Store.

01:09:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or maybe literally we're getting rid of it, so you can do whatever you want. I'm sure Microsoft had hoped to get Google involved in this right.

01:09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we never really understood why they killed this. Oh, to get Google involved in this right?

01:09:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we never really understood why they killed this. Oh, I can tell you why it's because they hate each other.

01:09:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you mean Google and Apple, Google and Microsoft hate each other, but they killed it because yeah, but the Android app subsystem was really a good thing, wasn't it, or no, yeah?

01:09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but you need. The point of it is to fill in the app gap, right? So the Amazon App Store on app store was never going to do that, right, unless you wanted to run a slightly better kindle app, I guess, right, but you know. But people wanted google play, right, and obviously there were hacks to kind of make that work, just like there were hacks to make it work.

01:10:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These are all this usb way to load sideload stuff like that was about and microsoft announced killing it a year ago, but they only actually are killing it, like next week, yeah oh, they still have it yeah it's been well, because it's part of windows, right yeah, so they gave the long lead time yeah, so yeah, interestingly that the kill, the time of death, if you will is closer to this announcement, right?

01:10:37
and now it all starts lines up. Yeah, that's, oh, that's really interesting. Now this is the f. This is an fdc fodder here. Man, you could talk about the collusion if you want. I've never thought of big tech as colluding.

01:10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nobody cares, let's all make no money on this thing.

01:10:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly, yep.

01:10:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was just always second rate. It's too bad. This is not official from Google, but I think it was. Maybe Business Insider or Forbes or someone reported that Google is going to drop text messaging as an option for 2FA on vacation. Good, they're going to move to QR codes. This caused a bit of confusion with my readers, who seemed to think they would have to point their phone at a phone to take a photo of a QR code. They were curious how that was going to work. I explained that you use a mirror for that. I mean, are you some kind of an?

01:11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
idiot. No QR code. They were curious how that was going to work. Um, I explained that you use a mirror for that. I mean some kind of an idiot. No, no, you don't. No, I'm kidding, but um, that's a good answer. Yeah, I'm like. I just it's not obvious.

01:11:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Have your friend look over your shoulder that's right and read the QR. Do is you draw a picture of the code and then you take a picture of that Come on think.

01:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I'm going to confess I didn't understand how this works either, so explain to me.

01:11:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no. So right now, google does a little bit what Microsoft does where, depending on the service, depending on the day, the phase of the moon, whatever it is, you have to authenticate, for whatever reason, right Conditional access. Yeah, sometimes, you know, know, you just have to prove your you again, right?

01:12:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just did it. For that I use my two-factor authentication app, some call the google authenticator that's right.

01:12:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's one way, right, you could use a passkey. Well, I have to say that I also use one of the skis when they let you do it, and it's most of the time they do on desktop. I just did it on this exact computer. Before we started, the little pin tabs I have for gmail and google calendar had a little white circle. I had to re-authenticate. I didn't have to do anything other than click yes and then the little proton pass, uh, pass key slid in. Yep, that's the one and I was no problem, right?

01:12:43
Um, if you're on a windows computer, you can use windows to load or authenticate against Google. If it's Google, we are talking about Google. There's different ways, so I think the most common well, sadly, the most common mainstream way probably is a text message, right, but what it should be is a 2FA, an authenticator app. Ideally it would be a passkey, but there's all different ways, and so most people will have I don't know what the number is two to five different methods, right? So if you were to go into your Google account, you could probably authenticate by sending an email to a secondary email address where you get a code If you have Google running on your phone, you can have a have it pop up a single sign on message.

01:13:25
That's right, because the Google app, the Gmail app, the Android operating system.

01:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But how does the QR code?

01:13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
work. The QR code is for when it's on your computer.

01:13:32 - Bee AI (Announcement)
Okay, so it's only at this time. So the idea is you have your phone.

01:13:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't take a picture, but you use the phone app, you click the link and then that passes through and ideally, on your phone you've already. It's probably a. By the way, here's another picture. I have no idea what this is. Uh, it's probably new york city pittsburgh or paris, show it. Let's see, no, this one's, definitely it's. It's a big city looking down, it's gonna be new york city.

01:13:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's new york city, for sure that's new york city.

01:13:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's gotta be new york city. Yeah, I just, I don't recognize that, but I don't did I take. I think they show me other people's pictures anyway.

01:14:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, I mean, it's a pretty good picture right, um, but this is still using your phone to authenticate, with arguably a lower friction way than pulling up the authenticator app and typing in a number.

01:14:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, and I would say, well, yes, and definitely more secure than sms, right? So the the next thing I'm going to talk about very briefly, cause I don't want to get into this too far is that in going through my single sign on accounts that I used through my Google account and trying to sign into each of those online services that I've been using with Google, you have to confront something which is what's worse. Right, you're funneling everything through an account that could be taken away from you, but it's super seamless and convenient, it works great, the signing with Google. Or you take that away and now you have multiple passwords to manage, which you're using a password manager for, right, and that's protected with 2FA and whatever. So good.

01:15:04
But every one of those services supports some subset of these other forms of authentication and it's different for everyone. Some of them only support text message-based authentication Still, to this day. It's stupid. So there is no good answer here. This is kind of a weird problem. So I actually, I have to say, I think from Google's perspective, as a primary online account, like, but in the upper echelon of the most important online accounts, they're probably the number one or two, right, especially because of this sign in with Google thing, or maybe in addition to that or whatever, but good for them for taking this away. Google has long supported every single method, including the hardware security keys, like I think Richard still uses and I know Leo has used. It's not something I would like my wife's never going to use that.

01:15:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm not recommending it anymore. Anyway, like we're inches away from pass keys being really quite good, that's right. So the day of the FIDO key. I think it's done.

01:16:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem with pass keys right now is just the inconsistency of implementation. And even Google, which I would hold up as the best, will do this weird thing where, most of the time, what I described earlier where I get it through my password manager, no problem works fine, but I would say 5% to 10% of the the time the option I have is it actually puts up a qr code. I have to use a phone. I have a. Now I do have the passkey, my phone too. It's fine, but it's I signed in with windows.

01:16:35
Hello, I have it right on this computer, like I don't why, why, and I think part of it is um, just keep me on my toes. No, I think. I think they're trying to. I think they want to vary it a little bit, like when you get a code, sometimes you have to type in something, but sometimes they give you the thing and you know they try to make it a little different, make it a little less easy to spoof, maybe, I don't know. Anyhow, I think what they're doing is good. Um, I I will say I can't say this definitively, but having now removed some hundreds of single sign-on connections, I'll call them. With my google account, I've never run into an online account where I couldn't get into it otherwise right, even though I think some of them, I have never signed in otherwise right and this is often like pretty deceptive, like phishing methods to get you to give them your Google SSO right.

01:17:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know it's not great, because they get additional data from that.

01:17:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem for me is, if I was positive, well, two things. So I can't be positive that there isn't an account out there where I won't be able to get into it yet, because I haven't done them all, but I've done enough of them. Now I'm thinking this is how the system works, but I've done enough of them. Now I'm thinking this is a system, this is how the system works, like they probably I can't say it definitively, but I don't think there is going to be an example where I couldn't get into it. So, okay, good, most of the time it's going to involve them emailing me a code, right, and then I can I don't maybe set up a password at that point, whatever it is, depending on the account. So there's that.

01:18:03
But the truth is, if I thought I was going to get rid of that 100%, I would probably install a browser plugin that hid single sign-on opportunities from me, so I never was tempted to do it. But I also think I'm not going to get rid of all of them, right, I think there's going to be some handful of accounts for me anyway where I'm like you know what I'm actually going to keep using that Google SSO thing, so I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Basically, I've just got to going down some path. I'm doing the work and I'm not even sure what the point of it is, so I don't know. There's no good answer with this stuff, I guess. Maybe it, maybe that's the point.

01:18:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a battle, and I'm even more optimistic on Passkeys. There's plenty of opportunities for them to screw that up too.

01:18:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, you don't have to look too far to find a service that screws up Passkeys for sure. Like I said, even Google is not 100% consistent. They're one of the better ones. But yeah, it's not simple. It bugs me when I can't. I know it's there, I can see it, I literally can see it. I mean it's there twice. Actually it's in my computer, it's in Windows, because Windows stores one as well, and it's in my password manager, which is always available. Why can't I use that?

01:19:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:19:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. Well, at least they're not using SMS.

01:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know this is a current issue because the government has now announced that they can't get the Chinese hackers out of our phone system.

01:19:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple can't even stop a spam text that says hi who are you? You came up in my contacts. What the fuck, Guys? This is not social engineering.

01:19:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's three things that will survive a nuclear attack. One is the rats in the new york subway, the cockroaches right in the new york housing and the chinese hackers in our nation figure it out. This is the simplest thing in the world no, it's not well, a lot of it, I mean one of the issues is in order to upgrade the equipment. They'd have to upgrade the equipment because the equipment they're using is bugged and they can't fix it.

01:20:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I'm just talking about something simple. If it says something like I just said who are you? You're in my just don't show it to me Well, that of course that's never going to be a human being. Yeah, no, I don't mean like, yes, listen, we're, we have AI. Now you could sound like the representative of a bank or whatever. Yes, people are going to fall for that, no doubt about it. But who's? Who does this? Who does this phone? Who is god?

01:20:37
come on like even I could write something to block this geez, this is a bit of an aside before we go into the break, but we had an earthquake this past week here in.

01:20:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did you see? Near seashells? Yeah, and all of our phones went off after the earthquake yeah, but also get the alert. Yes, but you know that alert's supposed to come out ahead, so it was a bit late, and it was. We were really close to it too. We were. I was in a pub at the time. It was lunchtime and all of the sports screens flipped over to an emergency screen as well yeah that's what you want to see, yeah, it's just great. After was awake, they all arrived too late. Yeah, without.

01:21:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then it said welcome to the united states of america yeah.

01:21:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
51st state thumbs up no. Uh, I've had several experiences with this earthquake alert in the us right one was right before an earthquake, yeah and everybody in the restaurant kind of went, what's going on? And then then we had an earthquake. The other one, uh, was everybody went and the school were across the street from a school. They got all the kids out of the school and everything, and then there was a tsunami alert and I told my son who lives in a houseboat. I said go have lunch somewhere up.

01:21:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah uphill somewhere. Yeah, exactly nothing, yeah nothing happened you mean, well, nothing, he's a pretty rare.

01:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But well, nothing happened. That means they're pretty rare. Well, not even an earthquake. I mean they shut down the school. But I like the premise and once it did work, it actually yeah.

01:21:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just because you didn't feel the earthquake doesn't mean there wasn't one.

01:21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The speed of light is faster than the speed of quake, and so, in theory, if they sense a quake, they can send out an alert.

01:22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know the United States, but here in Mexico, if you get an alarm, that means this is less than three minutes away. If it happens, it's happening.

01:22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's going to happen quickly. Yeah, I mean, they only can outrace it by a few.

01:22:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the USGS has a technology called a P-wave detector. Yes, right, yeah, and so that actually picks it up before the shaking starts, right but you know the network is not straight line.

01:22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It takes a while to get through this purpose cats you know I'm waiting because we live on a hillside and uh, you're still out about.

01:22:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're waiting for, like your, the neighbor up the hill to come colliding. Will we be?

01:22:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going for a ride, or will they be going for a ride, or oh boy yeah, anyway, it was a nice little 4.8 and uh on a fault line?

01:22:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
nobody knew about uh, so they yeah the the geology analysis of it's all very excited. But, yeah, they woke everybody up so you felt it, oh yeah, no, it was a good little shaker. And then it said, hey, wake up, let's get ready for an earthquake.

01:23:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A little late, dude, that's fine. The worst one I've been in is still the one that happened in New Jersey, new York, last year, and I don't know how we've avoided that here, but I mean by and large.

01:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, well, Richard and I are on the ring of fire.

01:23:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we are really on the fault lines, well, and the kicker is, I don't know if today we got to mexico city is, but it is, are you?

01:23:29
on a fault line. There it is. The entire country is a fault line. It is the worst pause. I think. Also, you're built on a swamp, which is not the best. We're a swamp that's been drained completely and it's just empty space. Yeah, it's perfect. You know it's what could go wrong here. It's like a sinkhole with buildings on top, at least we're on bedrock and that's good yeah, this is the rock the ice couldn't crush.

01:23:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what you have to keep telling yourself. But uh, yeah, now and then. You know, when we got to puerto vallarta in january, the first night six, but there was a six oh, that's why paul was hanging on to you.

01:24:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. Well, that happens anyway, but it's separate issues. You're watching windows weekly paul thorat in roma norte, richard campbell in madeira park more in a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, the folks who quite literally bring you this podcast, this episode of windows weekly, brought to you by cashfly, our content delivery network. For over 20 years, cashfly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know this because, almost since the beginning, we've been doing this. We've been using CashFly because when you use CashFly, those podcasts they must roll. They will roll, they will get to you. And have you noticed? You know Slack's been down all morning, but the podcasts keep on coming right.

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01:27:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Winder's.

01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got blinders on my Winder's, so it's been a long time since you talked about AI.

01:27:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What do you think? Yeah, I think it's been like 17 seconds, yeah, at least. Yeah, so I think it was last week. You know, I'm trying to use AI, right, and by trying to use AI, that's like saying I'm not using AI, right. That's what that really means. So I'm trying to figure this out right, and so I just wrote an article about some of the things I came across recently where, you know, in one example there was a I was out half the day yesterday.

01:27:51
So when I got back last night, I had, you know, a hundred and whatever items in my feed. There was the stuff to kind of sift through. I wrote a couple of things and then there was this stuff I just kind of put off for the morning, and one of them was an Xbox announcement of some sort. That was a video. There was no accompanying text, you know, and I thought, how am I going to do this? I can't take time out of my day to watch a video. It was only 20 minutes long. But I'm, like, you know, back in the, not back in the day, back in yesterday. You know, as long ago as yesterday, what I would have done is read the transcript. Right, you go to youtube, get the transcript, paste it into whatever. So I did that and as I was doing it, I thought, wait a minute, I could use ai to summarize this, right, when I make that. And that worked great.

01:28:34
And then I asked it this question. I'm not really sure what made me think of this, but I I got the summary, which is good, and I said it. This was in the form of an interview on like a pod, like a video podcast, right. So it's a a new guy in the xbox executive suite and then a person who works for xbox, but does these podcasts, and I said do they discuss anything you would consider news? And they said, yeah, there's, uh, four topics we think might be newsworthy, and one of them was the thing that lauren had written about yesterday, which is that the Fable reboot has been delayed, which we'll talk about a little bit later, although I guess now we don't have to. So that's useful. I mean, maybe I'll do more of that kind of stuff. I asked a few other questions.

01:29:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wrote about some of that. That's my problem with summaries.

01:29:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How would you know if it was a bad one? Yeah, I know, Right, so you got to get asked, you know. You got to keep probing, I guess. But you know, Leo, I think it was last week mentioned, if I'm not mistaken, a three hour long video about three and a half my friend three and a half, so worth watching.

01:29:41
Yeah, so coincidentally I had watched a shorter video. It was probably like an hour 20 minutes, but similar, you know, kind of thing explaining AI. Good, you know. And of course, once you watch something on YouTube then your thing has changed forever and you just go see those videos.

01:29:54
Yeah, tied to this. I also, you know, you guys probably know who Dave Plummer is, the Dave garage YouTube channel for my Microsoft engineer Fantastic. Dave garage YouTube channel, former Microsoft uh, engineer, fantastic, that's a great. He did a three and a half hour interview with Dave Cutler from NT, did a wow, it was a two, two and a half hour interview with Herman Chen, another, uh, you know luminary. You know who's still working at Microsoft, by the way, uh, which I've watched actually both of those repeatedly Fantastic, recommend them. But he's been doing a lot of stuff.

01:30:28
Ai lately also worth watching, and so I have all these AI videos now in my stream and I came across one called Generative AI in a Nutshell, how to Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI which is actually kind of an older guy who kind of latched onto chat GPT earlier than most and is one of those people who kind of figured it out like you have to use this thing differently and I've not done this, but I think we're. I know it's weird, I I can tell this is getting mainstream, because I know normal mainstream like non-technical people who pay for chat gpt and use it like all day long, every day, and so one of the stories this guy told in this video is that when, when he has something to figure out in other words, whatever it is like, it could be anything right, because it's not always like math or science or engineering, whatever the thing is he goes for a walk and he uses chat GPT as a sounding board. So he starts by saying to chat GPT always respond with the word okay, unless I ask you for something. So it just listens and it doesn't interrupt him and he just gets. He kind of dumps his thoughts out and when he gets back he asked for a summary of that conversation that he just had with himself. And then we they have a back and forth of some kind and he gets recommendations for like for to-do items and things like that out of this. And and I said this to some guys yesterday I was with, but, like you know, we used to see people walking around in the streets talking to nothing, but they had like a little headset on.

01:31:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We thought they were insane, yeah, and now, is this schizophrenia or is it Bluetooth? It's hard to know.

01:31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yup, and now it's going to be as a schizophrenia as an AI, because they will will literally be talking to nobody, but it will be their buddy chat GPT, right. Can't wait, I'm dying. Kind of interesting, yeah. So the next thing, though, I want to do and this is tied to this is what I was saying up front. We're going to kind of hit on this briefly later is when I think about you know, my archives and how I want to be able to access them.

01:32:19
I don't really think of that as like a public facing thing, although maybe someday it would be, but I do have, like these smaller bodies of work that might be interesting for, like custom GPTs, like the Windows 11 field guide, right? So let's say you bought the book, or maybe you're a Threat Premium subscriber, so you could go to a website and instead of you could read the book, you could look things up if you wanted. But if you had a question, you know how do I bypass the hardware restrictions in windows 11? Ask the custom gpt that question, and then it will give you the answer based on the grounding it has in my book, right? So leo knows exactly how to do what I just described. I do that all the time? Yep, but I want to do it found.

01:32:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I found? These things now are such generalists, yeah, that I don't need to do the rag I used to do, so, um well, no, but this is where I have it at a lisp chat? Yeah t, no, but I. But I just the other day asked the new um claude coding assistant to write me some common lisp code to solve one of the advent of code problems. Right, right, it did it very competently, without any rag.

01:33:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I understand that, but what I'm saying is I want to create a service that people could hit on my site, maybe.

01:33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, oh, I see, it literally parses my code. Query Paul, yeah, yeah, well, you want virtual?

01:33:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul, yeah Well, virtual Windows 11 field guy to start, and then maybe are you listening to this?

01:33:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is hysterical. What do you think of of the idea of maybe having a virtual? I don't know who this paul guy is, but he sounds like a freaking idiot. Um, I was just talking to my buddy, don't know.

01:33:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate to go to that uh, so tomorrow there's going to be like a windows 11 field guy assistant or a virtual presence can lead to many creative ideas and solutions.

01:34:02 - Bee AI (Announcement)
What specific idea are you thinking about regarding a virtual concept?

01:34:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd love to Well, my buddy, paul, has a website and he just wants to feed all his articles to you and then let people ask you questions about that. They would ask Paul, but ask the AI instead. You think that's a good idea?

01:34:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She's a little slow, so sometimes I can tell you my website search is terrible. So it's a fantastic idea.

01:34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's going to be better than the website search right.

01:34:27 - Bee AI (Announcement)
That sounds like a fascinating idea. Having an AI like me answering questions based on Paul's articles could provide fast, informative responses to users, making the information more accessible. It could also free Paul from having to answer repetitive questions directly. How do you think Paul would feel about this setup?

01:34:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I appreciate you considering my feelings.

01:34:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, it sounds a little like Helen Mirren, doesn't it? Yeah, I had it sound like Neil Gaiman for a while, but that creeped me out in the long run Right, that didn't age well, I mean this is. I mean, this is uh, this is that b computer I'm always talking about but, this is the. It's the very little seed of an idea, which I think is great. It's not just for your website, it's for you.

01:35:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you can ask no that right, I'm, I'm kind of baby stepping into that, but yes, that's me too, getting close, like in other words to her right. Yeah, let's ground it in something finite, because you're going to get the best results and we're going to limit it to this thing.

01:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you can do that now.

01:35:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really do Well, you can. The trick is publishing it.

01:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And would it be?

01:35:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
reliable. Yeah, the testing I've done so far where I just ask a question, whatever the AI is. I've done a couple of different ones. Yeah, actually it's good right.

01:35:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the benefit of RAD. You can say to it specifically do not make anything up.

01:35:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Every answer must come from the source materials I provide. Or just, if you paid for chat GPT, you make your own GPT, right, right, which is what I did, but I don't actually know how to do it on a website. Well, there are services that will do this for you, but I have to find something that actually is legal you know, legal use of that L on whatever technology, and something that I don't get a bill for $6,000 after I start using it. So I got to figure that out out. But but to me this is an interesting idea and it ties into that notion we talked about earlier, um of you know kind of grounding it in some collection of documents, whatever it might be, like my entire way.

01:36:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. That's what this is. It has has a bunch of lisp documents that I've uploaded uh to it. Yeah, that's right. And then and then, furthermore, I've I've given it instructions about how to answer. Um, and this is this prompting is is everything right? Yep, that's right.

01:36:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I and you can really tell these things how to be I bet if you were to query you know the audience right now, 90 something percent of them would cringe visibly when someone said the phrase chat engineer or uh, you know, or whatever, engineer, prompt engineer, but you know what, there might be something to it. Oh, there's definitely it's it's creative. I mean, it's all. It's not like, it's not really even engineering, it's almost uh, I don't know what to call it, but there's a creativity to it.

01:37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna have, you know, we have, as you probably know, the show that follows. This one is all about ai, intelligent machines. Right in a few weeks we're gonna have a friend of mine, harper reed, who wrote an article about, with, with the prompts, how he pair codes with an ai. Yes, and it's, re. It was a very thorough um explanation of you know what prompts to give it and it's and it was also multi-layered thing. I mean it's there's.

01:37:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, there's something to it, and that the video that I referenced briefly is, you know, the guy. The guy is whoever he is, but he is on to something. It's. It's interesting, like I some, sometimes one of these will be good enough that I actually mentioned it to my wife. I'm like you should probably actually watch this video. I know it looks a little geeky and technical, but, um, there you get these little tips, you, you know it's kind of interesting. You know, we were out with these guys yesterday and one of them he talked to chat GPT all day long, you know, trying to find out things to do in a particular place. Or if you had to choose between this and this, which is better.

01:38:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Before we got here did I tell you this that I was making breakfast for Lisa and I wanted to make sure that I had the best possible hash browns right. So I asked chat gpt. Oh, one deep research, I love it dude, look at all the pages of research.

01:38:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do have any idea. You brought, you brought down the, the power grid in like dubai, so you could figure out how I, I put a small village yeah in the darkness, into darkness for this and it asked me some follow-ups and it said how are you going to make them?

01:38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and look for this 14 minutes. It researched jeez, but it gave me basically a book there.

01:38:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Better be a duck fat thing in there somewhere oh, I don't know, I didn't.

01:38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I couldn't read the whole thing. It was too long, so just give me some bullet points, all right he's like this this is tell me which one to buy frozen. But I want to point out that one of the things it did you see, these, these are references. Yes, so that is a good thing, right? I mean it's not it's not just completely whole cloth right. It's always got, uh, some references in it, which I think is great.

01:39:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It also allows me to dig deeper yeah, I so I mean, you know, for for the one I was thinking about, for the book. You know it'd be kind of neat if you could link to where it was in the book and then somebody who wanted that answer might want to read some of the other stuff around it, or whatever.

01:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the next version of the field guide.

01:39:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It should be that. Yeah, it's just going to be me walking in a park talking to my phone like a homeless person. You know, me, me talk, walking in a park talking to my phone like a homeless person, you know, but you know, 20 bucks and would have been better had I followed the instructions to the letter and I thought I was smarter than the ai and I was not so anyway I you should do this.

01:39:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul I, this is a perfect example of rag. I am trying to use the book, I think not the website, the book.

01:40:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's right. I'm trying, I'm trying like I still. You know you mentioned the software development stuff. I have the stupid app thing I'm doing. I'm this is a complete kind of side thing to the main point of it, but I'm trying to. You know, the, the text position and a text box is not a column row like you would expect or whatever it's. It's's, it's uses this weird system, but you can kind of calculate column row and I have to do it in reverse. And so finally, this morning I was like I went I what did I use? I think I used chad pt. I don't remember, it doesn't matter. But I'm like, could you just write me a freaking thing in?

01:40:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
c sharp that does. I need a pivot table please?

01:40:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
done and I'm like it will yeah, I spent two weeks on this like a jerk, you know? Yeah, it's crazy.

01:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's mind boggling. Now, richard, one of the problems with AIs is they have a limited space for tokens. Yep, right, paul's book is pretty long. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it might be too big to fit into. That's been one of my issues. Yeah, yeah, you would.

01:41:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The process of creating your rag is vectorizing all of that into a form that can be fetched right, rather than trying to tokenize the whole thing. Oh, they don't tokenize it.

01:41:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they do but they store it in a different way.

01:41:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, so you're not. You're worried about tokens because you're thinking in terms of his book as a part of a prompt. Given this gigantic prompt, what about this? Where in a?

01:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
rag model it's actually vectorized already so, oh my god, that's crazy, but that is what you're doing. It's post-training, isn't it?

01:41:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so the the free services are. We'll usually say something like they're like yeah, throw us all your documents, we're happy to steal all of it. And then they're like you know, uh, it's a little big, um, do you think you could split this up?

01:41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, so I've run. So anthony says rag is different than putting it directly in the context window, which is, yeah, what I basically just said yes thanks, anthony anthony and I agree yeah, I don't understand it.

01:41:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm just that's how. That's how home assistant works with. Uh, with the ai interface, is that it's basically adding to the prompt the entire description of the house in the context window instead?

01:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of rag. That's right so but, rag. Often maybe it's just a commercial limitation. I mean like I can't put more than 12 documents, I think, in chat gpt yeah, you can go, yeah, it's.

01:42:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's what if you're running at home?

01:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you could have an unlimited. Yeah, so is rag tokenized.

01:42:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then yes, so the context window is vectorized, rag is tokenized well, they're both tokenized, but the but vector storage is how you store the tokens efficiently so they can be fetched as part of the rack, which is and that has to be in ram doesn't have to be, but there you have depends, yeah, yeah, yeah how big is your book, paul?

01:42:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh that's how many gigabytes? Yeah, so right, uh, you know, I don't, I don't have this, it's big, it's that's big.

01:42:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How many gigabytes? Yeah, so right, uh, you know, I don't even, I don't have this, it's big it's big. It's, I think, one of the file limits was like 100 or no, it was 50 megabytes, it's probably 173 or something, so it's 1100 and something pages, something like that. It's doable though, right, richard? Yeah, I know I've done it. I actually have done it. It's doable, but okay, I'm trying to find one that makes sense, you know well, you also have to put it on the actually have done it.

01:43:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's doable but I'm trying to find one that makes sense. Well, you also have to put it on the web, right? That's right, that's right.

01:43:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I did find a service called every week. You wait, it gets easier, right? Yes, so there's something called pmfmai that allows you to pick the LLM you're going to use and do what I'm describing, and most of them you would have to pay. You know something, and I don't want to just throw this thing on my site and have people use it and be like yikes, you know, I need to figure out like what will this cost?

01:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
me? Um, ideally it would cost me nothing, you know, but lean pub sophisticated enough to ask them.

01:43:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean that seems like it's not sophisticated enough to return an email, leo, so no, okay never mind there is no. I mean, that seems like a feature.

01:43:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Good, they're good people, but they're not. Yeah, but you're not wrong. This should be what publishers get into to try and stay relevant I, I bet you anything.

01:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tim o'reilly is thinking about this, right, right.

01:43:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, by the way, semi-related to this is a service it's called 11, something 11 publish, maybe, or something like that, where you have a, an ebook oh 11 ai yeah, 11, and it will make the audio book. They're really good, yes so I'm thinking about doing that for um windows everywhere. So we'll see. But first I want to figure out this uh, the windows um the field guy. Look, my goal is to not ever work again. So I'm thinking eventually he is going to do it, good or bad, it's going to take my job away.

01:44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it does a good job, but I don't know if you want to listen to the field guide for windows no, not the field guide, the windows everywhere book.

01:44:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, the windows everywhere, because the one that's more of an error.

01:44:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, see tim o'reilly could take this learning python. Oh yeah, but who would want to listen to that? You wouldn't want to listen to it, but you would want an AI that you could query. Right, that's right, because I don't want to read all thousands.

01:44:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is thousands of pages. No, you have a question. You're using Perl. You have a question. How do I do this thing? You can kill small animals with that book.

01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's is. I learned python when this book was half as big and then I said, oh, I gotta learn python 3 and I said good lord, I've missed a lot.

01:45:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they've been a edition the first edition was this thing I'll just recommend again. Uh, scott hanselman and mark was in a rich have a podcast and one of the conversations they got into that I really thought was funny was scott said something to the tune well, it's not like you're gonna use this thing to create code in a language you don't understand. And Mark said I do that every day. What do you mean Exactly? And he said well, he and he the, I think the exam, I think the example he used was Python and he said I don't know anything about Python because I can tell whatever because it's used a lot with ai stuff, I guess. And uh, and then he just tells it several times make it better, and it does.

01:45:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then yes, that's one of the tricks, isn't it is, you know? Okay, that was a good start, but improve that yeah.

01:45:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So he's like no, I do this every day. He's like I'm not learning pearl or a python, I'm, I'm just gonna do it this way, I mean as I said I, he's one of the smartest people we've ever met, so so if he's doing this, I mean I think you know I got.

01:46:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Claude to write a very good answer for my Common Lisp. This is day seven for the advent of code and it wrote it in Common Lisp, which I do know. That's the language I use. But not only was it well written, but I ran it and it worked. Yeah, it's nice when that happens. Yeah, I mean I don't have to really do the advent of code anymore, I'll just have a friend.

01:46:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you've misunderstood the point of the advent of code.

01:46:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, actually this was great because I could learn from it. Yeah, because I was a little struggling with this one because it's dual recursion, and I thought, oh, I don't know. And now this helped me understand it considerably and, by the way, look here's the explanation it did on it.

01:46:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I know that's the thing. It's really good at documenting it yeah, much better than I am. You ask it a question, spits out the code and it's like this is what we're doing here and it's like this is what we're doing here and it's like, yeah, nice, it's amazing we live.

01:47:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why I wanted to do an ai show. It's interesting because something's happening. By the way, steven wolfram will be our guest in about an hour oh, like anyone's heard of him ray kurzweil in two weeks. I'm sure we're getting some good people heavy hitters on. As I said, harper, we'll explain how he uses a chat GPT to code Cool. But what's interesting to me, really kind of an overarching thing, is a lot of this behavior is kind of unexpected. Yeah, like it's better than one would expect.

01:47:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that was I keep. I don't know why I keep referencing it, but that short video I mentioned at the end he says something to that tune. He says you know, one of the things that's really interesting about it is, I don't you know, the people that made this didn't expect it to do this stuff like in some ways there's some sort of emergent that's exactly there's something going on here that's very interesting. Um, and you know I welcome our ai overlords. It's fine.

01:48:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I it's all good I think emergence is a perception thing yeah, yeah, it are on our part, yeah, yeah, of course, we're just we we anthropomorphize, uh, anything like animal pets, whatever.

01:48:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course, I would stop now. Right, right, we're good at it, that's.

01:48:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be one or I do it the opposite direction. We have a inflated opinion about what we do as human beings. When we think, yeah, and we think there's some magical thing going on and actually off you throw enough computer. Oh, no, it's you're.

01:48:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like the thing that hits the thing you know, like that's your brain in action. It's not right? Yeah, well, it's certainly my brain in action, except I missed the thing, so um emergent is just saying wow it's, it's almost as good as we are.

01:48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which?

01:48:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and then you know, then you fling the feces at your friend and you're like oh yeah, how did it? How did it raise to this level? I you know, honestly unbelievable. Okay, so, moving right along, yeah, we gotta hit the top of the hour here, so let me uh, I'm gonna, I you know, honestly unbelievable, okay.

01:49:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, moving right along.

01:49:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we got to hit the top of the hour here, so let me uh, I'm going to race through a little bit of this Cause, most of it doesn't matter.

01:49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tell me about Panos. Tell me you watch this thing. Oh, did you get? You can't watch it.

01:49:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had to be there. Nope, nope, nope, no, I did not.

01:49:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I will say in the past I've been invited to watch it remotely. Did not get an invite this year. I'm sure it's not related to me, yeah the Verge got all the invites.

01:49:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There were like five Verge people there.

01:49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean Amazon live blogged it, I mean you know whatever. So Alexa Plus. The good news here is it's actually free if you have a Prime account. I was afraid it was going to be an additional thing.

01:49:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I didn't yeah, but did they say when is the real? Yeah, a couple of months.

01:49:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think at the end of March or something. It's coming. It's not over here, right, like not today, but not six months from now, it's just a month or two.

01:50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you don't have anyone's ever going to do, I don't know it's what we do for chat, gpt and claw, yeah and then.

01:50:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But right, so why would you go to the amazon player?

01:50:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I mean whatever, I guess it seems like you need an echo with a screen and a camera, and yeah, no, it turns out amazon sells you something, so I'll make this better.

01:50:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, so yep, uh, yeah, I'll, I'll look at it. You know I don't I'm not super excited about that. Um, because amazon hardware is crap. I, I the. The problem here is the good news is amazon's pretty consistent. They're good, they put out, you know, they do stuff. They're not like google goes off like a, a kitten distracted by a laser light, like amazon I'm. You know they're, they get, they do stuff. Um, but also I've seen the stuff they're doing is crap and I just don't. You know like these devices are terrible, so I don't they did, and they didn't announce new devices, did they?

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just just alexa?

01:50:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so, but they don't have to right because none of this is local right. They don't need to that stuff. Yeah, yeah, you know that may change over time, like you'll have devices that maybe are here's the real question how many times did panos say he was pumped? Yeah, I don't know because I refuse so I don't know. I assume he did. How many embarrassing videos of his daughter did he show? How many weird sneakers was he wearing? I don't know.

01:51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would it be worth spending $400 for the 21-inch Amazon Echo that hangs on your wall?

01:51:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not to me, but I don't know. That's kind of pricey I do like the idea of a 15-inch smart display based on the fact.

01:51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can get the 15-inch. Yeah, yeah.

01:51:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not made by Amazon, I mean.

01:51:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they have. Oh well, they have one made by Amazon.

01:51:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No I know, yeah, 300, not made by amazon. I mean, um so well, they have made by him. No, I know I. Uh, yeah, 300 bucks. I mean that's probably okay. Look, we'll see. I they appear to be a little ahead of apple, which granted low bar these days.

01:51:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, or apple poor apple, they're missing the ai right.

01:51:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah they're doing okay financially, though, so don, though Somehow they're getting by. Yep, open AI said that they now have over 400 million weekly active users. Wow, not bad. I think at least four or five million of those are paying, but whatever the figure is, I mean, it's a good user base. That's good.

01:52:25
There was a heavily misunderstood story, mostly because it's there's no way to really know, but, uh, there was a report that Microsoft has canceled some of their AI data center leases for the coming year. Um, I actually don't think this means anything, frankly. Um it what it sounds like is oh, it's finally slowing down, you know? Um, the only thing Microsoft will say on the record is that look, we already said we're going to spend 80 billion bucks this fiscal year. We are spending at least that this fiscal year, so it's going to be more than that, but whatever, it's most likely that to me anyway, my opinion is that they have let OpenAI go off and use other people's AI infrastructure. They get the right of first refusal, but it's going to ease up their needs, and I think some of these were things where they hadn't actually exchanged money. This was like a forward leaning type of a thing. They were probably just making sure they could have capacity if they needed it, mostly for open AI, right and so they're probably not going to need as much of it anymore. So I don't think it's anything. I don't think we're seeing. There's no indication at all that big tech is slowing down the spending on AI. So it will happen eventually, I would think, but I don't think today is that day.

01:53:33
Um Anthropic, which is really kind of interesting in that they're super highly regarded among, like, technical people the LLMs came up with their first reasoning model. This is the type of model where you can kind of see it thinking, so to speak. It kind of shows you how it gets to its answer eventually, except that they're not doing it as a separate model. So they have a new version of their cloud Sonnet model 3.7, I think and it actually just has a switch. You can go back and forth between faster and maybe less accurate or slower, and you get to see the text and more accurate, right, and it's your choice. And, of course, if you're a developer, there are APIs that will do that for you and all that stuff. So, good, semi-related.

01:54:24
I feel like this all happened kind of back to back, but things that were paid are suddenly becoming free, which is not what we would expect with AI, because we were always told how expensive everything is and then in one case, one thing that was super stupid expensive is now just normal expensive. So Gemini Code Assist, which is their version of GitHub Copilot, is now free for individuals and it's pretty much wide open. I mean they technically have limits is now free for individuals and it's pretty much wide open. I mean they, they technically have limits. You, I don't think anyone could code this much and not sleep to use these limits, so or hit these limits, so it is effectively free.

01:54:51
Like GitHub co-pilot has usage restrictions each month that it resets and I've never run into those limits on GitHub co-pilot, but so I mean whatever good for them. I mean so. So google gemini, you can get that for free. That's cool. Um, think deeper, which is the you know microsoft flavored version of the open ai chat gtb reasoning model. Uh, no longer has usage restrictions. Before they had monthly usage restrictions and also the voice capability same thing. That is interesting. And then the deep research feature, which was previously only available to chat GBT I can't remember what it's called maybe Pro the $200 tier.

01:55:31
The $200, right is now available to all of their paid customers, no matter which plan you're on. Like $20 a month for individuals, you get access to that. Now there are restrictions, of course. I think it's off the top of my head, maybe 15 a month or something, or whatever it is. But, um, you know, you could do leo's deep research into um hash browns, there you go, or or some sciencey thing, you know, whatever, whatever it might be or some.

01:55:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, there's a lot of science in hash brown in the making I don't, yeah, but you don't need to do more than 15 researches into hash browns a month, so yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty funny.

01:56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The free tier is probably good enough for that one it's pretty funny that it took 14 minutes, longer than took me to make the hash, to make it yeah, yeah, I mean it's.

01:56:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's funny. Um apple has been going through a series of ios and also ipad, os, mac os.

01:56:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would never ask siri how to make hash brands.

01:56:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could tell you that right now I'm sorry, I don't know what the temperature is right now. What is it?

01:56:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what get a rubber eraser?

01:56:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's like a person like who has both, like hearing loss and dementia. You know, like, if you want that in this, in a model or you know a chatbot or whatever this thing is called now at siri is right there with it. Um, so 18.1 was the first to add some features. I think 18.2 was the big one. 18.3 came out, so now they're testing 18.4. This was the one that was supposed to close the loop on the siri functionality they talked about last year at wwgc and it turns out that, uh, that's not going to be the case, so this is going to be a future release. Um, it's very possible. We're going to apple the case.

01:57:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there's going to be a future release. It's very possible that we're going to Apple. But yeah, they clearly said they were going to do something before they knew how they were going to do it, and now they're fighting to try and deliver.

01:57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I look, if you're an Apple customer, use these products and I think I guess the good news is like they're going to get of there. I guess is the idea, but it's taking a long time. Uh, I mentioned that service 11 whatever it was. 11 public, whatever, blah blah that will take. If you're an author will take a audio, no, a ebook, right? No, yes, it will take a, an existing book and turn it into an AI narrated audio book. Spotify is also offering this service. Nvidia partnered with actually two other companies and did some work with the Rochester Institute of Technology, and my son went to give away a service called signs and I think it's signsai, let me just make sure. Yep, no, sorry. A service called signs and I think it's signsai. Let me just make sure. Yep, uh, no, sorry. Signs dash aicom. Uh, that will help you learn american sign language for free.

01:58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, I saw that. That looks so cool it's a good. That's a neat thing, and I was gonna ask you, uh, what your son thought of that I think yeah, so he was.

01:58:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was excited that ret was involved in this and they're doing a thing where you can sign if, if you know sign language, you can optionally go in and say I will help you train it. And they'll you do? You go through some exercises, you do various signs and they try to find the ones that are most accurate and use that to train them, train the model there. You know, the goal is to make this thing as accurate as possible, right, they're going to um grounded on that data, right, and so it's. You know, the American, I'm sorry, it's the American society for deaf children. And then there's a company in the back and it has a strange, I'm sorry, I don't know the other company, um, but NVIDIA, right, so NVIDIA is obviously donating a lot of technology to make this happen. But cool, I mean, this is you know, this is you know, this is great. They also I threw my wife is more involved in actually everything than I am, but I I threw this quote by her.

01:59:10
It says the american sign language is the third most prevalent language in the united states and she's like no, it isn't, it's not, no, not even close. Um, I don't know why they say that. So obviously english, spanish, but after that it's like portuguese, italian, no, it's the whole thing like it's, it's some. I don't know what the numbers are I shouldn't say numbers but it's yeah, it's actually not even close and she knew that right off the top of her head. She's like, yeah, that's of course she did. Yeah, the ai probably wrote the press release. It's fine, um, what else? And oh, and then, because I asked about this last week, so Microsoft did belatedly ship well, to me belatedly NET 10 Preview 1, right. So now I think every six weeks through November we're going to get more previews and whatever.

01:59:51
But this one was weird. I don't know if you, you must have looked at this, richard. This is the first time I think I've ever seen this where there was no announcement post describing things. They just had links to each of the whatever's in this milestone and those links all went to GitHub, which is inscrutable. And I went through the list and I was like I don't think there's anything new here. I don't know what this is of note, you know, obviously. Well, this will be a long-term servicing version of NET, so that's cool, but that's not going to be in the preview. And then when I look for the things I care about, like things like WPF or some minor WinForms change or stuff they're doing in NET, just language changes to C Sharp etc. There's not a lot of meat here. There's a lot of text, but I don't know. This one was a little strange for me.

02:00:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you did complain last week that they hadn't posted anything, so I guess they felt they needed to post something.

02:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, it's not even in the top 10. Yeah, right, right. Well, I did say spoken. Maybe if I didn't say spoken, I feel like oh no, I.

02:01:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, I mean, I looked up languages and I found five immediately that had more users. Yeah, yeah, yeah, active users, yeah, but there is a video coming of what's in preview, one that might be a little less inscrutable.

02:01:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, my take from way outside is that I think they might have finally. They're on a pretty tough cadence. I mean it's possible that once a year for the entire stack is not necessary maybe anymore. Like they haven't just caught up, like it's so much better than it's ever been. I mean maybe it's time to start thinking about not having a major, you know, every year.

02:01:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know just of the. Well, I would also argue the preview one is usually all the stuff that didn't make it like which you. There are epics, there are bigger features, that that are worked on across multiple versions, and you haven't heard from any of those right yet, because they're still gauging where they are. On them to say is this yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:02:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Clearly they wanted to get this up before the end of february, something you know this is the normal time for preview one to come out. Yep, so maybe, uh, you know, preview two, preview three, whatever will be more meaningful. I know, I mean just because I cared so much about it last year. They did, uh, the wpf stuff in preview four or five. I think I remember that one of the two but that was also timing.

02:02:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
With the announcement of build right the build, I kind of said, hey, we're going to make a big push on wpf then there were no other updates and then it shipped and then it was like oh, here's a couple of new features for wpf.

02:02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, guys. She's like I mean, you couldn't have thrown that in a month earlier?

02:02:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean yeah um, I think there's a real struggle for what gets done in the time frame.

02:02:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so too well, that's what I mean. There's a little too aggressive.

02:02:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there's a sort of philosophical debate here of do you ship to a date or do you ship to a feature set? Right, and and for a long time, devdiv lived on a ship to the feature set world, but it also meant that you didn't know when stuff was going to appear yeah and right.

02:03:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's a reliability, obviously to a yearly schedule. But I mean, I look, maybe it's time for an 18-month schedule.

02:03:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know there's a certainly an argument around that, because it's not like they're trying to make annual revenues. You know milestones here either right, there's no money here, there's no direct revenue associated with this stuff. Um, yeah, it's also a part of this is also keeping people on the current version to decrease the amount of security patching they need to go back on and so forth and see lts and all that, like getting this commitment to the three-year cycle, like you're talking about a big thing to change to be able to expand that out.

02:03:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I were on version 10, which I guess is technically whatever version, because this was NET Core. Well, I guess it is. It's still 10, right, still been 10 since.

02:03:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
NET Core. More or less they skipped over nominally five right Okay.

02:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look okay, so we're about a decade into this. I mean, look okay, so we're about a decade into this uh, it's succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I think it's incredible since the rewrite yeah, yeah, maybe now it's time to rethink.

02:04:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know you know, if you have dot net questions, that guy on the right there, mr richard campbell's the king of dot net. His podcast dot net rocks at that, rex knocks I am the court jester of dot net.

02:04:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you for mentioning that. If you have an, Xbox question.

02:04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The guy in the middle is the one to ask. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell. We're glad to hear you. Lovely winners and dozers. Let's do the Xbox segment, Paul, A chance for you to show your brilliance.

02:04:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well that's like, and it's so much good news too why, unfortunately, I, I, yeah, so we already mentioned that microsoft delayed fable uh, the reboot of fable as part of this bizarre video interview. I Just a weird way to do it and it's hard to know where to land on this. Phil Spencer talks about this a lot Like we want to give these studios the time they need to make the game right, you know, make it well. And the alternative, of course, is what we see across the industry, which is there are games that are three years in where they're like, yeah, we're not doing this, they just give up on it. So that's obviously a fear as well.

02:05:30
But, okay, fine, you know, and as part of that and I only know this because I use chat GBT, but they talked about, you know, the broader strategy at Xbox and bringing games to more platforms and it's, there's nothing new to say there, but it's, it's. I think it's one of those things Xbox as an organization feels like they have to keep repeating, because at some point, you have to reach these people who are just like no, no, I want console and I want it exclusive, and I don't know, I don't know how we bridge this gap.

02:06:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that anybody actually wants exclusive per se. That isn't a game producer, right? Like regular, people don't care where the games run, they just want to run on their device.

02:06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You would think that, but you know I, my readers, are really negative about this, like they feel that they associate with xbox as a brand. You know they see what sony did and the successes they've had with these exclusives and they want to that for themselves.

02:06:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this is more about games. You know, this is more about the conversations you'd have with your therapist than it is about software.

02:06:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am with you 100%, I agree, no, I, I am, I, I. I look at this logically and I say, look, I, yes, it would be wonderful if Xbox as a console was going gangbusters. Xbox as a console was going gangbusters, it was great. It's not. So what can we do? And I think they have come up. We'll see what happens in the real world, but I think the strategy is correct and that Xbox, ultimately, is really.

02:06:59
They don't want to say it this way, but it's what Activision Blizzard was right with the nuance of our parent companies, microsoft. They have this cloud stuff and data center and we're going to be doing, um, you know, cloud streaming games. We'll talk about that in a second. We're going to be doing ai generated content. You know, I didn't put this in the show notes, but one of the things activision finally admitted to was that they put out all this in-game content for call of duty and it comes out at such a clip that people are like, come on, you must be using ai for a lot of this. Like, how are you doing this? And they were like, yeah, some of this is made with AI and the sum of this is stuff like little decals and hats and guns and things or whatever you can buy in the game. That just you know don't really impact anything. But yeah, you know, people like to people like that stuff.

02:07:40
You know, I don't know, I don't know, um, I don't spend money on anything like that. I get the game, but then I just kind of play the game I don't know, whatever um call yourself a gamer I know well. Yeah, I usually try to do air quotes around it small g, but yeah you're a gamer, I call you gamer man.

02:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm kidding gamer, thank. Thank you um game over, game, game over man, exactly so.

02:08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is the former project xCloud xCloud yeah, I don't know why that sounds weird when I say it. Yes, xcloud Is still something you can only get as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate right. So if you pay for the most expensive tier, you get this.

02:08:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which is expensive.

02:08:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is expensive. It's $20 a month now, right, um, it's expensive. But you get all the pc games, you get all the xbox games and you can stream a chunk of them through the service. But it's continually in beta. It's not really changed too much and they just announced an update to it, which, in the scheme of this thing, is actually fairly major, so you can invite people from within these stream games to come and stream with you and play games with you, so that should work anywhere you can access Xbox cloud gaming, so cross platform, which is pretty cool. I love the network quality indicator, which will do what my iPhone does and tell you that you always have five bars, even though you can't connect anything.

02:09:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Lies yeah.

02:09:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you've ever used like Xbox, called gaming, unless you are the perfect storm of upstream and downstream and right place, right time, whatever phase of the moon. You know it's kind of a dicey endeavor. There's a lot of latency issues there. So, whatever endeavor it, there's a lot of latency issues there, so whatever, um. And then they've made uh, new titles available, um, that you can stream if you own them, right? So one of the features they did fairly recently was that thing they promised, probably two years ago, which is that if you have, if you own games, digital games, you can stream them through the service as well. You don't have to have them on a xbox somewhere and stream them through the service as well. You don't have to have them on an Xbox somewhere and stream them from the console. I'm looking at this list. Honestly I don't recognize. Well, tomb Raider 4 through 6 is remastered. That's cool. Kingdom Come, deliverance 2, several others. Subnautica, deliverance the game Deliverance yeah.

02:09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you get to?

02:10:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
squeal like a pig.

02:10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, not that not that you get to squeal like a pig no, that was the first one.

02:10:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, no, it's play that game. Nobody wants to play that game, nobody, nobody. Uh, kingdom come, colon deliverance two is the ah, not deliverance that I mean, it's the, yeah, it's a uh, what do you call?

02:10:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like a um, you got a pretty mouth like a woman right, the tennis was that the tennessee valley project or whatever.

02:10:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, they were gonna flood it and yeah, and then they would have flooded those guys, so yeah, burt reynolds decided this time to take a little kayak ferry voyage down the mighty river.

02:10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a great movie it is a great movie. A little uncomfortable in places um I don't know how well it ages you ever watch old movies and you go wow, yeah, all the time and you're like oh my god, I love this when I was a kid and what happened? Yeah, we're doing that right now because the day of the jackal is on. You know the tv show there are multiple versions right, so the original new tv show with eddie redmayne and I'm saying that's not, this isn't, it didn't happen. What?

02:11:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because I read the original one is the uh, what's the french leader from world?

02:11:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
war two gall. They were gonna go right, so we're watching the original 1973 movie that's pretty good with that's good I think it's eddie fox.

02:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the other fox, the one that's not in every movie you've ever seen in the 90s.

02:11:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a wonderful movie. But yeah, it's Eddie Fox. Yeah, the other Fox, the one that's not in every movie you've ever seen in the 90s. It's a wonderful movie, but it's a little Lisa's going. You know what would make this really work? A drone shot? It's like no they.

02:11:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so all right. So there was a fairly modern remake with I think was it Richard Gere.

02:11:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, there's a new version.

02:11:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, modern era not new now not.

02:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is he still going after de gaulle?

02:11:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, it's, they changed up the plot, but actually, if you've seen the movie the american right with um uh, clooney right, yeah, if you think about clooney and his character in that movie and him assembling weapons and going around, it's actually very much like the original um, the original movie. That's me.

02:11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh jack, day of the jackal there's some little in the tv show, which is a 10 10 hour extravaganza is this on what?

02:12:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
netflix or?

02:12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's, uh, no, it's peacock, I think, or that's why it's one of those oddball, but it's good, it's just you know, it's not it's not the original uh-huh.

02:12:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I found the ending disappointing and deeply unsatisfying. It's not well written.

02:12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're like all of a sudden he gets hit by a car, and then the next scene they cut away he's walking around. I think they like all of a sudden he gets hit by a car and then the next scene they cut away.

02:12:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's walking around. I think they ran out of money I literally couldn't shoot.

02:12:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That must be what it is yeah yeah, so it's, oh it's bruce willis bruce willis and richard gear. We're in 1997, so not modern, but you know more watch the original universal pictures 1973 starring edward fox.

02:12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the day of the jackal, I think classic movie.

02:12:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think redman did it and edward fox is that guy you'll be like but he is a brother who's an actor and they look very similar and I always forget fox always plays royals now, like he's king, of course, oh he's. I was gonna say looks most like the andrew actually, but anyway but, yes yes okay, anyway, sorry, and that's yeah nope nope, that's that's it, that's what I got folks.

02:13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, before we go on to the back of the book, there's a fabulous brown liquor pick a coming. Uh, it's a coming around the mountain wench. Oh look, they're tiny hello guys we're just little. You know, if you want these little guys to grow up big and strong, there's one thing you can do today to help them, and that's to join clubs tell them to stop smoking that's your growth, uh.

02:13:48
The club, by the way, uh, seven dollars a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. You get additional content. Tomorrow we're doing stacy's book club. That'll be a lot of fun. I always like doing that. Uh, I have to read a 700-page book in the next 24 hours, but that's par for the course. We have the photo guy, chris Marquardt, doing a wonderful photo segment every month. There's a lot of extra stuff for the club, plus, of course, access to the club, twit Discord, which is the behind-the-velvet-rope access to all of our hosts. But, most importantly, that seven bucks a month makes up the difference between what it costs to do these programs and what we make on advertising. The advertising doesn't cover it all, but the club makes up the difference. We thank the club members and we invite you to be part of the club. It's really a great club Seven bucks a month. Twittv slash club, twit or scan the QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Now back to the little fellas.

02:14:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, it's time for the back of the book, starting with paul's tip of the week I just got an email, by the way, that's told me that ai is a better cook than I am, so I might be. You're on to something, leo the ai may better hash browns than I did.

02:15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's told me that ai is a better cook than I am, so I might be you're on to something, leo. The ai made better hash browns than I did, that's for sure um, this is kind of apropos of nothing.

02:15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just want people to know that this happened. So, uh, some years ago, um, a guy, some guy, started the like, a unix preservation society, and dennis richie. I don't know why. That's hilarious, but okay um dennis richie unix is doing okay.

02:15:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying I don't know if it needs to well, is it?

02:15:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean unix, isn't really. I mean the original unix, I don't know.

02:15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean paul next time you do your banking, you can thank okay well, dennis kernahan and yeah, denn, and Dennis Ritchie and Kevin Thompson, whatever Kernaghan's name was.

02:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes. So Dennis Ritchie in 1997 donated to this guy a set of old what he called deck tapes which were backups he had made on a PDP-11 back in the 70s which included a bunch of the original source code for Unix. So the first two versions of Unix were actually written in PDP. Whatever Assembling, assembling language, yeah, and then of course they invented the C programming language and subsequent versions were written in C. So this is not actually the oldest version of Unix. They found handwritten notes about the source code for the original. One of the 1.0 versions scanned it, got it onto an emulator and it works. They got it to work, but this what they. So these tapes have been around for well for 40, 50 years, whatever. It's a huge discovery. But he started handing them off to a different guy who has specific skills around recovering data off of these tapes. He found on them not in one thing, but he collected what he needed to find the oldest machine-readable version of Unix. Wow, it's a beta.

02:16:59
They didn't call it beta at the time but they didn't have version numbers at the time. But between V1 and V2, sometime in 1972. So V2, I guess, had some fundamental changes to the operating system that hadn't occurred yet in this version. So it's really kind of a 1.0, something like 1.5, whatever, and he got it running in an emulator and it works. So you can go see the source code, you can download it.

02:17:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has all the instructions I have a pdp 11 emulator right here I yeah should see if I can get it yeah, it's really interesting. So to me the it, the story, is, to me, what's most interesting now, this isn't the one from the napkins, this is from the tapes, this is from tape. So that's the point.

02:17:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of this was like we this will almost certainly be, given the passage of time, the oldest version they've ever recovered from actual physical media.

02:17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the eunuchs era begins in january 1st 1970, but 72 has to be one of the early. You know, for years I have cherished uh this book. This is uh called the lion book. It's Lion's commentary, it's the Unix 6 source code. And it's actually. You can see it's a dot matrix printout, but Lion wrote great commentary on this.

02:18:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was a guy who still has a running PDP-11. I wonder if we could get that Unix loaded on that machine.

02:18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a PiDP. It's running a Raspberry Pi, but it's emulating.

02:18:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's full, so I if I could be getting this wrong, but I think v1, the first version, actually ran on something called the pdp 7, yeah, which curiously is an 18-bit mini computer system. You know as you do right um, I think it was programmed with a egyptian hieroglyphics or something um but yeah, that's in the 70s, so it's much, yeah, so v2 and and this well it was ported later the pdp 11, which I guess was much more powerful.

02:18:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The funny thing is um, in 1984, when I started working for knbr radio in san francisco, they were generating their music playlists on a pdp 8. Oh, oh, geez, wow, wow. And the software it ran on was on this giant eight-inch floppy. So I would come in as music director. You'd have to put the floppy in clunk, boot up to the floppy and then the PDP-8 would generate on dot matrix teletype, a playlist for the djs to play. That is incredible and it was such a pain to use I accidentally broke it. Oh no, and we got a pc. Because this is 1984, kids, it's it's time to get with the. I think we got a mac.

02:19:39
Actually we might have got a microcomputer revolution was happening, yeah but yeah, you have to use a pdp and you know who else loves the pdp. Uh, seven and eight is mr steve gibson? Okay, and uh. He actually said at one point I don't know if he'll really do this that his dream is, when he retires, to take a pdp eight and and rewrite the operating system yeah, no, that's a good time.

02:20:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds like a good use of time, man, uh that day plumber, guy from microsoft brought up a pdp 11, he bought one and brought it back to life this is how they grew up.

02:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, this is their first experience.

02:20:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like you know. Other types of people might buy a muscle car you know, yeah, yeah them the same thing you know or I might buy an atari 400.

02:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, right, you might buy a amiga yeah, yeah, I did, yeah, see interesting uh, and then so is this. Uh, this is. Can you look at it online?

02:20:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you can go read the assembly, you can download it, you can run it in an emulator it's crazy.

02:20:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome. Yeah, that is really. I'll have to look at it.

02:20:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's incredible and then, uh, this is not a Windows app or anything like that, but I didn't want to do the same browser again, so this is actually kind of a big release. But Adobe actually put out Photoshop like actual Photoshop for the iPhone this week and I don't know if you've looked at this. It's pretty freaking good.

02:20:59
Now I believe you have to have a paid Photoshop plan to access it, but it has all the same icons as Photoshop and if you use Photoshop today like Elements, especially the default UI is not the workspace, it's one of those like what do you want to do next, kind of things, and so it sort of works like that.

02:21:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you open a file, basically, and then it gives you all the icons.

02:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it more like Photoshop elements? Yeah, probably. I'm not really even sure anymore what the difference is, but it's it's. Well, you know how they had like Photoshop, they had a mobile Photoshop app called something Photoshop.

02:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they've had Photoshop, but it was not full.

02:21:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it's something else. It's like Photoshop essentials or Photoshop. This is now available. Yeah, no, no, this is literally iphone, you know. Yeah, no, I know it's right and and it I. It also works on the ipad, so we're getting it. We're getting it. Yeah, it's getting kind of interesting now we're got, we have some yeah.

02:21:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you didn't see this, this is where photoshop yeah, this is worth looking at like it's not. It is not the stripped down nothing that you think it is, it's actually, I picked a bad time to give up my creative cloud subscription, didn't I? Yeah, yeah, well, that's always the way, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's interesting this is, this was more.

02:22:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was better than I thought it was going to be. Like this might actually be a I don't want to say the term game changer. It's a little overused, but it's it's pretty amazing.

02:22:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and people do stuff on their phones. There's no two ways about it, right, right, it's got to be the thing.

02:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep.

02:22:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Impressive.

02:22:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so.

02:22:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it is a statement about the amount of horsepower in an iPhone these days. Right.

02:22:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And thank God they don't have those stupid small screens anymore. Now you can actually see the damn thing. I know this is for some people, sorry yeah, all right, you ready for some run-ass?

02:22:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
well, this week's run, as I did on exchange server, because it had been a while, the on-prem well, this was what the debate became, right, um, michael de rose is, uh, from the netherlands, does a definitive book, the, the exchange administrator's handbook, and does a lot of. There's a lot of scripts. If you, if you were operating the exchange server, you've run some of his powershell scripts, it's kind of inevitable, right, he's the guy and, uh, so we've been talking a while, but I really want to talk about exchange, just what it's like in 2025, because there hasn't been an on-prem version of exchange servership since 2019. Geez, right, they're overdue. And he made the point because, of course, he's very much an insider. So he says you know, they've already publicly stated it and there will be another on-prem version of exchange, probably this year, but it will be subscription-based.

02:23:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ah, so you are going to keep it on prem but but, yeah, right and it's just

02:23:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but you know the bigger conversation is if you care to get the nitty-gritty and I do was just how much work it is to run a mail server today that won't automatically get all of its mail rejected. Right like this, because the the new security rules and filters and all these sorts of things, uh, there's really hard to maintain like the. It's difficult to to actually make a running exchange server today, and so, once again, it's like the. All the encouragement is to go to the online product one way or the other. Right and uh. But we went back and forth on this. Just the challenges of what it's like and you make a lot of that pain go away when you can just go online.

02:24:27
All that being said, there's still no good hybrid mode, non-hybrid mode. If you've come from on-prem and you're moving online, you still end up with at least one server left behind. You know, weird, it's difficult to actually hang hang it up. They've never. It's an active directory thing. When you uninstall your last exchange server and your on-prem environment, it pulls all this stuff out of active directory related to mail, which causes problems, and so you kind of have to leave that in place if you're going to continue to function that way. Hey, no one ever said this stuff was easy. That's the whole point.

02:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a flex. Yeah, I run my own server at home.

02:25:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I run Exchange. That's past flex into sort of I like abusing myself.

02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's masochism. I like suffering From flex to masochist in one easy step. By the way, paul, I got it running. Look at this, hide background, right, removing back. Let's, paul, I got it running. Look at this. Oh, hide background, right, we're moving back. Let's see, I mean you could do this in the iphone by just direct what?

02:25:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's okay, yeah, wow interesting the screen like it. The thing that's interesting to me is, like on mine it was when I was using it was dark mode but like the um it, like it mirrors the Photoshop desktop UI. I was like what, how is this possible?

02:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of interesting. This is actually. Yeah, this is not bad. Yeah, huh, all right, richard, you have 22 minutes and 15 seconds to sell us some brown liquor. We've got Stephen Wilkins going to be on the horn in a minute I'm going to panic. Absolutely Don't panic. The smartest man in the world is about to join us.

02:26:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no don't panic, but I mean maybe panic, I don't know. Uh, I'm going back to my stomping ground. So, as you've heard me tell, when I go to Scotland I like to go stay at the hotel Craig Alachi. The Craig Alachi Hotel on the Spey River, and Rothes is a town in Moray which is just north of the Craig Alachi, which is also on the Spey River. That town is old, it's been around since, like there's records going back to 600 AD for that town, and it's not huge, but it is whiskey central right. This is the Spey side. So literally within the limits of the town are the distilleries Speyburn, glen Turret, glen Spey and Glen Rothes. The Rothes Castle, which is a ruin now built back in 1200, is right beside the Glen Spey distillery on the southern side of town. So now, on the way from the Craig Alachi to Rothes you're going to pass Abelauer, mcallen and Dewars so, which is also where other whiskeys are made too.

02:27:12
And not surprisingly, because this is Scotland, they got the railway in 1858, which is sort of your catalyst for an awful lot of these things. So the original Glenrothes distillery, built in 1878, 20 years after the railway, came through from a converted sawmill and started producing whiskey, and long before the Diageos and United Distillers of the World, there was a group formed around Glenrothes and an Isley whiskey called Bunahaban, called the Highland Distillers. And this is you know. We're talking the late 1800s. So this is when, uh, france has its crisis in wine production, when they get the, uh, the, the blight that kills a bunch of the grapes and drives the price of brandy through the roof. So whiskey sales goes go crazy. And these guys were right there in that hot time and they bought up a bunch of other distilleries, including glas, glenn, glasau and tom do. And then, even after the 1800s, into the early 1900s, they bought highland park, they also in glen turt, which is famous grouse, and, uh, in the 90s they bought mccallan. But, going back to the early times, they had all the usual problems for old style distilleries, including explosion in 1903 that leveled the distillery and big chunks of the town.

02:28:32
This is because you were vaporizing alcohol with fire and sometimes bad things happen. Yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often actually. Well, it doesn't happen anymore because by the 1960s they go to steam for heating. So the fire is outside the building and you're pumping hot water in and everything is safer. Right, it's the right way to go. 60s and 70s is when everybody converts to that, so fewer people die. Um, but you'll also notice, if you're going to these still buildings we do the tours, that they're open air right, that they're basically environmental temperatures because they always need to be vented, right. Uh, in In the early 1920s a group called the Berry Brothers starts using Glenrothes to make a blended whiskey called Cutty Sark, which is a fairly famous whiskey.

02:29:15
I've heard of that. Yeah, it's also the early 1920s, which is when Prohibition is on, so they immediately start selling it to the Americans. Berry Brothers has been around a long time, formed in 1698 as wine merchants, and of course they got into liquor and so forth, and so they um, they expanded into this market and bought into the space and uh were right through the prohibition making money smuggling. How do you start into that? So they actually had a really good brand reputation when prohibition ended. Uh, now you can fast forward to uh the 1990s with this group called the edgerding group. So the editing group comes from glenn grant and a bunch of, or from william grant and a bunch of the others.

02:29:55
These were the counterpoint folks that were sort of uh, anti-diageo, anti-untory, anti-big conglomerate. They were Scots buying Scottish stuff and so they acquired Highland Distillers, which at that point was over a hundred years old. They'd been around a long time and actually took the group private, so got out of the public markets to help protect it. It was very much their mindset that they wanted to keep all of those, these different products, including mccallan. It's not a huge group, it's not like diageo with 30 something distilleries it's half a dozen but very nice whiskeys and they they kept it private and, um, uh, in part of that process they ended up buying up. Uh, they they actually sold off the glenn rothys distilleries back to berry brothers and then turned around in 2017 and bought it all back. So at this particular moment, edmonton Group owns the whole cluster and Berry Brothers is out of that business and they including you know Cuddy Sark is now over there as well.

02:30:56
The distillery itself is interesting in the way that it operates. They don't do separate maltings the way that a lot of other distilleries do, but they do do it with one of their other distilleries, tamdo, which is about 20 kilometers away. That's where the maltings happen. They actually do their own and then bring it back up to Glenrothes to do their own mash and milling and all the distillations. They have single five-ton mash done with copper top 20 wash backs, of which 12 are Oregon pine, eight are stainless. That ratio of two to one wood to steel is very deliberate part of their flavor profile. They use your favorite, the yeast cream, to do a 55 hour fermentation to eight percent. My favorite, that's absolutely a thing right.

02:31:40
And then they now have uh, over over the literally century, have added still to the point where they have five washes and five spirits all identical. The wash stills slightly smaller spirit stills, which is weird. Normally wash stills are bigger and these are very tall neck stills with bulbs for maximized reflex because they keep their still running at a higher uh, putting out a higher level product than most. They put out about 68 to 72 percent and they actually barrel at 68, which is unusual. Most whiskeys are bare. Most scottish whiskeys are billed at 63, but most, almost all of their. That's really because of bourbon casts, which they rarely use. They only do a little bit of bourbon. They mostly barrel in sherry. They also make their own barrels. They do not use any of the shared cooperages. Galen Rathace has their own cooperage Now.

02:32:33
When it was run by Berry Brothers, berry Brothers did not do an age statement whiskey. They did these things. They called vintages. They had their own names for them, but since uh edgerton is taking it back again as of 2017, they are doing vintages and I picked the base vintage which I've had called the glenn rotha's 15. This is almost entirely sherry cash, so it's very rich. Uh, dark reddish whiskey 43. It is available in the us, uh, if you can find it in specialty stores, usually running about a hundred us dollars, I consider it a super old school, uh, scottish whiskey and that is it worth it you know this is a.

02:33:16
This is a first drink whiskey. Is it really peaty? No peat at all, it's a space side, oh yeah, okay. So very sweet and light, dark colored. It's a nice uh drinking whiskey, but yeah, for a hundred dollars a bottle, uh have one, and then uh switch to the fix to the famous grouse, which you'll be paying the same guys, but you know that's a twenty dollar bottle of whiskey. Or have a cuddy sark or the cuddy sark, yeah, yeah, it'll work too they, but they own both, both cuddy sark and famous gross.

02:33:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you have your choice richard campbell had a very nice uh episode of what we now are going to start calling, uh, richard's little brown leaguer segment. By the way, I I like that, uh, microsoft band jacket, I guess or maybe you're a scottish, I don't know what this is sure that sure looks like an rcmp serves he's a mountie.

02:34:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what he is it looks like a mountie he's a mountie with somehow working for microsoft.

02:34:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, thank you to joe esposito once again for his lovely photoshop skills not made on an iphone, I have no doubt. Yeah, um, and ricardo campbell, the brown liquor segment, I love it I love it always.

02:34:37
All right, let's liquor, but when I do, he does look like the most interesting uh round liquor man in the world, something. Uh, wait a minute. Let's get paul full size there you go. And let's get him on the left there you go. And then let's get me in there in the middle and no, on the left. And then I didn't make you sick with all of that ladies and gentlemen, they should never give me control of the mouse.

02:35:01
I just want to say, uh, thank you so much once. Once again, another wonderful edition of windows weekly. Richard campbell is at run as radiocom. That's where you'll find his podcastnet rocks, also the podcast he does with carl franklin run as radio. I think you switched those up, but yes uh, you're the radio guy.

02:35:24
You and carl are done that rocks, thank you. Uh, yes, paul thurot is at thurotcom, that's easy to remember. Uh, t-h-u-r-o-t. It's not easy to spell, but it's easy to remember. There's. There's two r's, three t's, an o and a? U. Put them in any order and you'll get there. Probably this works. You should register all possible combinations his, uh, his uh. Books are windows everywhere and uh field guide to windows 11. Uh, now, with ai, are available at leanpubcom, maybe soon I love that idea.

02:36:01
Yeah, we'll see, and I like the idea of an audiobook of windows everywhere that you could do. That that's easy. I don't want to read it, that's for sure yeah, let the ai read it.

02:36:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe they could train it on my voice and that would sound like me reading. I can get you, helen mirren, it's like dripping with sarcasm dot wave and then you're not going to believe what Microsoft did next.

02:36:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do windows weekly every Wednesday, 11am pacific 2pm, eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live. The lip sync is not as good, but you can watch us do it live on a variety of platforms if you're in the club, of course, club twit discord has the stream and also the chatting going on behind the scenes. But we also use youtube, twitch, kick, xcom, tiktok, facebook and linkedin and, um, I think I got them all anyway. Yeah, is it on vine?

02:37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what would be? What's?

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
left. Fine, we're dead. It would. We're on everywhere. We can't, because we want to make sure everybody gets a chance to watch. But you don't have to watch live.

02:37:09
Most people listen, uh, at their convenience. The way to do that, of course, download a copy of the show, audio or video from twittv, slash ww. When you're there, uh, you can also find a link to our YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. That's good to have for sharing clips. Just, you know, youtube makes that very easy and you know everybody can watch it and it helps promote the show. So, thank you in advance.

02:37:36
You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That's probably the best way to do it. Find a podcast client, whether it's Pocket Cast, which I think a lot of people use, or apple's podcasts or overcast, or I can go on and on. Any rss feeder should be able to subscribe, and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done editing it of a wednesday afternoon. Thank you, richard. Thank you, paul. If you're watching live, stay tuned. Uh, we're going to do intelligent machines in a few minutes. Very special guest, stephen Wolfram will join us. Whoever that is Some smart guy, I don't know no one of the most accomplished people in the world. I really want to get the people who've been doing this for a long time to help us understand this stuff, because, like you, paul, I, I love it, I'm interested, I know it can do stuff, uh, but I I'm pretty sure it's just a magic trick.

02:38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, that's my level of understanding.

02:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to know more. We asked richard. That was my car.

02:38:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is one very clever, stochastic parrot.

02:38:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, exactly I knew I had a quarter behind my ear, exactly.

02:38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on DrippingWithSarcasm no, I'm sorry on Windows Weekly. Have a wonderful week.