Windows Weekly 996 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
Time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. Patch Tuesday again. We'll talk about that, the new changes to Edge making it more like Chrome. Not sure that's a good thing. And here comes Grand Theft Auto 6. Could it be anything but a disappointment? Windows Weekly is next, and I promise it won't be disappointing. Podcasts you love.

Leo Laporte [00:00:23]:
From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 996, recorded Wednesday, August 12th, 2026. Security through lack of features. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dosers. Yes, we're back from Vegas, a little lighter in the loafers, but nonetheless happy. Paul Thurrott has returned to his domicile in beautiful Roma Norte, Mexico City.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:02]:
Hello, Paul.

Richard Campbell [00:01:03]:
Hello.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:03]:
Hello, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:01:04]:
Wonderful to see you.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:06]:
You too.

Leo Laporte [00:01:06]:
Uh, it was fun seeing you in the flesh, I might add.

Richard Campbell [00:01:09]:
That was a lot of fun sitting together.

Leo Laporte [00:01:11]:
Oh, look who's here! Richard Campbell of Run As Radio fame.

Richard Campbell [00:01:15]:
And considering the meals for the 48 hours, nothing lighter about me.

Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
Oh my God, that was a good steak we had at the worst named steakhouse in America, I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:26]:
What was it called again?

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
Tender.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:28]:
Oh, Tender. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
You could have called it Tinder.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:32]:
Legal Tender. A little different.

Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
Legal Tender. I, I, yeah, maybe I don't get— I didn't really get the name. Oh yeah, their steaks are tender.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:41]:
Oh, they are tender.

Leo Laporte [00:01:42]:
They were sort of.

Richard Campbell [00:01:43]:
What's the implication for the other steak places? Right.

Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
I'm going to open a steak shop called—

Paul Thurrott [00:01:49]:
Smell like burnt oily bacon. What's going on here?

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
Rich is in Madeira Park, beautiful British Columbia. What's the weather like in Mad Park today?

Richard Campbell [00:01:58]:
Well, let's take a big peek out the window there.

Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
It is gorgeous. Gorgeous.

Richard Campbell [00:02:03]:
Sunny with a touch of forest fire smoke.

Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
Oh, a little haze, that makes the sunsets pretty. That's okay.

Richard Campbell [00:02:11]:
It certainly does. But also a lot of suffering going on in the interior right now.

Leo Laporte [00:02:16]:
Yeah, I should have come to the station.

Richard Campbell [00:02:17]:
Lots of homes and lots of people displaced.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Well, we were doing intelligent machines a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it was last Monday. And I said, I smell smoke. And then I looked at— we have a program that everybody in Northern California watches like a hawk, everybody in California, called Watch Duty. Do you have that up there? I don't know. It's a fire alert. And all of a sudden, yeah, there's a fire half a mile away.

Richard Campbell [00:02:42]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
And it has a name.

Richard Campbell [00:02:43]:
The news is faster than the software.

Leo Laporte [00:02:45]:
When they name it—

Richard Campbell [00:02:47]:
Yeah. Once your fire has a name, it's a problem. It was the Straub Fire.

Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
Fortunately, it was also the put-out fire within half an hour. So we were okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:56]:
That's good.

Richard Campbell [00:02:56]:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, our pattern is first you call it a fire, then when those— a couple of different fires meet, then it's a complex.

Leo Laporte [00:03:02]:
Ooh.

Richard Campbell [00:03:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
When does it become a bomb cyclone?

Richard Campbell [00:03:05]:
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:03:06]:
Jeez. Uh, anyway, enough nomenclature. I think we're here, uh, to talk about something you all know as Windows. And yesterday was Patch Tuesday.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:19]:
It sure was.

Richard Campbell [00:03:21]:
And I just looked down at my sys tray and I have not patched.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
Oh, do you get a little squirrely line thing there?

Richard Campbell [00:03:27]:
The little swoopy with the yellow blob.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:29]:
Well, we can wait while you reboot if you want.

Richard Campbell [00:03:31]:
That seems really unwise.

Leo Laporte [00:03:33]:
You were out of town. You had a good excuse.

Richard Campbell [00:03:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
You know, as predicted, by the way, since Microsoft introduced the notion of you have basically infinite number of pauses you can take on Windows Update rebooting, when I initially observed there's no way that's true because You were going to get zero days or whatever it is. Like, you're going to have to reboot your computer.

Richard Campbell [00:03:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:54]:
Every single time since then, they have a really serious, uh, new dialogue that's like, you really need to reboot. You should do this right now. Do you want to do this right now? And you're like, no. And it's like, all right, but we're going to do it soon. It's like, but hold on a second. I, but I'm pausing it. It doesn't matter.

Richard Campbell [00:04:10]:
They don't care.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:11]:
No, no. And this is no better than you. Well, especially this summer.

Richard Campbell [00:04:14]:
This would be right, right? If we're talking about zero days and things like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:18]:
That's what I mean. Like, you, you introduced this feature at a time when no one will ever be able to use it because every month we're going to have some crazy number of fixes. And some of those are going to require reboots. And so it's cute to see, you have this cute little UI that you could use, but we're going to just ignore it because we have to. I mean, anyway, that's part of the story.

Richard Campbell [00:04:41]:
I'm wondering when we get over the hump on the backlog of vulnerability patching going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:48]:
Yeah, so there's no way to know that right now, but the one semi-interesting thing about this week's or this month's patches is that there are fewer bugs fixed this month than there were last month.

Richard Campbell [00:05:00]:
Yeah. So is that a good sign or a bad sign? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:03]:
I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:05:03]:
Because I also have this sense that there's a set of bugs they now know about where the fixes are not a simple patch, but something serious, like a UAC kind of, we have to change people's workflow. You know, I've certainly— I don't know if you've noticed this, but in the past like 2 months, a lot of credentials have been forced to be reloaded. Many sites have forced me to change passwords and so forth. So you can see people are fixing a lot of things. And I got to say, it's good news actually, as annoying as it may be.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:35]:
You're right. Well, that's a very healthy way to look at it.

Richard Campbell [00:05:39]:
Fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:40]:
I'm really— No, and you're right. I mean, you're correct. But yeah, I don't think this means we've crested and we're going to go down.

Richard Campbell [00:05:46]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:47]:
We're gonna have aberrations.

Richard Campbell [00:05:48]:
I think it's summertime and even zero days have to wait for—

Paul Thurrott [00:05:51]:
Even, yeah, even hackers go on a vacation in the Crimea eventually. Uh, so yeah. Um, so anyway, but I don't remember the number last month, but it was over 600. This month it was 420 all told. Um, or, uh, 421 maybe was the right number, but somewhere in there.

Richard Campbell [00:06:09]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:09]:
And then as far as, you know, Patch Tuesdays go, we would've talked about this 2 weeks ago because, you know, we saw the preview version of this at least for 25H2, but kind of a minor one. some ways, right? So, um, this is like the new gestures for precision touchpads, the improvements across like Windows Hello for external fingerprint readers on ESS, and widget improvements and search improvements, and nothing major really. Um, so there's a— if you have 26H1 though, um, not hilariously, but unfortunately, you're still a month behind, right? So This is the calendar-based pausing of Windows Update that we just sort of referenced, the point-in-time restore feature, which is actually really good. Multi-camera support if your cameras support that. Yeah. Yep. And if you install it fresh, Windows that is, the ability to choose your user folder name during setup. So, you know, the stuff we've, you know, we've talked about many, many times, but— Nothing dramatic.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:15]:
One little note is Windows 8 introduced the concept of a picture password. Remember this thing? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:07:22]:
Did anybody ever use it?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:25]:
Nobody over the age of 12 who didn't work at Microsoft, but they would demo it and it was like, okay, whatever. To me, the bigger deal, this was the beginning of Windows Hello, right? So we had, well, we still have obviously PIN, but facial and fingerprint recognition, you know, formally added to the operating system. But Picture Password was an option because we were gonna all be using tablets within 10 seconds of the release of Windows 8, and that worked out great.

Richard Campbell [00:07:52]:
Yeah, that's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:53]:
And we were gonna be able to draw on the screen, right? And Android, I think, might still have an option for that type of thing, right? Where you draw a pattern as a—

Richard Campbell [00:07:59]:
Yeah, yeah, or it's a grid. You have a grid and you draw between the grids.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:03]:
Yeah, so it actually kind of worked like that. I think the idea was you had a picture up and you might draw like a, like a lot, like a, triangle or whatever from your wife's eyes to a tree to, you know, whatever it was. Um, but anyway, that's being phased out. So in— this probably already happened in 25H2, but in 26H1, that's actually one of the things that's changing. It won't impact you if you're using it. I don't think they— I could be wrong though. I don't believe they're going to take it away, but if you do a clean install or a new install, that will no longer be an option.

Richard Campbell [00:08:31]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:34]:
Yeah, super exciting.

Richard Campbell [00:08:37]:
Um, no, maybe— I mean Security patches, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:40]:
Things are happening. Security patch. Yeah. So 400 and whatever I said, 421 I think was the total, but I think that includes, that might include Edge. It was like 398 CVEs, which are the common vulnerabilities. There's nothing common about a security vulnerability, but whatever. And then over 60 of them are critical. And then one is important.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:59]:
And that's, they know is being actively used by attackers, which is going to explain why you're going to be forced to reboot the same day you get the little calendar that says, I don't want to reboot. So have fun with that. So last week we talked a bit about Microsoft's AI spending in the context of the broader industry. There's trillions of dollars now we've reached in AI infrastructure spending and CapEx across Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and then some other companies, right? Oracle's in there somehow as well. But since then, Bloomberg looked at their 10-K report, which was published, I believe, that day. at this for my own analysis of the quarter, I used to look at their 10-K report. And if you ask me right now, what's the difference between those 2? I do not know, except that a 10-Q is quarterly and a 10-K is annual.

Richard Campbell [00:09:55]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:55]:
So Microsoft's 10-K came out, of course, in the wake of their fiscal year ending on June 30th. And in there is some interesting stuff. And some of the first of these might be tied to the fact that OpenAI is hoping to go public at some point this year, right? So they reported that they earned $24.1 billion in revenues, not profits, right? But revenues from OpenAI during that fiscal year that just ended.

Richard Campbell [00:10:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:22]:
So we don't have anything to compare that to, right? We didn't get a figure the year ago quarter, year ago year, I guess actually. But the thing is, Microsoft spent $145 billion on CapEx in the same year.

Richard Campbell [00:10:37]:
Wow. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:38]:
And that $24 billion they earn in revenues, there's a 90-something percent chance that 100% of that money Microsoft also transferred to them first and they transferred it back. And they're both recording it as revenues. This is one of the accounting tricks they're using right now. Right?

Richard Campbell [00:10:53]:
It's the circular accounting trick. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:55]:
This is a big problem. So the thing that Bloomberg had come to is that just looking at the numbers and they're running into the same issue where I run into every quarter, which is we don't get all the numbers. But if you look at what they call, and they in this case is Microsoft, actual AI sales, and this was the— see, we don't have this number, but they were— Microsoft, that is, I'm sorry, a quarter ago said they were on track to earn $37 billion in AI revenues over a 1-year period that is not their fiscal year. And this was based on the quarter ago where they had earned $37 No, one quarter of that number. So probably like $9.25 billion, which was a record at the time. And they were like, if this just persists, we will make $37 billion over the year.

Richard Campbell [00:11:46]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:46]:
And it's like—

Leo Laporte [00:11:47]:
Profit?

Paul Thurrott [00:11:48]:
No, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte [00:11:49]:
Oh, revenue.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:49]:
These are just revenues.

Leo Laporte [00:11:50]:
Jesus, you scared me.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:51]:
I know these are big numbers to normal people. These are not big numbers to these companies. And the calculation they made was that between 50, and most likely closer to 70% of all of Microsoft's, what they call actual AI revenues, sales, they call it sales, but revenues came from OpenAI, a company they are funding on their infrastructure pretty much 100%, right? There's not a lot of dollars coming Microsoft's way from OpenAI that did not originate at Microsoft, right? If you do the math on this, this means that Microsoft's total annual AI revenues for, I'm going to call it this fiscal year, might be between $41 and $48 billion.

Richard Campbell [00:12:35]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:36]:
But they spent $145.3 billion on CapEx. And so this turns into that Spaceballs joke, when will then be now? Meaning, when will those numbers crisscross each other on a graph? And I'm going to argue that the sun will implode and the Earth will be destroyed before we ever see that happen. That's my professional financial analyst guess. But again, looking at the numbers a little bit more, Microsoft would use the term invested, I would use the term lost about $100 billion on AI in that last fiscal year, because you have to factor in the paper revenues they made from AI, which again, I think most people don't—

Richard Campbell [00:13:20]:
Sure. Because when you say CapEx, I keep thinking they're building data centers with that money, but you're talking about them— This is actual AI revenues.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:28]:
Well, there's no check, but in OpenAI's case, I would imagine it would be one of those giant comedy checks. They brought him a check and Sachin will hang it on his wall or something. And then people like Ed Zitron and I'll quote Dr. O'Fallon just a little bit, believe that if you look at all the CapEx spending and you look at all the money that's just being circularly returned between each of these companies, It's pretty clear that industry-wide, and this is a small industry, right? These are the 3 big hyperscalers, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. 70% of the revenues are just money they're exchanging with each other, and it doesn't account for the vast spending that they're making, which again, this annual year, this, what do you call it, actual year, it's probably going to be about $1 trillion, right?

Richard Campbell [00:14:19]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:20]:
And it's going to keep going up if we take these people at their word. And my math on this, which is very simplistic and again is missing data, is that at most Microsoft has made $1 in revenues for every $3.30 that it spends on AI. But it's actually much worse than that because we don't have all those— we don't have all the numbers. We don't have any—

Richard Campbell [00:14:41]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
It's a pyramid scheme basically. We don't really have everything we need to accurately understand this. So the other comparison I made is that Change Bank ad, which maybe I brought up on the podcast. I don't remember. The bank that just makes change, there's an SNL skit and they're like, well, how do you make money? And he's like, volume. And you can't argue with the volume. I mean, these companies are exchanging vast sums of money, but this is just— I don't know. I really feel this is—

Richard Campbell [00:15:14]:
Yeah. Vast sums of money being exchanged is great if you got a couple of points on the upside, but if you don't, it's—

Paul Thurrott [00:15:20]:
There's also this problem. Yeah. You could make the argument that Microsoft at some point or over some period of time handed OpenAI actual money in the form of $11 to $13 billion in investments or whatever. It didn't actually work that way, right? Because a lot of that was Azure credits and whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:15:36]:
But yeah, But whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:38]:
I mean, let's just pretend.

Richard Campbell [00:15:39]:
But I suspect they listed those funds as an investment.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:42]:
That's the thing. But that's the rare example of money in this story that originated from somewhere. It actually came from a physical, well, a real asset or whatever you want to say that. But I feel like the vast majority of the rest of this is just Microsoft is paying, somehow paying. I mean, maybe they're paying for it over time as we talk about, but they are paying and the other companies are paying to build out this infrastructure. That money has to be paid. Nvidia's making real money. They might literally be— no, they're not the only, but they make the vast majority of what I would call the real money being made in this market right now.

Richard Campbell [00:16:16]:
Nominally, they are selling shovels. It's just a question of how many shovels can they actually deliver on.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:22]:
I hope shovels can be used to make a dam because we're going to need that too at the end. But I don't know. I feel like this is just The more you know about this, the worse it gets. Not knowing a lot about it is purple.

Richard Campbell [00:16:34]:
The chilling it gets. It's just sort of that sense of dread of, y'all know what you're doing, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:40]:
Right, right.

Leo Laporte [00:16:41]:
Speaking of picks and shovels, who's really making money is Nvidia. I just spent a lot of money in Nvidia so that I don't have to give Anthropic and OpenAI any more money.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:51]:
You're like, let's avoid the middleman and I will just pay them directly.

Leo Laporte [00:16:55]:
Yeah. I'm sad to say Chinese models, although it's interesting because both Nvidia and now Meta have decided, oh, open weights, that must be the big thing. And they're pushing out some pretty incredible models.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:07]:
So one of the things, again, I guess I'm just going to bring up Corey Doctorow every show now because whatever. But one of the things he talks about is this notion of, he has all these good ways of saying different things, right? Like when you hear a company is pivoting, what that means in big tech is Our strategy has failed. So now we're going to completely change the business model. That's what Facebook did when they became Meta and went to VR, and what Meta is now doing as Facebook—

Leo Laporte [00:17:33]:
Facebook's famous for it.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:34]:
Yeah. Well, because they're run by idiots who are—

Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
The next big thing's metaverse. Wait a minute.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:40]:
Wait a minute. This just in. I did put this in the notes. I'm not sure why, but of course, Mark Zuckerberg comes up with a 6,000-word manifesto about how human lives matter and AI is for humans and blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's like, yeah, that's what a loser says. If your AI was taking off, you would be talking—

Leo Laporte [00:17:59]:
I didn't want to win the race anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:18:02]:
You would be talking about how it was attacking other AIs.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:05]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:18:06]:
Apparently that's what the cool AIs do.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:08]:
This is the guy whose company, and I don't think he invented any of these ideas, but this is the company that tracks their own customers so egregiously That Apple invented a feature for their mobile OS that would prevent that from happening because they're so terrible. And he's like, oh yeah, A for humanity. People matter. Oh, people matter now? If people matter, how come when I go to Facebook, I don't see what my cousin and my aunt are doing? I see ads for perfume and whatever nonsense they show me.

Richard Campbell [00:18:38]:
I just—

Paul Thurrott [00:18:39]:
God, it's not even— is it hypocritical? I guess it's hypocritical.

Leo Laporte [00:18:43]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:44]:
It's worse than hypocritical. I need a better word than hypocritical. God, like, who the— why would anyone follow anything Meta down any rabbit hole? Like, geez, it's unbelievable. Anyway, but I don't know anything about their finances and don't care. But Microsoft, you know, this is what we talked about. This is like a scorched earth policy that the 3 big hyperscalers have made. The deal with the devil they made is like, we're going to spend trillions of dollars, and when we're done, we're still going to be left standing. And if we're lucky, All those other companies will just be gone.

Richard Campbell [00:19:17]:
Yeah. I think that's— one would argue this was the Cold War strategy, right? This is Reagan's Star Wars mission.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:24]:
Attrition or whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:19:26]:
Yeah. Spend the Soviets into the ground. So the big 3 are extending their lead because a lot of that money is being turned into data centers, which they are ultimately going to need. I mean, data center recognizing it's just a big concrete box with power and water and data connected to it. And whatever you put in it is secondary to the point.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:45]:
Yeah, so I've watched a few Ed Zetron videos lately. He does a lot of interviews now and he's kind of, he's caustic. There's something about his personality that kind of rubs me the wrong way.

Leo Laporte [00:19:58]:
He really is.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:59]:
But he's got a good command of the numbers such as they are, as available. And, you know, his estimate based on lots of things, but is that 70% of all of the revenues generated by AI in our entire industry come from OpenAI and Anthropic, 2 companies, both of which are never going to be profitable, both of which need massive resources to do anything that they do. This is not a model— like in hardware building or whatever, you make an Xbox, you make a phone, you make a computer, whatever it is. The idea is that, yeah, at first you might lose a little bit of money, hardware's expensive, but over time your costs reduce, et cetera. The problem with this business is the more people that sign on, the more people that pay you, especially the more they use it, the more you lose. You know, there's no version of this where they— like, you get enough $20 a month people where you all of a sudden are making money. So leaving aside the fact that probably 100% of the revenues these 2 companies generate come from the free companies that are also paying, that's 70% of all the revenues in the industry. Like, the, the growth that's occurring right now is predicated on the idea that We can't meet the demand, but once we meet the demand, there will be more companies paying us.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:11]:
It won't just be these 2. But who are those companies? Who's going to pay Microsoft, Google, or Amazon the sheer amounts of money that these companies are sort of paying them? Who are those companies? What are they doing? What do they need that compute or infrastructure for? Do they exist? And the theory is they do not.

Richard Campbell [00:21:31]:
Well, logical thing here is that one or both of them get acquired by one of these players.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:39]:
Which is going to open an antitrust can of worms, for starters. I mean, there's going to be that.

Richard Campbell [00:21:44]:
If nobody else is going to buy it, in the current administration, I suspect you're going to be able to get any deal through you want to get through.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:51]:
Maybe.

Richard Campbell [00:21:51]:
As long as you've smooched the right butts.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:54]:
So now that you've said that, what entered my brain at that moment is it's possible that the reason this situation exists one of the reasons is because none of those companies can buy those 2 companies today, right? That, in other words, they're so dominant, they're so powerful, they would be, uh, examined so closely, which they do not want for this kind of stuff, um, that, that is why neither— another, you know, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon have not tried to, uh, purchase those 2 or acquire those 2 companies, right? Microsoft did make that— what was the, um, uh, Suleyman's previous company, the AI company, uh, No, not Perplexity. I can't remember. Well, they did an acquihire where that company, they basically took all of the assets and all of their AI and then all of their people, but did not buy them because that was one way to get around regulatory scrutiny.

Richard Campbell [00:22:41]:
Yeah. Generally, that's been happening now is it's quicker to just steal all the talent.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:46]:
But all these companies, they've all invested in both of the— it's interesting because they're partners on some level, but they're also direct competitors on many levels too. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all investing into companies who, if they're successful, will put those companies out of business. But now they need them like some parasite. I don't know, what do you call this? It's not a symbiotic relationship. It's like a cannibalistic relationship or something. It's very strange. It's like Google and Apple. They compete in phones, but they're paying each other.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:17]:
Well, Google's paying them billions of dollars for search and now for AI, right?

Richard Campbell [00:23:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:22]:
I mean, I don't know what they're paying for AI, but for search, they're definitely paying. I don't know. We just sit here and let this happen, I guess. There's 3 companies on Earth that matter. This is it. I don't know. I don't get this.

Richard Campbell [00:23:34]:
I'm really— That's been true all along. The rest has been largely smoke.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:38]:
It's true. Yeah, you're right. But I think the thing has changed because one of the things I did, this is a good graph. I did not make the graph, but in this article that shows Microsoft's market cap history over time. So you can see the The decade-long period where their stock price and market cap was like, beep, to understand why. Yeah, the Ballmer, right?

Richard Campbell [00:23:56]:
The Ballmer times.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:57]:
Right. So when Satya Nadella took over, it was 2014, early 2014. But I think the bigger event was Amy Hood becoming CFO about a year before that.

Richard Campbell [00:24:07]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:07]:
So if you look at Microsoft stock price over time, you get the big bump up to $2,000 and it flatlines, right? Big for the time. I mean, big meaning like maybe half a billion dollars, right? But then for you guys, in the reverse for me, the giant spike upward, which yes, has spikes at the top, but it's still massively bigger than it ever was, occurs while Amy Hood is CFO.

Leo Laporte [00:24:30]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:31]:
And yes, most of it when Satya Nadella was CEO. But I feel, I think many people do too, that Amy Hood had maybe the bigger impact on those earnings. And I went back to the same quarter from 15 years ago, to look at Microsoft's earnings announcement and kind of compare it to what's happening today. So the revenues each of their major businesses generate is not exponentially bigger, but they're dramatically bigger. Back then, Microsoft was still doing their prepubescent form of manipulation of finances where they would spread Windows license revenues out over coming quarters. So it would always be roughly $20 million a month, and they wouldn't have those spikes in revenues. And at the time, it was like, what are they doing? That seemed kind of screwy. But in a PC market that was actually down, Windows licenses just held steady the whole time.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:30]:
That's kind of interesting. But 15 years ago, let's see, 15 years ago was like, yeah, so this is pre-Amy Hood. So these were like whatever, I can't remember the guy's name, but her predecessor most likely. was doing that kind of stuff. But back then, you would get numbers. Microsoft announced it sold over 400 million cumulative Windows 11 licenses since it was released. It was almost 2 years ago. It was like one quarter shy of 2 years.

Richard Campbell [00:25:54]:
Peter Klein was the previous CEO.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:56]:
Peter Klein. Thank you.

Richard Campbell [00:25:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:58]:
But you would get numbers from Microsoft. So you would see numbers for Office, you'd see numbers for Server. These were the good old days, sort of. We didn't realize it at the time. And now what we get is language you have to go to a dictionary to decipher. You know, Satya Nadella is referencing some book about the Great Depression. We don't understand why he brought it up. We don't even know what he's talking about when he said it.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:17]:
And they keep changing the terms for AI. Like, AI is now— we're usually talking about harnesses and blah, blah, blah, and our customers are doing all these shifts and everything. It's like, are they? I mean, like, I, I don't even— I don't— I shouldn't know too much about this to begin with. I'm— this is not my world.

Richard Campbell [00:26:32]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:32]:
But it's, it's become— it's just so purposefully obfuscated, I guess is the term. I, I, and, and so much bigger, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:26:42]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:42]:
Um, so I don't know. I, I don't want the world to collapse. Like, I, I don't— and we're never going back to the way it was. I know that. Like, I get it. But I just don't understand what's happening here.

Richard Campbell [00:26:54]:
Yeah. How do we land this thing?

Paul Thurrott [00:26:55]:
I don't know. You're right. Right. What— right, exactly. What's the, what's the post-apocalypse look like in this world? I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:27:03]:
To underscore what I said earlier, I've been running benchmarks. As you know, I foolishly bought a lot of hardware from—

Paul Thurrott [00:27:10]:
Or ingeniously. I mean, depending, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:27:13]:
And I thought I was going to be running a Chinese model, DeepSeek V4 Flash. And I've been benchmarking all night on the Sparks, which I set up last night. And weirdly and kind of depressingly, the strongest model is NVIDIA's own new Nimotron Lightning. It is fast and good and— well, then this is the sad part— fits into a single Spark.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:39]:
Yeah, no, I was going to say this is the—

Richard Campbell [00:27:40]:
I wonder if it's a hard way— it's NVIDIA knowing how to use their hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:27:43]:
It is NVIDIA on NVIDIA hardware.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:45]:
Exactly. Not that anyone else couldn't come along and optimize for that hardware too, right?

Leo Laporte [00:27:50]:
Well, I'm theoretically running optimized versions of DeepSeek anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:54]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:27:55]:
Um, and then, you know, and I'm not really crying because the models are gonna only get bigger and better, and maybe I will need 2 at some point. But NVIDIA's again firing on all cylinders. Very impressive. They're doing an open weight model that competes well with the Chinese models. I think that's very interesting. That's a brand new data point, by the way. This came out a couple of days ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:19]:
Okay. Anyway, I'll shut up now. No, no. I mean, part of the Meta thing, which I did not add to the notes, was that—

Richard Campbell [00:28:26]:
Glimmer.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:27]:
Yeah. Is it Muse Glimmer, I think is the name of it?

Leo Laporte [00:28:31]:
Yeah. They released— and they've got Muse Spark, I think is coming out.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:35]:
Yeah. So Muse Spark, I believe, is like a cloud model, which cannot compete with the best of the hyperscalers, right?

Leo Laporte [00:28:42]:
And Muse Glimmer can't either, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:44]:
Well, no, it's a local model, right?

Leo Laporte [00:28:45]:
It's not very good.

Richard Campbell [00:28:47]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:47]:
Well, of course you're not, it's Meta. But, but I mean, but this is what, you know, not only they like, now they're calling for the open internet and open weights and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Of course you are. Um, but you couldn't compete. And the reason you're doing this is because they were never competitive in the cloud, right? And now they're not competitive locally, but now the future is local and they're just kind of shifting the goalposts here. Like, we're gonna like, this is where everything should be now. It's like, this will be easier for us to maybe become competitive. Maybe, but I don't think the other guys are going to slow down anytime soon either.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:16]:
So I know we'll see. I hate that company. Have I mentioned that? Because I hate—

Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
Yeah, yeah. And I have to admit a little bias, you know. Uh, when I downloaded Glimmer, I thought, well, this isn't going to be any good, but I wanted— I wanted to keep an open mind. It's not bad. It's not bad.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:33]:
What, what if it was awesome? I mean, you might as well check.

Leo Laporte [00:29:35]:
I'd be thrilled if— in fact, I'm thrilled that And NVIDIA's model is so good because I— do I want to use a Chinese model? Not if I can use an American model that's as good. I want to use the best model, best open-weight model, right? Oh man.

Richard Campbell [00:29:53]:
What is best?

Paul Thurrott [00:29:54]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:29:55]:
Well, since you ask, I've had a— we took all the work we've been doing for the last few weeks and all of the potential pitfalls, the places where it stumbled and so forth, And made a test, a 13-part difficult— some of it's the easy stuff, like a train leaves the station at 4:00 AM and blah, blah, blah. Some of it is based on our own stumbles. A lot of it is. And I want to see which model does best with the kind of work I've been doing. And so that's— I'm testing, and this is the only way to really test anything is test it on what you do.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:31]:
The only problem is you have to keep retesting it. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:30:35]:
I have a whole harness so that I can do that. New ones come out every day.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:39]:
Yeah. Okay. There you go.

Leo Laporte [00:30:41]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Friday, there's going to be a new Quen. Well, there was one today. It's too big for me to run, but there's going to be one I can run on a Friday. There'll be one next week. Pretty much can assure you.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:53]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
And the week after and the week after. But that's an exciting thing. Anyway, I'll shut up because this isn't the AI show. That is coming up. And actually, I should mention on Intelligent Machines later today, we're going to interview our old friend Nicholas de Leon, who is by day a mild-mannered reporter for Consumer Reports, but by night an AI guru who's doing all sorts of really interesting stuff, including—

Paul Thurrott [00:31:16]:
That's funny.

Leo Laporte [00:31:17]:
He had a World Series simulation that he put online. He has a local newspaper for Tucson that's really good. So Nicholas de Leon will tell us how he does it. Uh, later.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:28]:
Okay, cool.

Leo Laporte [00:31:30]:
And now back to Mr. T and Mr. C and Windows Wii.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:38]:
Leo, have you ever heard of the Shift web browser?

Leo Laporte [00:31:42]:
Is it a piece of Shift?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:44]:
Uh, it is a piece of Shift.

Leo Laporte [00:31:45]:
Shift happens.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:47]:
Shift is happening.

Leo Laporte [00:31:49]:
No, I've never heard of that.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:50]:
Little web browser, you know, wedge into there. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [00:31:55]:
You are Mr. Browser in the world.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:56]:
I don't know what's going on. Yeah, how many web browsers do we need? One more than we have is the answer to that. It looks interesting. I just—

Leo Laporte [00:32:04]:
Is it from Microsoft?

Paul Thurrott [00:32:06]:
Nope. It's a— nope, it's kind of a private thing, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:32:10]:
There's a, you know, in the AI world, there are a lot of AI-specific browsers. In fact, Cloudflare just announced one. So that's pretty common because AIs have different needs. I don't know if you've noticed that.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:23]:
Yeah. So yeah, I think that that was partially, no, fully responsible for the supposed usage gains that Linux saw last quarter.

Leo Laporte [00:32:33]:
It's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:35]:
But I may or may not write about this, but I feel like a year ago at this time, I was writing a lot about AI web browsers. And I think the big shift that's occurred is that Anthropic and OpenAI are the 2 big AI companies are both doing in-AI browsing now. They have integrated web browsers, right? So they don't really need to have the browser anymore. So Google will put their stuff in Chrome, Microsoft will put their stuff in Edge. But I'm starting to wonder, from a usage or a user experience perspective, if just don't worry about— just don't have AI in the browser. You can, I mean, you can have an extension or whatever. Why bother even having that as part of the browser? You might not need it anymore. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:19]:
Anyway, they have optional AI on the Shift. I'm going to look at this later today, but kind of— I'd never heard of it, so kind of interesting. Um, but regarding Microsoft's web browser, uh, which, you know, follows in the footsteps of Chrome in many, many ways, including like the support lifecycle or the update schedule, etc., etc., um, they are following Google to switch over fully to Manifest V3. which is the browser extension platform that Chromium Chrome has, where all the extensions come from. So the big problem here was anyway, maybe still is uBlock Origin, right? So infamously, as Google was trying to push this through, for all the right happy noise reasons, uBlock was like, whoa, hold on a second. You're making a change that you know, makes it much harder for us to— well, impossible really— to have the same level of protection that we offer to our users, right? Um, but anyway, uh, Google has already made that shift, I believe, right, for v3? And now, uh, Google— or Microsoft rather— will do it in Edge by the end of the year. So that leaves you with a couple of options, and I feel like both of them are at least semi-temporary. You know, Brave and, uh, Vivaldi have said that they will continue trying to support MV2 as long as possible.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:36]:
Meaning the original version of uBlock Origin that actually works really well. Firefox does not use the same, you know, browser extension platform. So they have also said that they're going to maintain that and we'll see. But if you're using Microsoft Edge, they're at least going to do it right. It will go through the Canary channel first in the Edge Insider Program. It will make its way to dev, then beta. So if you're an individual Sometime before the end of the year, you'll be on a Manifest 3, Manifest version 3 only browser. And then for businesses, it'll be sometime next year.

Richard Campbell [00:35:12]:
But this is part of Chromium anyway, so—

Leo Laporte [00:35:15]:
Yeah, but do you think they had to do this?

Paul Thurrott [00:35:18]:
Well, I think the overhead of not doing it would have been problematic. Yeah, for my, you know, I think that's the issue.

Leo Laporte [00:35:24]:
It's just part of Chromium.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:26]:
Yeah, it's just, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:35:27]:
Yeah, pretty soon.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:29]:
I mean, one of the selling points of the browser is like, look, you can come to us, just everything you have will work. You can bring in your— like, they even let you sign in with a Google account now. So, you know, you could— all your extensions are going to work. They're the same extensions. You know, it's part of the compatibility thing, which I think for Microsoft is a big deal. But, um, this is one thing they don't have to do, right? So you— one of the reasons you embrace Chromium is there's a lot of, you know, scaffolding done for you. So this is a big chunk of that. So I'm guessing that's why, but I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:59]:
Um, and then just because—

Richard Campbell [00:36:01]:
High holes are living happily ever after.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:03]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I use NextDNS, um, but only on my devices. I don't use it on PCs for the most part.

Richard Campbell [00:36:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:10]:
Um, I probably— I don't know, sometimes it's— I live in a weird world where I kind of have to see the terribleness so I can, you know, understand it. Like, if I just blocked everything, I, you know, it'd be a little harder because people would be like, how come Microsoft does whatever? I'm like, I don't see that. I block it all. I kind of have to see it.

Richard Campbell [00:36:25]:
Just like using YouTube without an account, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:29]:
I refuse to do that. Or without an ad blocker. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:36:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone, right. Everyone has a line. There was actually a bunch of software stuff that happened in the past week and I didn't know where to put some of this. So I just threw this in here, whatever. So I think it was about 2 months ago, Proton announced that they were adding a CLI interface to Proton Drive, right? And so Proton Drive is their cloud storage service. It has the end-to-end encryption, like all the stuff you love about Proton, right? Everything's private, yada, yada, yada.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:03]:
And then they do the CLI, and this is a way to automate things related to file storage, right? So like backups, file transfers, sharing, whatever it might be. It's also good for businesses, right? Because businesses are more likely to automate these kind of things than individuals. And so They've added a bunch of business functionality, which is the reason I'm talking about this now. But they also do a really good job of explaining for different types of businesses like law firms, accounting firms, you know, shipping firms, like whatever it might be. Like they give all these use cases, healthcare, et cetera, et cetera. You know, very important. But I brought this up, what had happened originally at the time, but this is the beginning of Proton Drive coming. What was that?

Richard Campbell [00:37:43]:
Press and talk both sentences.

Leo Laporte [00:37:46]:
Oh, I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:49]:
Wow. Creepy.

Leo Laporte [00:37:51]:
I'm so sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:52]:
I didn't know I had that timed up. That was borderline scary.

Leo Laporte [00:37:58]:
I should explain. So I've been—

Paul Thurrott [00:38:00]:
Hold on. Would you play the music from Halloween while you're talking so we have—

Leo Laporte [00:38:04]:
So xAI, Elon's company, just released a newer model of Grok 4.6. And so I—

Paul Thurrott [00:38:12]:
yeah, good.

Leo Laporte [00:38:13]:
And I— but because its name is— I, I thought I'm gonna humiliate it and call it Kronk and say you have to talk like a caveman.

Richard Campbell [00:38:21]:
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte [00:38:21]:
So that's—

Paul Thurrott [00:38:23]:
That was the caveman voice?

Leo Laporte [00:38:24]:
Yeah, that was— it's kind of scary.

Richard Campbell [00:38:26]:
It's got a little Vincent Price in it, but it was kind of guttural.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:29]:
It's like the type of thing you're sitting— well, so, so just 35 years ago when I was first married, My wife and I were watching TV or movie on TV, and we had a TV in the bedroom at this time, which was stupid.

Leo Laporte [00:38:40]:
But, um, yes, anyway, not to be married very quickly. So I'm glad you took it.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:45]:
So the movie ends, the credits are rolling, my wife gets up to get ready for bed, you know, to go in the bathroom, whatever, get whatever she does. And I, I just click around the channels, and what it was like the end of the MTV Music Awards or something was happening right then. So that was just ending. And so I'm just sitting there waiting for her to get out of the bathroom, and this voice comes on. He goes, I know where you live and I'm coming there tonight.

Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
Oh God.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:08]:
And I was like, what the hell was that? And it was like, it was, it was part of a movie. I can't think of the name. I know the movie, but I was like, it was, it had, it was like it had shifted in the audio from the wrong thing or something. And I was like, oh my God. Anyway, that thing was just like that. That was—

Leo Laporte [00:39:23]:
It was. And I'm so sorry, I didn't realize I had the pod up. It's supposed to talk to me when it needs me. It's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:31]:
It was just unexpected.

Leo Laporte [00:39:33]:
It was saying it needs me in a very special way. I apologize.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:40]:
No, no, it's okay. Anyway—

Leo Laporte [00:39:42]:
AI is taking over. I'm so sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:44]:
No, I feel like this is inevitable. Eventually we will be the ones not here.

Leo Laporte [00:39:49]:
We're preparing for the future. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:51]:
And we'll be the ones living in caves, ironically. So that's going to work out really well.

Leo Laporte [00:39:56]:
In a rock.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:58]:
Gronk has showed you your new home.

Leo Laporte [00:39:59]:
Enjoy.

Richard Campbell [00:40:00]:
Your new home. Enjoy.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:02]:
This is a hole in a rock. What is this?

Leo Laporte [00:40:03]:
Good luck inventing fire, human.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:06]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you've lost the technology.

Richard Campbell [00:40:09]:
Rub the sticks together, boys.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:11]:
How come this doesn't work? Uh, anyway, sorry, the— but the— this Proton Drive CLI is useful just because it's a CLI, but it's also the makings of a full Proton Drive client that's going to come to Linux later this year. So this for me has been one of the big issues on— there are no like top-tier cloud storage services on Linux with full, you know, file-on-demand type sync. And I know there are third-party solutions to make that happen. And I also know Proton does not necessarily measure up to like OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever, but this is something I already do pay for. So I'd love to see this happen. So this will happen. So that's kind of cool. And then this one's just kind of fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:54]:
So there's a developer, his name's John Marshall, Marshall, Will, and Holly from Lost. What was that called, that show? Lost and Lost, whatever it was called. Anyway, it's not him. So he has ported Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, which dates back to '91, '92. Was it Windows 3? Yeah, Windows 3. It was right after the release of 3.

Richard Campbell [00:41:16]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:17]:
But he's ported it to x64, so it runs on Windows 11. Now, the problem is there's no downloadable exe that you can get. You have to actually use the Visual Studio Make tool on the command line to kind of make this happen. I actually did try to do this by— or CMake, I should say. I didn't actually get it to work yet, but I'm going to keep— I actually want to just kind of see this. But what he doesn't say is that the reason this is possible is that Microsoft open-sourced This version of Word back in, what year? I don't remember. It was like 2014, maybe 2013, something like that.

Richard Campbell [00:41:51]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [00:41:51]:
Yeah, it was a long time ago. Yeah, it was a really long time ago.

Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
I just realized that it couldn't read any of the current file formats. They said, hey, you guys can have it.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:58]:
Yeah, who cares? So I guess, yeah, this is quaint. It doesn't even have like DDE in it. Like it's no OLE, there's no COM, there's no nothing. But, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:42:07]:
It's the old Windows file format, right? Before the XML format.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:11]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:42:11]:
I mean, who's got a document like that?

Paul Thurrott [00:42:14]:
I would almost rather have the DOS version of Microsoft Word, honestly, which I believe you can in fact still download. But anyway, at the time they had also open sourced MS-DOS 1.1 and 2 point something. You can go to the Computer History Museum website and get this stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:42:30]:
Yeah. It's not really open source per se, is it? They've just published the source base, the source code through the museum.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:37]:
Okay. Well, this thing is a 7-megabyte file, so it's smaller than an MP3.

Richard Campbell [00:42:43]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:43]:
Which is hilarious, right?

Richard Campbell [00:42:46]:
And so what this guy did—

Leo Laporte [00:42:46]:
Olivia Rodrigo's driver's license is bigger than Word 1.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:51]:
Yeah. No, I mean, this might as well be a couple of bytes. This is like, it's hilarious.

Leo Laporte [00:42:55]:
I've got pictures larger than you.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:58]:
Yeah. Right, exactly. But what this guy did, I think, is really cool because he did a lot of work, right? He translated all the 16-bit assembly language entry points to fixed like C or C++ code. He mapped like segmented and double indirect memory handles to x64 safe memory, like native runtimes. He adapted like Win16-specific startup messaging graphics file and resource behaviors to Win32 APIs, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he did the whole thing. And like I said, I—

Leo Laporte [00:43:25]:
Did he do it or did he have some help?

Richard Campbell [00:43:27]:
No, he did it.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:28]:
Oh, that. Okay. I'm sorry. That, that could be the case. I don't know about that.

Leo Laporte [00:43:31]:
I see the word Opus in here. I'm just thinking.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:35]:
Okay. But whatever. But the point is he did the work, right? So the work was done. Maybe it's the way, whatever it, however you want to put it.

Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
He didn't make it. He made it happen.

Richard Campbell [00:43:42]:
That's the difference. Right. There you go.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:43]:
There you go. He had the idea. He was inspired.

Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
He might have. I'm, I shouldn't. Oh, actually, that's interesting. The historic code name of Windows—

Paul Thurrott [00:43:50]:
Is Opus.

Leo Laporte [00:43:51]:
Oh, is Wopus.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:53]:
Of that version of Windows. That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:55]:
So there you go. So Opus isn't—

Paul Thurrott [00:43:58]:
It wasn't necessarily Anthropic related. I don't actually know.

Leo Laporte [00:44:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:02]:
No, in fact, it doesn't mention AI at all. Yeah. Right. And I feel like in this day and age, if you did this by yourself and didn't use AI, you might brag about that. So I don't actually know how he did it, but the point is only that he did do it. And this thing has got to be like 1/10 the size of Notepad today. It's probably, you know, for like, for actual writing, it's got to be— I bet it's pretty good. You know, I, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:28]:
I, I'm fascinated by this. I like this. To me is a, an example. This is like, uh, what do you call it? Like software preservation or whatever. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's cool.

Richard Campbell [00:44:38]:
And, and a nostalgia poke.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:40]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and, and honestly, um, you could already see, like, if you look at the screenshot, that screenshot is not from today. That's from, you know, Windows 3.0, right? You can already see this thing going off the rails, right? It's got like this big, you know, file menu or menu system. It's got like 2 toolbars with lots. It's really dense with the controls. Um, you know, for the time, this was, you know, like pinnacle. Like this was as good as a word processor, especially on Windows, was ever going to be. And then, you know, not really, but, um, but it still makes—

Richard Campbell [00:45:12]:
You're not in love with the kilobytes free?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:16]:
Well, actually, I'm kind of in love with just the buttons, you know, like the old school. I kind of wish we had like a theming engine in Windows. I could be like, could I just look like— could this look like Program Manager, please? Like, please. I kind of like it, you know. I miss SVG.

Leo Laporte [00:45:30]:
Yeah, we didn't have shaders. Yeah, no, we—

Richard Campbell [00:45:34]:
look at you and your no-math coprocessor.

Leo Laporte [00:45:36]:
Look at you and your transparency.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:40]:
Every software-based renderer You know, also just to put this in context, I mean, this was Castle Wolfenstein was either out or just about to come out. 3D. And then we're a year or 2 away, not at most, from Doom. You know, everything changes pretty soon after this, but, um, but this was also Windows ascendant, right? Windows 3 was the first big one.

Leo Laporte [00:46:01]:
This was Windows 3.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:03]:
Windows 3.0. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Windows 3.0 was 1990.

Richard Campbell [00:46:06]:
Look.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:06]:
Yeah. Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:46:07]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:46:07]:
I remember seeing Windows 3.11 and saying, uh-oh, Microsoft caught up with Apple. It looked like that was Steve Jobs' contention.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:14]:
I remember him saying that.

Richard Campbell [00:46:15]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:15]:
That was the moment. No, and one of the funner things about Windows/Microsoft history is that there are many examples of minor releases that were actually really big deals, right? So 3.11, like you said, there was a Windows Workgroup version.

Richard Campbell [00:46:29]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:30]:
Maintained the 3.0 look and feel, but you could enable things like 32-bit memory access, with a flat memory model, 32-bit disk access, and then one other thing I'm forgetting. But those were the foundations of what became Windows 95. So obviously you get the, you know, the new UI as well. But I mean, you know, as far as— and it— and all the apps were still 16-bit actually for the most part. Um, I don't think you could run— no, you couldn't. There was a, you know, that— remember they were going to do Win32S so you could run like NT apps on Windows, and then they kind of gave up on that. But—

Richard Campbell [00:47:00]:
There was a thunking layer. David Cutler told us to.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:04]:
Yep. Yeah. Anyway, I just think this is cool. It doesn't really— yeah, I don't think anyone's switching to it. Look, you could download versions of WordStar today, Electric Pencil.

Richard Campbell [00:47:14]:
I'm just trying to take an existing Word doc and export it to the old format so this thing could read it.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:20]:
I bet it— well, maybe. I mean, those are known— like, the document format now is known to be unsafe, right? Like, they, you know, it was the subject of a lot of attacks and so forth. So it's like—

Richard Campbell [00:47:30]:
This is pre-macros. Like, how dangerous could it be?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:34]:
Oh, like, in other words, if you loaded it in this version of the app, yeah, you'd probably be okay because you can't do anything. Right, right. That's okay. That's a—

Richard Campbell [00:47:42]:
that's probably security through lack of features.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:46]:
Well, by the way, I mean, there's something to be said for that. Like you said, we eliminated all the attack surfaces. What does it do?

Richard Campbell [00:47:53]:
Nothing.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:53]:
Um, you know, that's—

Leo Laporte [00:47:54]:
I'm really weak.

Richard Campbell [00:47:55]:
If you want to allow— you want to type text in and bold it, that's all it does.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:48:00]:
What do you need?

Paul Thurrott [00:48:01]:
I mean, it's basically Markdown. So anyway, I just thought that was kind of cool. And then a couple of just quick non-Microsofty kind of AI things. So yesterday Google announced that Gemini had surpassed 1 billion users and this is the fastest it's ever reached, any Google product has reached that milestone.

Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
Really?

Paul Thurrott [00:48:21]:
Wow. Yeah, but asterisk, right?

Richard Campbell [00:48:22]:
900 million users was cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:25]:
Let's asterisk that because here's the thing. Today, Google announced the Pixel and the series phones. So there's a new watch. There's not new earbuds. There's no smart speaker, but they have the new phones. And so the new phones are like $100 more expensive. If you buy a Pro device base model, you're getting less RAM than you got a year ago. You have to upgrade the storage to get more RAM.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:47]:
So it's less capable than it was. But one of the many— well, sorry, in some ways less capable. I mean, obviously there are other improvements, but But one of the little things hidden away in the Google announcements is they used to give a 1 year of a Google AI Pro, which is their $20 per month AI-enabled Google Storage, blah, blah, blah, whatever subscription, which gives you higher access on Gemini, et cetera, for free, right? So this is worth $240. So if you bought a Pixel 10 whatever, well, except for A, right? But any of the ones from last year, you got a year free of that stuff. And if you buy the Pixel 9 series whatever, you also got a year free of that. I think it was a different name, but it was the same thing. This year they're only giving 6 months for free and only on the Pro devices. So if you have like, if you buy the base Pixel 11, you don't get anything for free for Gemini AI from the paid version of the service.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:39]:
So I feel like that was one driver for this kind of thing. Like it's like 1 billion people, yes, but they never said how many people are paying for it or even using it. Well, using it is 1 billion allegedly, but I mean, But how many of those are paying customers? Because if we follow— How many of those are paying customers? Because if we follow—

Richard Campbell [00:49:59]:
Because they own a Pixel phone. Maybe.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:02]:
I mean, I'm not— well, it can't be all of them. There are probably 10 people using Pixel phones, but I'm just saying that was one of the drivers, which is now disappearing. If you follow the business model, because it's the same for everybody, it's Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or whoever, Google's going to be the same thing. They're spending billions and billions of dollars to build build out this infrastructure. Um, people using Gemini and not paying for it are, uh, are a drag on their economy. I mean, like, I'm sorry, but they're costing those guys money. So yay, a billion people, but also, uh, you're gonna have to monetize these people for this to make any sense.

Richard Campbell [00:50:35]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:35]:
And they didn't— they don't talk about that at all. So, you know, we'll see. Um, but they— this is, I think it's, what is it, they said 14? I think this is the 14th. Yes. 14th Google product to have over a billion users. Yikes.

Richard Campbell [00:50:50]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:50]:
That's crazy.

Richard Campbell [00:50:53]:
I mean, this whole OpenAI thing was about beating Google.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:56]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [00:50:57]:
How's that going?

Leo Laporte [00:51:01]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:01]:
I don't know how to answer that because obviously Google has caught up in some ways, although Google is now dragging on new model releases. They've run into a problem. They lost Dennis Hasselblad, or Sam Altman, stepped down as CEO of DeepMind.

Richard Campbell [00:51:14]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:15]:
I mean, there's some stuff going on there, so we'll see. But—

Leo Laporte [00:51:19]:
The big thing going on is that they moved the DeepMind crew and Geoff Dean left.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:26]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:51:26]:
And I think the general consensus among the people who don't work at Google is that Google is saying, giving up a little bit, just as others have, and saying, well, we're not going to have a frontier model that people want to use to code. They are very— they do have the best, I think, image model still.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:48]:
Look, they're absolutely— I think the important thing is, like, generally speaking, they're competitive across the board. Maybe not for coding, but I mean, for normal people, like people with their phones and whatever. Yeah, it's pretty good. And maybe that's all they need to do. But, you know, Dennis Hasselblad, however, if I'm saying his name correctly, was one of the guys talking.

Leo Laporte [00:52:04]:
They moved Dennis to sciencing.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:07]:
Well, this is the step— this is your sideways out the door, right? He clearly has lost any interest he has in this. He probably knows more than he's saying about the reality of what they're going to be able to do.

Leo Laporte [00:52:19]:
I think the other possible interpretation is, so it looks like in a thumbnail, remember ChatGPT was chasing, OpenAI was chasing images of Sora and video. They're chasing chat. They were doing all this stuff. Meanwhile, Anthropic's going, no, no, no, it's all about coding. And they went head down and they built the best coding tool.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:42]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:52:43]:
And everybody went, whoa, it was all about coding all along. OpenAI says, we're getting rid of all that stuff. Sora, bye. We're going to focus on coding. And I think something similar is happening. Google didn't. And Google's now saying, yeah, we're too far behind. So let's focus on science.

Leo Laporte [00:53:01]:
Because they already had DeepFold. They already had the Protein folding capability.

Richard Campbell [00:53:06]:
Huge.

Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
Ademis had done some really interesting stuff there, AlphaGo. And so I think that maybe they just say, well, we missed an opportunity. It's kind of like Bill Gates' internet memo, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:19]:
Yeah. No, by the way, I think you're right. But I also see what I wonder about this is what this means more broadly. In other words, is this acknowledgement that throwing spaghetti at the wall isn't really working? Let's focus on whatever the things are that we can do.

Leo Laporte [00:53:32]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:32]:
So you're seeing them already scale back. So in the sense that AI is so fastly moving upward or forward or however you want to say it, they're also cutting features more quickly all of a sudden. And I think for a guy like him or like Mustafa Suleyman, or I'm trying to think who else might fall into this category, but people are talking about superintelligence or AGI, blah, blah, blah, whatever, it's going to change the world. It's like, yeah, no, it's just a spell checker in the sky. And It's good. It's a sickness that's actually harming OpenAI and Anthropic right now is this chase for superintelligence.

Leo Laporte [00:54:04]:
It's almost a religion. It is. It's religious.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:06]:
And I think Google is— I mean, I can imagine Google saying to Demis, look, you know what's really going to change the world? If you can cure cancer, if you can come up with new vaccines, if you can make big breakthroughs in health. Well, because the protein folding thing is doing that, right?

Richard Campbell [00:54:23]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:25]:
So you are— and that was his baby. So you say, you know what? Let's focus on that because you know what? Go ahead, let them take coding, let them do all that. We're going to fix everything. We're going to make everybody healthier in 5 years or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:40]:
I mean, that sounds like something Google would never do, but—

Leo Laporte [00:54:43]:
But if I wanted to keep Demis happy, that's what I would do. I'd say, yeah, Demis, we missed the boat. We're sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:49]:
The weird comparison here that will only make sense to me is in Mexico City, there was one cocktail bar and it begat—

Leo Laporte [00:54:55]:
I know where you're going here.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:57]:
It begat every other cocktail bar in Mexico City. So everyone we know has worked at every other cocktail bar, but they can all trace themselves back to this one place. And that's what DeepMind is in the AI industry.

Leo Laporte [00:55:07]:
That's true. Google invented it.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:08]:
It's the genesis point for all of this stuff, right? So the fact that they actually are getting rid of DeepMind, the fact the guy who started this and ran it is stepping down, stepping aside. But come on.

Leo Laporte [00:55:20]:
I, I, well, I wonder— Sundar's stepping upstairs, but I don't know if I'd like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:23]:
Yeah, but that's stepping upstairs. Like, that's what they say when people die. No, he's in a better place. He's upstairs.

Leo Laporte [00:55:29]:
That place upstairs.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:30]:
I'm just saying he's upstairs. He's fine. He's looking down on us. You know, I, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:55:35]:
Like a farm upstate, only different.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:37]:
Yeah. Can we get a proof of life on this guy? I'm not even sure he's still around.

Leo Laporte [00:55:40]:
You know, you know, he's He's out there playing with the other AIs, enjoying life.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:45]:
He's chasing SMLs around the field. He's happy. I don't know, maybe.

Leo Laporte [00:55:52]:
I don't know. This is the funny thing. All of these companies are so opaque at this point. You guys know more about Microsoft, obviously.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:00]:
Yeah, but no one knows as much about these companies as one could have known about Microsoft back in the day. Like, this is the thing. They've started opaque and have made it very opaque.

Leo Laporte [00:56:09]:
Very opaque. And we just don't understand what they're up to.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:12]:
Nope.

Leo Laporte [00:56:12]:
So we all eventually try to read the tea leaves, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:56:16]:
I mean, it'll go public, I guess, and then we'll know a little bit more, but they're going to be as non-transparent as they can be.

Leo Laporte [00:56:21]:
I mean, I can tell you this, they are not going public till they have to. They're not going public till they run out of private investors who are willing to pump billions of dollars into them.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:29]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:56:31]:
Because they don't want to—

Richard Campbell [00:56:31]:
We'll see if that is ever going to happen, right?

Leo Laporte [00:56:34]:
Well, I think now I'm starting to think, because they really delayed it, they filed these IPO plans.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:40]:
And then you heard nothing about this.

Leo Laporte [00:56:41]:
But it's a ripcord. It's an emergency button. It's a break glass button. And so they're ready if they have to, but I know they don't want to. They don't want to disclose this stuff. They're very private.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:53]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:56:54]:
They don't want you to know that they're—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:55]:
Oh, no, they absolutely do not want you to know. Right. That was my point.

Richard Campbell [00:57:00]:
looking at what's happened with SpaceX and going, you sure you want this?

Leo Laporte [00:57:05]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:06]:
I mean, he's— that company's run by a Bond villain, so I mean, it's a little different. Well, I guess they all kind of are. What am I talking about?

Richard Campbell [00:57:13]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:14]:
I guess what I'm finding interesting is they just released a new model and got zero attention. Meta got more attention for Glimmer than Grok 46 got. I mean, it's like nobody's even Saying anything about it.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:28]:
Taking the time to analyze anything that Mark Zuckerberg allegedly said or wrote is the greatest waste of time I can possibly imagine. I, I, and yet I have seen so many analysis pieces of like, this is what he was saying. It's like, dude, he doesn't say anything. Yeah, you're, you're, you're attributing intelligence to nonsense.

Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
Well, he's cagey. I mean, I—

Richard Campbell [00:57:52]:
Cagey?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:52]:
You're giving him way too much credit. The guy's a fucking idiot.

Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
He's a very, very wealthy freaking idiot.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:59]:
Sure he is. But most really wealthy people, as it turns out, are not geniuses. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:58:04]:
Right place, right time.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:05]:
Yeah. Let's not be enthralled by billionaires. It doesn't mean they're special. They just got lucky almost every time.

Leo Laporte [00:58:14]:
I'd like to get that lucky.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:16]:
Me too.

Richard Campbell [00:58:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:17]:
Me too. I just went to Vegas and didn't gamble a cent, so it's never going to happen again.

Leo Laporte [00:58:21]:
That's our problem. We're too smart to gamble.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:24]:
Yeah. So too dumb to be rich. Too dumb to be rich.

Leo Laporte [00:58:26]:
Too smart to gamble, too dumb to be rich. That's a good motto.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:30]:
Autobiography name.

Leo Laporte [00:58:33]:
Love it.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:34]:
Too Dumb to Be Rich: The Paul Theroux Story. I don't know. Anyway, speaking of things I don't quite understand, OpenAI announced they're releasing a desktop app on Linux for ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte [00:58:48]:
Why?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:49]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:58:50]:
If you're using Linux, you're already using it in the way you want to use it. You don't need that.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:55]:
I know, but they're doing it. So I don't know. It's like, why? Because they could. I guess. But that's interesting to me. I suppose it might be like a remote access thing.

Leo Laporte [00:59:07]:
Oh, there may be other purposes.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:09]:
Maybe. I can only guess because literally they announced it on Twitter X or whatever. They didn't post about it yet. I guess whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:59:17]:
I'm a snob. I don't use those desktop apps. I feel better to run your own harness.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:24]:
If it doesn't run in a CLI, it's not ready.

Leo Laporte [00:59:28]:
Terminal, baby.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:30]:
Yeah. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:59:31]:
And I think most Linux users, well, I don't know. I don't know a thing about Linux users, but if I would imagine spend a lot of time in the terminal, they would be comfortable with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:39]:
Well, I would also imagine they spend a lot of time not using OpenAI. I don't know. It just seems kind of weird to me. But they're doing it.

Leo Laporte [00:59:45]:
So like I said, I fired Anthropic and OpenAI this morning in a huff. You're fired, get out of here.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:53]:
So I did, I mean, I did, you know, I did that month of purging and, and Netflix was the best one of all. Like, I, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders, shoulders physically almost. But, you know, I killed Anthropic, I killed whatever else, but like, it felt good getting rid of stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:00:09]:
I saw that Anthropic's putting like, uh, secret messages in all your stuff so they Well, we learned from the best. Steven Sinofsky said, yeah, he said, yeah, we tried that. Didn't work out so good.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:22]:
You're still trying it, buddy. Or they are anyway. What are you talking about? We just learned about a—

Leo Laporte [01:00:27]:
Sinofsky was talking about putting GUIDs in office documents.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:33]:
I was just going to say the word GUID because it's like the people who blow whistles in Mexico City, to have another Mexico City comparison. My son was like, why is everyone blowing whistles? Mark, they didn't hand out the whistles so no one would use them. You don't make a GUID so it sits on the computer. The GUID's only good if it goes somewhere else.

Leo Laporte [01:00:51]:
I think they invented the GUID for this actually, for Word documents. And he does say, look, we caught the guy who did Melissa because he foolishly used Office to create the time bomb. But he also said, this wasn't a good idea and we deeply regret it. And so will Anthropic.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:11]:
I assume he has a lot of regrets.

Leo Laporte [01:01:14]:
I would hope.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:16]:
It would be better. But yeah, the Anthropic thing, you're always going to market this as a positive. It's like, look, we're going to identify this as AI-generated content. And people are like, oh yeah, this is what we want. And also we're going to use it to track you around the internet and find out what you're using it for, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, okay, well, that's fine. Welcome to big tech. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:01:39]:
Yeah, it's— it wasn't the only reason I fired them, but it's one of the reasons for sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:45]:
Yeah, be true to yourself.

Leo Laporte [01:01:46]:
And it's one of the reasons I really have been pushing to do local models. And, uh, I mean, if you can't— if you could, that would be ideal.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:54]:
The only thing I wanted to give Mark Zuckerberg not credit for, but just like kind of give him the nod on, was like the inevitability of a local AI, which is correct. With the understanding you're only doing it because you failed at this other thing. But whatever, that's fine. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:02:10]:
It's called making lemonade, baby.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:12]:
Right, exactly. It's pivoting, Leo, is what it's called in that industry.

Leo Laporte [01:02:15]:
That's the word.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:15]:
They pivoted. But we've all said this, and I think we all agree. I mean, at some point, local AI, depending on the workload of the task or whatever, is good enough, right? It's obviously never good enough.

Leo Laporte [01:02:28]:
It is now. It actually is now.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:30]:
Right. And that's, I think, right.

Leo Laporte [01:02:32]:
But it just takes a lot of hardware to run it on.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:33]:
Yeah. So 2 years ago, Microsoft does this Copilot plus PC that everybody mocks. Apple's been doing neural engine/NPU stuff for years and years, right? And then the modern Macs have really good NPUs essentially. Intel and AMD have caught up, right? They're in the Copilot plus PC train, whatever. But can you name a single app that you use that is— but not you, Leo, because you actually do, are the exception here. But I mean, you're a normal Windows user. What are you using local AI for? You have no idea. You don't know if you've ever used it, if you use it every day because it happens to be in some app you use.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:07]:
You have no idea.

Leo Laporte [01:03:08]:
I think people are AI curious just because of all the hype.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:12]:
No, no, no, you're right. But what I mean, I guess what I mean is the most, I don't know, user-forward AI that's in Windows 11 today is Copilot. Copilot is 100% cloud-based. But if you go into Paint or Notepad or Photos and Snipping Tool, a couple of other things aside from the like Recall and Click to Do, right, which are local AI, there are individual features that are local AI only on Copilot+ PCs. So you won't see them otherwise. But you don't know that if you're using the thing. You, you like, I use different computers all the time so I can go 2 computers side by side and be like, oh look, this version of Paint has, you know, 13 features off that dropdown. This one has 6.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:54]:
This one's a Copilot plus VC. This one is not. I know it's too— it's ridiculous. But if you have like Affinity or some video, like I think CapCut probably has some local AI stuff, whatever the apps are, even using those apps. So you go to the store, you're like, I want a local AI app. You're like, oh great, here's CapCut, you know? Okay, but what features use local AI? It's like a handful of them and you don't have no— there's no— Right. It's not like you get a starburst every time locally. You just, you know, It saved a unicorn or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:04:21]:
You know who's though put up local AI on the map, of course, is Apple and Google because they realize people—

Paul Thurrott [01:04:27]:
Because they realize people— They realize people—

Richard Campbell [01:04:27]:
They realize people—

Paul Thurrott [01:04:28]:
Billions and billions of devices. Exactly. So when you go do like a photo thing is a beautiful use case on a phone, if you can see it. You can remove people.

Richard Campbell [01:04:35]:
TensorFlow chips in the 9, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:04:37]:
You know, that stuff's great. Like, right. But I mean, but my point is like on Windows, you don't see that even though it's there. Even though it is—

Leo Laporte [01:04:44]:
Even though they pushed NPUs.

Richard Campbell [01:04:45]:
Yeah, for years, years and years. And Windows finally added support in the Performance Monitor so you can even see if the NPU is being used. Answer is no.

Leo Laporte [01:04:52]:
Yeah, because it's not a GPU. It turns out you don't get that much out of an NPU.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:59]:
That's the thing, but you should.

Leo Laporte [01:05:01]:
Yeah, you should.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:02]:
Well, and I think what you're getting, well, what you were saying originally, it's like it's there. I mean, you could install LM Studio, you know, pick your app, whatever it is. whatever local model and you do different things and it works locally and it's probably really good or pretty good at least, right? But that's not what normal people are doing. That's the problem. So Windows itself is no indication. You never get a little— I'm not saying I want a little sparkly thing every time something good happens, but I mean, you don't even have that option. You just have no idea. For the most part, nothing has happened with the MPU, but you don't know that.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:35]:
And God help you, something you're doing might use that thing every day. You have no idea. You don't even know what's happening. You don't know what you're— you did— you saved the rainforest. You have no idea. You know, it's a weird— it's a weird problem. It's like a chicken-egg pro— I don't know what to call this. It's just— it's very strange.

Leo Laporte [01:05:53]:
Uh, we live in interesting times is the answer. And the question is, right, tell me about Xbox in just a moment. Okay, Paul, you're on. Play the Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:14]:
God, this is like going to church. Dearly beloved, we gather now.

Richard Campbell [01:06:21]:
There was a sense of that in the game, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:06:24]:
Yeah, that's right. And I feel like this sounds more like the game than the game does. I feel like this is Halo to me now, all of a sudden.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:31]:
Yeah, weird, right?

Leo Laporte [01:06:33]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:35]:
All right, well, see you guys later. Um, so, so, uh, some number of years ago, I lost track of the time, Google came up with a gaming stream— game streaming service called Stadia, right? And they had all these different ideas. They were gonna have original games, they were gonna have, you know, whatever content.

Richard Campbell [01:06:50]:
It was gonna be awesome.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:51]:
Yeah, and the thing is, it actually kind of was awesome as a streaming service, right? They solved some of the problems of streaming services, including the latency of the controller, which is a big problem in fast-action games, whether it's a single-player game like a Doom type, Doom 2016, which I think— no, it was one of the games I played on Stadia, so it was within that time period. Of course, it's Google, so they gave up on it in about 2 seconds. But when they dropped Stadia, I kind of lamented this, and I think— I don't know if it was before or after Stadia was known to be dead, but at some point I wrote an editorial where I was like, Microsoft, You have to copy this feature because you have what we now call cloud gaming, right? The Xbox service that is game streaming. It's now today, it wasn't then, but now you can get it from basically any but the, I think the entry-level Xbox Game Pass subscription. So everyone has some access to this. Amazon Luna has some element of this. That service is not exactly going gangbusters either, but Anything you can do, especially if you're using like a Bluetooth controller, right? Bluetooth is the worst possible connection. If I was gonna do game, I always get the names of it, cloud gaming, sorry, the game streaming, right? With an Xbox or a PC, I guess, over Xbox, I would wire that thing with USB because you just, anything you can do to reduce that latency.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:12]:
So whenever this was, we'll call it almost 10 years ago, I just wrote this thing. I was like, Microsoft, you have to adopt this feature, like separate the controller From whatever the device is, because, you know, cloud gaming can work on a smart TV, it can work on an Amazon Fire TV, like whatever, like a stick, whatever it is. You don't want to have that latency with the, uh, with the device, whatever it might be. Um, and apparently the next version of the Elite Series controllers that Xbox has is going to include this feature, right? So this controller has leaked a few times. The latest leak has a photo of the top of the— well, I guess it's kind of like the front from So from you using it and holding it, it's actually around the back. It's like where the pairing button is and stuff. It's going to have a little screen. And the screen is—

Richard Campbell [01:08:59]:
There, where you can't see it when you're holding it.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:01]:
Exactly. Because Xbox and really good user interface. Well, because part of it I think is like a transmission type thing. Well, actually, I'm not even sure about that. But I don't know why it's there. But it's, A, there's a pairing button like we have today, like a physical button. And then there's a little screen that will show you if you're in local or cloud mode, right? Local mode, meaning you're connected to that device, console, PC, Fire Stick, whatever it is, or cloud mode where the controller is linked directly to the cloud service. So it has its own Wi-Fi connection, presumably, right? It wouldn't be— probably Wi-Fi connection.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:35]:
So they're doing the standing thing. It's nice. I also made the observation that if you enjoy games like you have a bag or you have a Lego castle or something, and you trip and it explodes into a million Lego pieces. Xbox Series 1 and 2 controllers are awesome like that because every single piece of it comes flying off if you drop the thing. So it will probably have that benefit as well because you can swap out the sticks and the D-pad and all the other bits or whatever. But to me, the bigger deal is this, and I have to assume this is coming to the normal Xbox wireless controller as well, right? Like you would want That, you know, cloud, direct cloud connection. So, uh, no word on the timing or whatever of this thing, but I would assume it's going to be this holiday season because let's face it, they don't have any other hardware to announce. Yeah, I mean, there may be other— well, yeah, to somebody, because listen, this is going to be a $150 controller.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:28]:
It could be. I bet it's going to be more than that. But yeah, but yeah, it's going to be expensive for sure.

Richard Campbell [01:10:33]:
Which is console for that? What a concept.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:35]:
I know. Um, so my hope is that, like I said, this comes down to the normal controllers as well. But, you know, whatever, there will be a timing issue. So, uh, this seems like a good idea to me, uh, other than the, the price. Yeah, do something.

Richard Campbell [01:10:50]:
It's, it's easy Christmas presents, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:53]:
Yep. My problem is I'm, uh, an ape, and so I break— I, between here in Mexico and my place in Pennsylvania, I bet I replace a total of 3 to 4 Xbox controllers a year. I should be on an Xbox subscription service, uh, that gives me new controllers every 3 months or something, because I like— I just, I, I'll drop it on the floor and like the stick will be like 45-degree angle.

Richard Campbell [01:11:14]:
Extra robust club model, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:11:16]:
Yeah, exactly right.

Richard Campbell [01:11:18]:
Right. Can also be used to collect food.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:20]:
Yeah, the one that will survive like the airport transport thing where people jumping up and down on the bags or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:11:25]:
That's it.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:26]:
Yeah. Um, yeah, I do need that. I'm, uh, yeah. I'm a disaster. I don't know. Anyway, I think this is really cool. So that's, I mean, other than the cost and complexity of this controller, but—

Richard Campbell [01:11:37]:
It's even more fragile.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:39]:
Right. Last week when we were in Vegas, I saw this headline and Laurent hadn't written about it yet at the time and I didn't have time to look it up. So I didn't know what it was, but Microsoft has been more aggressively testing new console features this year, right? As part of their own kind of pain point thing. And you're starting to see, I don't know how they used to do it. Someone who's in this and active in this will probably just tell me that this has not changed, but it seems to me there were more individual features being tested through the Insider Program, just kind of thrown out there like, we're going to do whatever the thing is. And then of course, eventually it makes it to stable or whatever. So there's been a lot of that this year. It's actually been very active.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:19]:
So Microsoft is changing or Potentially changing, assuming it gets all the way through, like how audio is captured as part of a video capture. Because you might want to capture, you know, think about it, like you might be playing with a team of people and you might want like that audio in there. You might be just playing with a group of people you don't know, so it's an adversarial thing, but you might want that game chat in there. You might just want the game audio itself, you know. So they're going to actually give you like more granular control over that kind of thing, which I think is—

Richard Campbell [01:12:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:48]:
Fine. I don't need any of that. I turn off audio. I can't stand listening to other people, but I also don't play with other people, so it would be good for that.

Leo Laporte [01:12:58]:
Do you not play online anymore?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:01]:
Oh, I play online all the time. I just don't talk to anybody.

Richard Campbell [01:13:04]:
You don't need to be reminded there's a 12-year-old kicking your butt all over the digital world.

Leo Laporte [01:13:09]:
That's what it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:10]:
Or someone who is a 40-year-old acting like a 12-year-old.

Richard Campbell [01:13:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:14]:
There's, so one thing, all right, so because we're talking about this, I'll go in, like I'll install Call of Duty or whatever on the whatever laptop I'm using now, right? So you go in, you have to do the shaders, it takes a long time. But then I go and configure it. Like I try to configure a couple of individual features, but there's like an accessibility preset where it's for audio. No, so no, it's for visuals. And what that does is it bumps up like the font size for like subtitles, for the player names, for the UI elements, whatever. And whatever other things, right? So I turn that on, which I really like, but one of the other things that turns on is all the audio because I don't know why actually, it just turns on the audio. So I always like voice chat for me is globally off, but when I enable this accessibility settings, it comes on. So I get to witness people talking one time per computer and it's always the stupidest, exactest thing from 1998.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:08]:
Like it makes me insane. That it's a kid with a TV playing in the background, or a guy yelling at his wife, or 2 guys who are together in a game with 12 other people talking to each other just over everything. And it's like, how is this not evolved? Like, how is this not better? So it's— this has been a helpful reminder about why I do what I do, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:14:28]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:29]:
I just hate it so much. I don't know. If I'm gonna play with other people— well, I'm not going to, I guess. I used to do this in the same room with people. You just talk to them like people. It was nice. Um, this might be my favorite news of the week.

Richard Campbell [01:14:41]:
I—

Paul Thurrott [01:14:41]:
this just came out of nowhere for me. I should have anticipated this. August, there's always like a QuakeCon that occurs, usually in Texas, right? And id Software is the makers of Quake and Doom and Wolfenstein and everything else. Um, uh, it's always a big deal. This year, I— the— some of the, uh, uh, id Software co-creators like, uh, John Carmack and, uh, John Romero showed up and were together for the first time in forever, and that's fun.

Leo Laporte [01:15:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:05]:
But there's always something. There's always like a remaster of something. Like a couple years ago, they remastered Quake II. Awesome. This year is the 30th anniversary of Quake, and they released a new episode that has 9 new maps for single player and then 1 new multiplayer map. And this is—

Richard Campbell [01:15:20]:
Which apparently are brutal.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:22]:
This is— it's kind of awesome. And it's awesome on multiple levels. Like the fact that the Quake engine, which was created in the mid-1990s, '90s, originally for software-based rendering in DOS, right?

Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:36]:
You gotta remember this. Is this scalable? Like, has not just survived all these years, but has been improved. So they have these, like, level creation tools that can do things that were not possible in 1996, right? So aside from just the rendering and, I don't know, resolution improvements and things like that we've seen through hardware-accelerated graphics, through things like GLQuake and whatever came after that, the Voodoo 3dfx card that started it all, et cetera, et cetera. There's just been— this was designed to run well on a Pentium, like the first Pentium, right? If you had a 486, Quake did not run great. And so that's how old this is. It's just bizarre. But so id is its own thing. Obviously it's still a company, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:21]:
But id, I think through third parties, id itself did Quake. It did QuakeWorld, which was the multiplayer improvement, which was awesome. It did, you know, it, when I say it, I mean John Carmack really, but it did, you know, GLQuake, et cetera, et cetera. But when you move to like the add-on stuff that occurred later, like the initial add-on episodes like Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, I believe these were always like third parties, you know, kind of like the company that became Raven that did like Heretic and Hexen.

Richard Campbell [01:16:52]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:52]:
And, you know, there's almost like an incubation thing occurring with it, which is really cool.

Richard Campbell [01:16:57]:
Totally.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:57]:
And of course they released the source code, and so we've had advances with this since then as well, right? But there's a company called MachineGames, which came out of a, I think it was just a group of people who were like enthusiasts with it at the time, but they've done the last 3 set, like episode sets that have added, and they're in Quake. So if you buy Quake right now, you'll get the original episodes, you'll get the Scourge of Armagon, you'll get Dissolution of Eternity, and then you get the 3 episode sets that this company has made, including the new one. Which is Dawn of the Machine. And there's, there's stuff in here that is so awesome. It's just like they always had like a weird water and sky effect where it was just kind of a— it wasn't a static bitmap, but it was kind of an organic-looking animated thing. But it wasn't— it was not realistically sky or water ever, you know, but it looked awesome. And that stuff in this game is dramatically better. Like, it's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:48]:
And the levels they've made are amazing. It's really cool. And the best part of this is The day this came out, it might've been— so let me just look. I think it was the day we flew. No, okay, it was the day after we got back. So we had just gotten back from Vegas last week, and I was like, oh, I should install this. So I opened a laptop, I clicked install, and I turned to whatever I was doing, and I looked back, and it was already installed. And I was like, wait, what? And this thing is 1.6 gigabytes on disk.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:20]:
It's the whole game with all the improvements. There's been massive improvements since the new level. It's like 19 new levels. It is. The latest Call of Duty is like 150 to 200 gigabytes depending on how you do it. Like this, and it's a good game. Like it looks great. It plays great.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:39]:
It's, um, it's amazing, you know. So if you already own this thing, if you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription of I think any kind, Like, you could just get this for free. It's just there. Like, you just— it's a really nice update. Like, it's a— it's kind of like the, the Half-Life 1 and 2, um, recent remasters they did on their anniversaries. Um, the, the menu system now is like this, and this is— this has been true before this, but, uh, it's like this gorgeous clean font. Like, this thing, you know, Quake originally was like 320 by 240. It was like chunky, you know? And then of course they did the smoothing and whatever other improvements, resolution increases, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:15]:
But now this thing, you know, it's like 4K, it's like 120 frames a second, it's gorgeous, you know. And I don't know, it's really good. I was— this is really, to me, this is really exciting. Like, um, it's really, really neat how this came about. It's nice.

Richard Campbell [01:19:28]:
Yeah, I've got plenty of old gamer friends who are waxing poetic about it too and being stunned that the new levels are so very good.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:35]:
Yeah, they're really good. They're just like notably good.

Richard Campbell [01:19:38]:
It was a community effort too. There's a lot of people involved in that.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:43]:
There were these things that John Carmack somehow fit into this game, like dynamic lighting or whatever. Or in the original version of the game, which was so weird at the time, and of course the super low res, every single thing in the game was a 3D object. So the creatures you were fighting were 3D objects, the environment was 3D, of course, and they had to use B-trees to figure out what you can see and what you can't see.

Leo Laporte [01:20:07]:
The Z-axis.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:08]:
Yeah, exactly. But you would fire a weapon, and they're all different in their own way, but if it was like little pellets or whatever, if there was light coming off of those things, if you hit something and there was an explosion of little bits, every little one of those was a 3D object. It was 100% 3D. And they went from a fake 2D world that looks 3D to literally just 3D. And it's this astonishing technological achievement. And then it scaled somehow, you know, because genius, I guess. I don't know. It's amazing.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:39]:
Like, it, it just amazes me that this is in any way, um, like viable or whatever you want to say, however you want to say that. Like, it's, it's nice. All right, now that I spent 30 minutes on my pet, my pet favorite topic for some reason, um, so one of the big questions about the Nintendo Switch 2, at least for me coming from like an Xbox perspective, is We were talking about Call of Duty happening here. What's going on with that? And that may or may not happen this year, I'm not sure. But Nintendo, I think this was part of their quarterly earnings, announced that, among other things, right? 'Cause there's a bunch of other games, that Minecraft is coming finally to this console on October 27th. So it's gonna be optimized for that hardware, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you have the game already as a Switch 1 owner, you'll be able to upgrade somehow. I don't know if it's— I don't think it's gonna be free, but it will be cheap.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:31]:
Um, so that's fine. That's good. Um, Rockstar Games is preparing to destroy everything on Earth as we know it that AI hasn't killed with, uh, GTA 6. And this makes like zero sense to me, but on August 27th, they're gonna have the first extended look at the game.

Richard Campbell [01:21:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:53]:
And they're gonna do it in the most logical of places, Netflix. Uh, what? Like, I'm sorry, what's happening? Um, and I don't know why. Like, I— Netflix says games, I know, but they're not gonna have this game. This is, this is like a AAA title.

Richard Campbell [01:22:07]:
Somebody paid somebody here.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:09]:
Oh yeah, yeah. And, and the set— if, look, if you're a sports fan in the United States in particular, you know that, you know, we went from free channels to cable. So some games are now on TBS or whatever, or TNT or whatever it is. And now depending on the sport you watch, you could have 7 to 10 different places where games can occur. Netflix is playing a fun role in that. And maybe that's what this is like. They're looking for any original content they can get, I guess.

Richard Campbell [01:22:34]:
I mean, what does Netflix think is going to happen? Oh, I want to see the preview so bad that I will sign up a Netflix account to watch it.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:44]:
Maybe.

Richard Campbell [01:22:45]:
Knowing it'll be on YouTube a week or two later.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:48]:
That's correct.

Richard Campbell [01:22:49]:
Not even counting the pirated ones.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:51]:
That is correct. It will be on YouTube. It goes to YouTube after that. So I don't like— and by the way, it's gonna be on YouTube later that day. It's like, okay, uh, what are we doing? This is— this reminds me of Spotify, or YouTube Music does this now too, where it's like, um, we're gonna have podcasts now. And it's like, yeah, but you're a music player. It's like, well, it's audio. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:13]:
Uh, it's not the same, but okay, yes, it is something I hear. I— this is like something you see. So it's like Netflix, we have things you see. It's like we don't have videos, we have movies and TV shows and other things you may see. I, I don't know what the tie-in is here, but we also have games, like I said, but not this game. So I don't get it, but whatever. Um, and we'll see what happens here. I wonder this— I don't think it's going to be a Duke Nukem thing, but I feel like the wait on this has been so long that it doesn't almost matter what hap— I don't— how could it not be disappointing, right?

Leo Laporte [01:23:44]:
Um, oh, you're not saying it doesn't matter, it's going to be great. You're saying it doesn't matter Everybody's gonna be—

Paul Thurrott [01:23:50]:
I'm saying at this point it's gonna be like, yeah, we waited so long for this.

Leo Laporte [01:23:52]:
Couldn't be good enough.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:53]:
The biggest fans of the game are gonna be like, are you serious? This is all it is? Like, and I don't— we'll see, maybe they'll surprise everybody. But this will be our first real look at that. I don't know, I'm not sure what to say about this. I have hopes. Um, if you ordered a Steam Machine or the Steam Controller— I think it's called the new Steam Controller— in Europe, uh, you would have gotten an email because unfortunately, um, their supply chain or their distribution partner, I guess, uh, Siva Logistics, was hacked and got access to a bunch of customer information, including, um, like, uh, well, not things like payment information, passwords, right, but customer names, full addresses, country, phone number, email address, etc. The— what exactly what you ordered, that kind of stuff. And so Valve literally— it's bizarre to me that they said it this way, but The email says you can expect fake messages. Like, what? So I, at the time, I don't know if this has changed, but at the time this happened, they were like, we've gone back to see if it'd be like, could you please explain exactly how this happened and why? And I don't know if they've ever gotten a good, um, answer to that yet, but you're going to get these messages that may quote your address back.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:05]:
We all get these kind of spam things, like an Amazon thing. There's a Uh, there was a recall in an Amazon order that you bought. You're safe to use it, but you should click here to something something, and you have to enter all your Amazon information, which they then steal. Um, it's going to be this kind of thing. So, uh, so there, there you go. I don't know what to tell you. And then I mentioned, uh, Nintendo's earnings report. Um, their earnings report was terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
Um, and this is weird because they launched the Switch 2 in the year-ago quarter, right?

Richard Campbell [01:25:37]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:38]:
So there should be this uptick for some period of time, year over year, it should be better, better, better for a while, and that's not what's happening. Nintendo is trying to, I don't know, obviously there's a bit of PR here, right? They're trying to, it's like they'll be like, well, compared to the original Switch in that timeframe, it's better in some way, whatever. But no, I mean, the reality is they've made a lot less money. than they did a year ago, and why would that reverse itself? So the thing that kept this from being worse is the same thing that happened to them, I believe it was last year, which is they have a movie. And the weird thing about this to me is I talked about this last week without knowing this was coming. So in Nintendo's case, they had a Super Mario Brothers movie, I think a year or two ago. I think it was last year. And then this past year, they had something called the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which made $1 billion at the box office.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:28]:
and dramatically impact, not to the tune of a billion dollars, though obviously they share that with studios and whatever, but to some degree, this helped this quarter be a lot less bad than it would've been otherwise. I think it was, well, I don't think it was like plus $35 billion compared to the year ago or something like that. It was like it actually had a material impact. Semi-randomly, I think it was last week on the show, we were talking about Xbox and I said, I don't know why they don't do more with their IP. They had this successful Amazon show for Fallout. They didn't have a new game ready for that. Okay. They half-assed a Halo TV series.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:05]:
No one was super interested in that. That's their best IP. They should be doing Gears stuff. They are finally doing a Call of Duty movie, but they have all this IP. There should be a never-ending cascade of Xbox IP-based TV shows, movies, whatever it is. And this is a good— this is just one movie. I mean, granted, it did really well, but, um, I think it says something that I don't recall even knowing this movie existed per se. Like, it's like Super Mario Galaxy, what are you talking about? But okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:35]:
Um, as long as you got the market for it though either, right? No, no, no, no, no. And they're gonna have another one, uh, next year. They're doing a live-action movie of The Legend of Zelda. So they seem to have figured this out. Uh, to some degree. So I wish Microsoft would do the same thing. But, uh, Switch sales down year over year. Switch sales in the current quarter, the one that will be the next quarter when they report it, will be down.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:00]:
Um, they will sell fewer Switches this year than they did last year. It's like, this thing just came out.

Richard Campbell [01:28:05]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:05]:
And I—

Richard Campbell [01:28:06]:
the people who wanted it bought it, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:28:09]:
I know, but this is not how it went for the— like, the original Switch is the best-selling console this company has ever made. Right. It is the record holder. I don't know if I have it here somewhere. Yeah, 157 million units. So it's great. Um, there's no way this thing ever catches up to that. This is not gonna have that, you know, that tail.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:26]:
This is no way. It's too bad, but there you go. But they have movies, so that's fun. Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:28:36]:
The movies. I'm a movie fan.

Richard Campbell [01:28:39]:
You like— yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:41]:
Did you see The Odyssey yet in the theater? Have you done this? No, I don't have 3 and a half hours to kill. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [01:28:48]:
No, I want to see it, but— I do too, but you have to sit in the front row at the IMAX in town.

Richard Campbell [01:28:53]:
Yeah, so many people booked it a month in advance.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:54]:
I'm gonna need an intermission. There's gonna be a meal in the middle of this.

Richard Campbell [01:28:58]:
I mean, like, I don't think you need—

Leo Laporte [01:29:00]:
I'll give you a hint, there's many long sea voyages you could at that time head to the bathroom and you'd be back.

Richard Campbell [01:29:05]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:05]:
Yeah. Do I have to read the Iliad to understand what's happening? Like, as a—

Leo Laporte [01:29:08]:
in fact, we'll just I'll just confuse you, Paul. Yeah, not a good idea. Uh, let's take a break. Uh, that was the Xbox segment. This is the back of the book coming up in just a moment. You guys are powering through this, man. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:22]:
I don't know what's happening.

Leo Laporte [01:29:23]:
You're good. You're good. Now, turn the page to the back of the book because Paul Theroux got his tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:32]:
Yeah, I didn't have time to write this up today. In Windows 11, I don't know, 3, 4 years ago, there was a build where it's like, we're all about developers, we're gonna put all these developer features in Windows 11. You know, this is when like, um, Dev, uh, Dev Drive happened, and there was a— I've already forgotten the name of it— there was some kind of like a, like a GUI front end to a lot of this stuff. They added a developer options page and setting somewhere for a lot of these kind of, you know, the types of features developers might want to enable. Sometime last year, they changed this so that now there's an advanced page. So if you go to like Settings app, System, Advanced, I'm kind of— it's kind of interesting to me that I find myself going here first more and more often when I set up a new computer. So the 2 things that I've been enabling right away are End Task, which is where you right-click on a shortcut for an app in the taskbar and there's a new end task option in that pop-up menu that appears. So you don't have to go into Task Manager and find the, you know, whatever it is or, you know, how it moves around because like things are taking up different amounts of memory or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:41]:
So the items move, you right-click on the wrong thing and end the wrong task. So you can just do that very easily. So that one's awesome. And if you use the command line a lot, there is a— you can add a sudo command, right? Which works similarly to the sudo command in like Bash and other Linux-type shells, right? But there's all these other things in here, you know, developer mode. If you're developing like modern apps in Windows, using Visual Studio, you have to turn that on, et cetera, et cetera. But I just did that massive update to the book that I can't stop talking about, but I also have these other books that I have. So the De-Insidify Windows 11 book, which I'm updating, the Markdown book, which I am in fact doing, the Windows Everywhere book, which I would like to update, but we'll see where that goes this year, Eternal Spring, et cetera. So I don't want to get into the full story about this, but I have moved my— the book stuff is all in GitHub.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:29]:
So I have like a, you know, a git clone thing I do and put it into the local file system wherever it goes. But the problem is I have to keep them up now that they're not syncing through OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever. I have to make sure these things are up to date. So if I use a different computer and I have the same setup, you know, on computer B, I have to do like a git pull or whatever to make sure that things are up to date. So I kind of just do this manually all the time. And when there are a lot of files, it's really hard to— understand whether they're updated or the latest version, whatever it might be. So there's an option in this advanced page where you can— well, there's a set of options, I should say, for File Explorer. And you go into there, and one of the options is— I'm just trying to find it here— it's like File Explorer plus version control.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:19]:
And what it does is you tell it which folders on your computer are Git repositories, right? So if you've cloned them from the cloud or whatever, and then it adds 3 columns to, um, File Explorer, the view, like details view or whatever, where it shows you the, the version status, the last change date, and the last change message, right? So if you do it, if you're using GitHub correctly, you know, every time you update, you explain what this update is, right? So you have this, it's kind of like metadata. And, um, so I enabled this for— I just tried it with one folder. It was for the Field Guide, the Windows 11 book, because that's the big problem. And I didn't see anything at first, and I'm like, what's going on here? What is this? And so then I, I reset, or, uh, I quit and then restarted explorer.exe, and then it popped up, and I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like, the only thing it doesn't have is a GUI way to do things like pull and push and all that stuff, but, but it gives you that status update. So I can just tell at a glance now if this thing is in fact the file I just updated on a different computer or not. And if it isn't, then I know I can just do a Git pull or whatever. And, uh, and I, I just— they announced this, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:24]:
I, I— it was probably as long ago as last year's build. I don't remember, but I, I'd never enabled this. And I was like, this is, this is, this is actually really useful if you use Git.

Richard Campbell [01:33:37]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:37]:
If you don't, there is a bunch of other stuff in this advanced page that I just feel like people don't know about. And I feel like any normal human being could benefit from End Task in particular. And if you use the command line a lot, the sudo thing is really nice too. But, um, I would just say just take a look at this. Like, I think people just aren't— just not aware.

Richard Campbell [01:33:55]:
They don't know it's here.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:55]:
Yeah, they don't even know it's there.

Richard Campbell [01:33:57]:
They need a little, uh, Mercurial integration into File Explorer too.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:02]:
Right, right. Yeah, I gotta look this up. I feel like there must be— well, of course this will all break soon anyway because they're changing File Explorer, but, but I feel like there must be File Explorer integrations that have a GUI for this stuff? Because I use, it's 100% command line. Everything I do for the book, whatever it is, any interaction between the PC and GitHub is command line based, which is good on some level, but—

Leo Laporte [01:34:27]:
It's funny because I got so used to typing commands to GitHub.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:34:32]:
And there are all of these graphical interfaces. Emacs has an interface people rave about, but I know how to—

Paul Thurrott [01:34:40]:
But then you use it and you're like, eh.

Leo Laporte [01:34:41]:
Push, commit, you know, all that stuff that you work on.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:44]:
Right. I have a— it's not a script. It's really just 3 chain commands that just basically update. And so I'm working on the book and it updates everything. That's fine. But the thing I don't know how to use from the command line, which I know is a thing, is it's just like a status thing. In other words, and I'm not going to do that from the command line. Like, I'm not going to go to the command line and say, show me the the latest update message, the latest commit message from every single file in this folder.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:08]:
Like, I'm just not going to do that.

Leo Laporte [01:35:09]:
That's what I have AI for.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:11]:
Well, okay.

Leo Laporte [01:35:11]:
But I mean, seriously, if it's more complicated than commit and push, I say, hey, who stashed that? What's going on?

Paul Thurrott [01:35:18]:
If I have to look at the help file and then I still can't figure it out, I have to look it up online. I'm not doing it. But now it's in File Explorer and I'm like, oh, that's exactly what I want.

Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
Yeah, that's a good point.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:27]:
It's good.

Leo Laporte [01:35:28]:
And it even does the sudo. That's kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:30]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:35:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:32]:
Huh. So it knows your master, it knows your password?

Paul Thurrott [01:35:36]:
The reason sudo is nice, well, sorry. Let me tell you about Linux, Leo. No, I don't mean like that. So obviously, you know why sudo is important. The reason it's important in Windows is the way that we've been doing this so far is if we need administrative privileges, we open the terminal as administrator. Oh, and you have to open it as admin and all that. Yeah, there's a cute little icon that tells you you that that's what it is, but you might forget and you might not want that thing running all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:36:01]:
I get what you're saying.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:03]:
So you could just open a normal terminal window and then do that, like, just like you do in Linux, right? So then you just do the one command because the lifetime of that thing is probably— well, there might be a time frame, but I believe it might just be— it should just be that command, right? And then you—

Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
On Linux, it's a— there's a timeout.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:18]:
I think there is. That's why I said that.

Leo Laporte [01:36:19]:
So you can do a few commands at once and then it says timeout.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:21]:
That's why I said that. And then you forget or you lose track of it and you're wondering why it's asking you for sudo again, or it says you have to use sudo now or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:36:27]:
I wanted to, honestly. That's, you know, I don't like it to auto-escalate or anything like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:33]:
Yep. So I feel like I could be wrong, but I think on Windows, I think it is just per command. I don't think it's a timeframe. Nice.

Leo Laporte [01:36:40]:
Very nice. So it does ask you for the password when you upgrade.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:45]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:36:45]:
Yep. That's good.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:46]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:36:46]:
Because it was always a pain to, oh, I got to right-click and I got to close the terminal, right-click as admin. That was just a pain. Good.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:53]:
I would do this. I can't tell you how many times I've done this.

Leo Laporte [01:36:55]:
Yeah, that's much better.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:57]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:36:58]:
And, uh, do we have a new, uh, browser by any chance?

Paul Thurrott [01:37:01]:
Yeah, but that's gonna be next week. Okay, I'd like to talk about the Shift browser a little bit. No, um, well, I might be talking about it next week. I'm gonna look at it. But in shiftification, shiftification of Windows. No, so, um, Stardock continues to release new Windows utilities, which I love, right? So this is Start 11. Fences, window blinds they still make. They have Object Desktop with all the stuff in it, a lot of stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:28]:
But when I saw the name of this, I was like, I don't understand why you're even looking at this. But they have a new tool called Alt+Tabby, which Brad told me was because they needed a URL that was free and that one was. So there they go. That was the name, but whatever. Obviously, it's an improvement on Alt+Tab, which is, as Brad says, has been pretty much unchanged in Windows for a long, long time. The only recent— other than some WinUI stuff, I guess, the only change I can think of is in Windows 10. I don't know if it was the initial version, maybe, but certainly in the Windows 10 timeframe, they added the ability to have Edge tabs be part of Alt+Tab. So instead of just all standalone windows or apps, if you had tabs like 3 by default, but it could be, I think it's 5 or 20 or whatever the numbers are, you're going to see those there as well.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:14]:
And that's been pretty much it. This utility does a bunch of stuff, but it has all these built-in layouts, some of which are beautiful. I mean, well, they're probably all attractive, but some appeal to me personally, including one that is like kind of search-based, so it works like Command Palette, like from PowerToys a little bit. But you can customize like every single element of this thing from like the size of icons, how windows are grouped, transparency, colors, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You can pin apps so that they appear in this Alt+Tab interface even When they're not running, so you can just get to them quickly that way. That'd be a click, a quick way to launch an app. It can replace Task View, so it does the Windows key plus Tab keyboard shortcut, et cetera. And then that Alt+Tab— sorry, the search interface I was talking about.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:56]:
But normally this will be $10. It's on sale for now because they just introduced it, so it's $8. And if you do have Object Desktop, you just get it as part of that suite as well. At some point, we're just going to have like a Stardock UI, I guess. Like, it's going to be— they pretty much, they're slowly working. I wish they would do a File Explorer replacement in some ways, but I didn't see this one coming. And I was, at first I was like, I don't understand why anyone would need this. But then I looked at it and I was like, okay, actually this looks pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:25]:
Like, so if you wanted more from this interface, definitely take a look at that.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Brad's still working there, huh?

Richard Campbell [01:39:32]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:39:33]:
Yeah, they do good stuff. He's happy. He likes, he likes it there.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. His boss is great. Like Brad Wardell is the best. Like he's just such a great guy. And, um, and still like, you know, the—

Leo Laporte [01:39:44]:
Brad Sams works for Brad Wardell. So that's—

Paul Thurrott [01:39:46]:
That's Brad. Yeah. To me it is as well. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the other Brad, as I think of him.

Leo Laporte [01:39:51]:
Brad Wardell was a, was solo for a long time doing this.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:54]:
I think he was an OS/2 guy. He was, he was making games on OS/2.

Leo Laporte [01:39:58]:
Yeah. You know, back in the He's one of the old guys. He's one of the, like, the Peter Norton types, right? The old—

Paul Thurrott [01:40:04]:
Oh yeah. And he's also a genius in his own way. And he's kind of— they're doing a bunch— like, sorry, I'm talking about a genius. I'm like, I can't get this off my watch. Um, anyway, um, slightly, you know, similar skill sets.

Leo Laporte [01:40:17]:
Um, different people are good at different things, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:23]:
Uh, yes. Oh, okay. Oh gosh, it's terrible being me. Anyway—

Leo Laporte [01:40:30]:
I am Reiter.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:32]:
Great company. Recommend their products.

Richard Campbell [01:40:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:37]:
No, that's nice. I'm glad. How big is it? Do they have a lot of people or—

Paul Thurrott [01:40:42]:
A lot of people working for the company?

Leo Laporte [01:40:44]:
Stardock, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:45]:
Oh, I'm actually not sure. I mean, they're a small company compared to Microsoft or whatever, but—

Richard Campbell [01:40:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:49]:
No, it was really cool when Brad Sams went there. I thought, That's neat. And I'm glad he's happy because it's been a few years now. He's—

Paul Thurrott [01:40:54]:
Yeah, it's been a while. Um, right. I'm not even sure how long it's been, but—

Leo Laporte [01:41:01]:
Too long to remember, too short to forget. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the point of this show where we shift gears and we talk to Richard Campbell about booze. Now let's say hello to Richard Campbell and find out what's What's coming up on Run As Radio?

Richard Campbell [01:41:20]:
Published today, my conversation with Matt Garoppolo. Matt Garoppolo is part of CMS Critic. So this is fallout of me doing the Umbraco show in Copenhagen, which Umbraco makes a CMS. And so I ended up hanging out with a bunch of CMS types, and Matt and I over dinner had a long conversation. I said, we should probably just make that a Run As, Matt. And so finally we're able to get it done.

Leo Laporte [01:41:44]:
That's why I always have a recorder with you, and I'm always recording all our conversations.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:49]:
No, I'm not. I'm just kidding.

Leo Laporte [01:41:52]:
I often think that though. Gosh, I wish I'd recorded that one.

Richard Campbell [01:41:55]:
Yeah. Well, and this is a guy who's doing a lot of— not only does he do the work of actually setting up CMSs for customers and so forth, but he's always reviewing the stack. And CMS is one of those wildly fragmented markets. Like, you, you have this battle between, I can just make a web page, especially now in the day and age of, of LLMs where it's just so easy to generate stuff off the cuff. But when you really dig into like, why would I want a CMS? It's more about the workflow. How do we do validation? How do we make sure we're going down the checklist of covering all languages and cultural elements and things like that? Like, it still made sense and it was very much part of our conversation of like, what is AI doing to I'm very interested in CMSs.

Leo Laporte [01:42:40]:
I think that's a great subject.

Richard Campbell [01:42:42]:
It's a funny little business, and it's one of those ones where there's so many products because there is no one right way. But there's one fundamental truth is once you go down a path with one, getting out of it again is virtually impossible.

Leo Laporte [01:42:56]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:42:56]:
You start pouring content into that, and there's always this schism between simple enough to be able to use with non-technical people and sophisticated enough to do all the things you need it to do. And in many cases, and again, this part of the conversation was this already reality of you jumped in on a CMS in version 1 when it was simple, and then you grew with it as it went through versions, and now you're deeply locked in and knowledgeable about it, and switching over to another one is a nightmare. And starting into any mature CMS is a real barrier. In some ways, it seems like most CMSs are going to make their customers in the first couple of versions, and then that's the business, which turns out to be a good business. Like Umbraco, they make a .NET-centric CMS, and it's a comfortable living for a group of people in and around Denmark. They do very well. Very funny little niche of the world, and a product that virtually every company needs one of.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:00]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:44:00]:
At least internally, if not externally as well. Just how do you present yourself using web technology? So I'd never done that conversation as a show before, so it was good to talk to somebody who's been deeply in this space just about what that means. Very nice.

Leo Laporte [01:44:17]:
CMS, episode 1049. You'll find it at runasradio.com and wherever you get your podcasts, as they say. Now we've left you plenty of time to talk about Lincoln.

Richard Campbell [01:44:35]:
Yeah, um, it's such a— this is such a wacky name of a whiskey. So it's a fallout of Nebraska, actually. I did another— I did a podcast while I was in Nebraska for another show. It was about tech and pizza, so they made me—

Leo Laporte [01:44:48]:
Why didn't I think of that?

Richard Campbell [01:44:50]:
Oh yeah, it was a good one. In this particular pizza place, and I think maybe it's just a Lincoln thing, they keep putting cream cheese on the pizza, which seems very wrong. But I got to tell you, the pepperoni pizza with little dabs of cream cheese on it, well, it wasn't horrible. I'm not going to go out of my way to order it, but it was at a— anyway, you can go find that show if you want to look it up.

Leo Laporte [01:45:12]:
It's very Midwestern.

Richard Campbell [01:45:12]:
But this was their gift, and it's another Nebraska whiskey, and it's called Sideshow. Although the full name is Lincoln Straight Bottled-in-Bond Bourbon, which is like too many words, but all of them mean something. And so part of the story is just going through that. Now, we just did a Nebraska whiskey. We did Loop River just a few weeks ago. So I don't really want to do the whole history of Nebraska again. But as I dug into this one, I ran into this great story that I thought you'd probably enjoy. So the founders of this Whiskey Sideshow are actually beer makers.

Richard Campbell [01:45:49]:
They're Kincader, which is a weird name. You think, is it their names, Kincaid? No, none of that is true. A Kincader is a settler from the early days of Nebraska who benefited from the Kincaid Act of 1904. It's actually named after a Nebraska congressman, Moses Kincaid. And the old Homesteader Act, which is in homesteaders, whereas if you go there and work this land, you own it, right? And the normal allocation was 160 acres of land, but that didn't work in the Nebraska Sandhills region. So the northern part of Nebraska, about 20,000 square miles, are grass-covered sand dunes. And I don't know that many people know this space even exists. This is a fallout of the end of the Ice Age that left behind these huge sand dunes on the east side of the Rockies where all that wind would come down and move it around.

Richard Campbell [01:46:53]:
But ultimately, prairie grass took it over and stabilized it. Now, part of the byproduct of that was it also makes The Ogallala water reservoir or the underground aquifer, which is the largest in North America and is unbelievable water. And that's just a byproduct of filtering through all this sand, but it's not good land for farming. And so 160 acres, you just couldn't grow enough to survive. In fact, most of those farms ultimately became ranches. And again, ranches need more land. So the Kincaid Act of 1904 changed that number from 160 acres to 640 acres. That's what it's all about.

Richard Campbell [01:47:40]:
Rather than naming their brewery after a family name, it's named after a land rush. And Kincader Brewery actually opened on the eastern edge of the Sandhills in a little town called Broken Bow, which is only about 3,500 people, but they drilled their own well into the Ogallala aquifer because it's really, really good quality water to operate their brewery. There are 4 of them that formed the company. Dan Hodges, who's the experienced beer guy. A bunch of these guys were hobby beer makers. Barry Fox, Cody Schmick, and Nate Bell. And it's Cody Schmick who always had an eye to someday I want to do distilling, to get involved in that. And we know beer and whiskey go well together.

Richard Campbell [01:48:24]:
Whiskey is what beer wants to be when it grows up. We think in terms of barley and malting and that initial fermentation and so forth. And then if you combine it with hops and move it on, you've made beer. And if you send it through a still, now you're headed down the whiskey path. And right off the bat and back in the beginning, and they set this up in 2014, they made 4 different kinds of beer, a pale ale, a Kölsch, a jalapeño ale. Okay. And a porter. A few years later, Cody gets his wish, and in 2020, he sets up Sideshow Spirits as a subsidiary of the Gencader organization right in Lincoln downtown.

Richard Campbell [01:49:07]:
Manages to get— Lincoln had its troubles, so to be able to get a big enough space to actually operate a distillery, and they call it Lincoln's first legal distillery. And if you remember from our earlier Nebraska stories, after Prohibition, there just were no distilleries. in Nebraska, and it stayed that way until Cooper's Chase, which opened out at West Point first earlier on. So Sideshow was the first distillery in Lincoln proper, and they went the whole meal deal. They knew what they were doing here because it's, you know, it's 2020. So a cocktail bar, a tasting room, tours of the distillery, all of that right in time for COVID. So well done. And they of course made vodkas and gins and so forth because it takes time for your mature whiskies to mature.

Richard Campbell [01:49:54]:
That's just part of, part of the price of the whole thing. The name on this particular whiskey— so this is not their first whiskey because it's a 4-year-old, right? And remember, they only started in 2020. So this is relatively recent. But the name is Sideshow, the name of the distillery, Lincoln, because it's in Lincoln. Which is different from other whiskeys they make, which they call Nebraska rather than Lincoln. And it turns out that what Lincoln actually means for Sideshow is a 4-grain whiskey or a 4-grain bourbon, rather speaking. And typically, most bourbons, they only have to be 51% corn. Everything else is optional after that.

Richard Campbell [01:50:31]:
You typically use barley because you want the amylase to help digest the corn so you don't make methanol and cause people to go blind. And then you would typically have a flavor grain, most of the time rye, sometimes wheat. But as we also saw with Frey Ranch just last week, 4 grains typically have wheat and rye, and that's what this is. So Lincoln means their 4-grain line. Straight is a bourbon standard, and that means a minimum of 2 years but no additives. Also, if it's less than 4 years old, you need to put an age statement on the bottle to be called straight. This does not have an age statement on it, so you know it's Older than 4 years. And finally, bottled in bond.

Richard Campbell [01:51:12]:
So what the heck is bottled in bond? Well, bottled in bond is actually an act from 1897, and the rules were the whiskey must come from one distillation season. Now, typically you do rounds of distilling based on when you get your grain, so there's normally 2 seasons of distillation, Jan to June, July to December, depends on when exactly you get your grain. So you have to make your whiskey, anything coming into the bottle has to be from that one season. It also has to be one distillery and at least 4 years old because it should be stored in a federally bonded warehouse. And a federally bonded warehouse means it is tax-exempt until you take it out. So you can make your whiskey, but when it leaves, you don't have to pay taxes on it until until you take it out of the bonded warehouse to go to sell it. So that's what a bonded warehouse is all about, and always bottled at 100 proof, so 50% alcohol exactly. What is this all about? Why bother with this? Well, the important part on this whole Bottled-in-Bond Act is it's 1897, and there are no standards for whiskey, and companies are doing all kinds of crazy things.

Richard Campbell [01:52:27]:
And so quality makers of whiskey are very frustrated because the ones that are cheating are able to sell are much cheaper. Maybe they're just using grain alcohol, maybe they're just using colored water. You don't know what they're doing. There's no controls. And E.H. Taylor, which we've talked about before over in the Sazerac Distillery, part of Frankfurt, was one of the folks that drove Congress to pass this Bottled-in-Bond Act just to create a standard so that people would know if you buy this whiskey that was bottled-in-bond, you know it really was left undisturbed for at least 4 years in this locked-up warehouse, this federally bonded warehouse. So you get a higher quality product. Now, we don't need that today because you have the FDA now, but the Pure Food and Drug Act, which is the precursor to what becomes the FDA, doesn't happen until 1906.

Richard Campbell [01:53:20]:
So this is 10 years before they can get standards together for food quality that'll include alcohol. They come up with a strategy to make a quality measure for an alcohol. That's Bottled in Bond, which begs the question, why are they doing this now? Because it's one of the last whiskies they've made so far, because it has to be at least 4 years old. So this is just a— I would call it a gimmick, but it is a standard. It is a real standard. And so there's no downside to this. It just means, you know, it's at least 4 years old and it's proofed. It's Bottled at 100 proof.

Richard Campbell [01:53:57]:
And of course, it's from a single distillery and from a single run. And because it's called straight, it has no additives. So no color, no filtration, just a straight whiskey. Now I'm playing the game, and I don't know if you guys like this or not, where I have not opened this bottle. I did the research ahead of time. I carried this from Nebraska. It hung out with me while I was fishing, and now I've just opened it for the first time. I've not done anything.

Richard Campbell [01:54:21]:
It's amazing that it got through that fishing session without being opened. Like, honestly. Uh, so this is a 4-grain whiskey. It's 65% corn, so you'd expect it to be pretty sweet. 15% malted barley, that's high. And that malted barley is done by KinAcre, which is cool. They don't buy their malt, they actually make it. And then 10% rye and 10% wheat.

Richard Campbell [01:54:44]:
It smells sweet, without a doubt. Oh yeah, that's bourbon through and through. Funny, there's a little spice on the nose but not on the mouth, so you kind of get that flair from the rye but not as much heat. That's really cool. Uh, of course, being an American distillery and a small one, being craft distillers, they don't actually publish much in the way of the specifications for their facility itself. And this is happening to me a lot these days as I'm looking more and more craft distilleries where I just can't look up, well, what kind of stills do they have and what are their mash tuns and fermenters and so forth? So I've gotten into this routine now, and thank goodness for generative AI, of going through TripAdvisor and Facebook and things like that for photos of a tour. And from that, I can piece together what the stills and so forth are. And here's how far I got with this one.

Richard Campbell [01:55:43]:
I spent an hour or so messing around figuring this out. They go all— they're all stainless steel. They're using gear from a company called Abe, A-B-E. Uh, Abe originally was in the brewery business, but they also make distilling equipment as well. Uh, and this was supported by the fact when I studied, looked up Kincader, I saw that they have a relationship with Abe, and in their pictures they have a bunch of Abe equipment. So that all makes sense. Makes sense to me. And then it helps to just get a good picture of the still where the big logo says Abe on it.

Richard Campbell [01:56:15]:
In fact, I found the model they're using. It's a thing called the Patriot Still, and it's a craft hybrid distillation method. We've talked about a similar system here where they have a 500-gallon pot still, which is their first stage, and then that is fed into a 250-gallon column still. Their particular model has 14 plates in it. You can adjust this depending on your design, which then feeds into a stainless steel condenser. Now, this is an unusual strategy for large-scale production. If you think about a company like Maker's Mark making bourbon, they do a column still to a pot still rectifier. So the column still raises it up to 60-plus percent, Then they put it through the pot still and do some finishing on it.

Richard Campbell [01:57:04]:
When I did the Maker's Mark tour back in the day, we got a chance to actually sample directly out of the column still and then sample directly out of the pot still to see the changes that happened there. But in craft distilling, they'll typically, with this particular hybrid design, they'll start with a pot still and then do finishing in the column still. And it leaves more grain in the whiskey. That's the concept, is that you really are not— you're less focused on the wood, more focused on the grain. And I think that comes across very clearly. I always worry about 4-grain whiskies. There's just too many flavors, especially to go grain-forward like this. Like, do you still get all the characters to it? And like I said, I can definitely smell the rye, but I don't taste it as much.

Richard Campbell [01:57:53]:
Not that it isn't amazing, because it really is. That's really cool. I think that's the least muddy of the 4 grains I've tried. Like, it, it feels like it's more complicated than your typical rye. Now, they only age in virgin oak barrels, which that would be normal for making bourbon, right? They're buying probably Missouri oak and they're making the barrels and toasting it. And then of course this one is 4 years. Now it's pricey. I found it on Total Wine, but only in certain areas.

Richard Campbell [01:58:23]:
I had to go tell them I was in Nebraska and go to the Total Wine there for $70, which is about twice the price of many of the other Sideshow whiskeys. But considering it's the 4-year, 4-grain, I guess that makes sense. It's their most advanced version, and I don't know that putting it in bond costs them more Because in theory, that's not their storage facility, although they might have paid to be certified to have a federal bonding area in their facility. None of this stuff is published and I couldn't find any documents to it. And I find if you actually take the tour and I tried, I couldn't get it. And you ask those kinds of questions, you get pulled out of the tour.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:59]:
Ask me how I know.

Richard Campbell [01:59:01]:
I mean, usually I just scare the tour guide so badly that they go get the master distiller or the owner and just take me out of of the tour because I don't ask normal questions. And I mean, on the other side of this is typically the master distiller or the owner would like to talk about that stuff. They just didn't educate the tour guide on that because why would you? Most people on a tour are there for the free drink at the end.

Leo Laporte [01:59:26]:
They don't expect Richard Campbell.

Richard Campbell [01:59:28]:
Yeah, I know. Well, and it's to the point now where I'm going to go do the Kansas City show again in September, and my friends down there have reached out to a few of the distilleries. I think they should probably give it a holiday. They should just offer me a private tour.

Leo Laporte [01:59:43]:
Yeah, they should, they should let you— let them know the guy's coming.

Richard Campbell [01:59:46]:
Be prepared. That's exactly what they did. And you know what they did?

Leo Laporte [01:59:48]:
They sent links to the YouTube channel and said, this is what you're going to get.

Richard Campbell [01:59:54]:
Yeah, this is what happens. And so yeah, I've got a private tour at the holiday with, with a few of my friends and the master distiller.

Leo Laporte [02:00:01]:
Sideshow Spirits, the greatest still in town.

Richard Campbell [02:00:04]:
These guys are really fun. And by the way, Lincoln downtown is a fun place.

Leo Laporte [02:00:09]:
I hear— I, you know what, I hear good things about Lincoln all the time.

Richard Campbell [02:00:12]:
Yeah, they've got a, they got a vibe going on there. We had a, we did a great show there. We had a lot of fun. Uh, I did my, my AI hype keynote, which everybody loves. And then, uh, but every night we were out and there's a bunch of cocktail bars. There's all kinds of cool breweries and things. They've got a thing going on there. And I wish I could have gotten to the Sideshow, but it was packed.

Leo Laporte [02:00:33]:
Interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:00:33]:
If I'm able to get back next year, as soon as I know I'm coming, I'm going to try and book this tour because it's just busy, busy, busy.

Leo Laporte [02:00:39]:
No, I always like going to drink at the coffee roasteries where you sit next to the roaster. I like the idea.

Richard Campbell [02:00:46]:
Yeah, no, legit. And that's the same thing. You think on the other side of that wall—

Leo Laporte [02:00:50]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:00:50]:
—of the bar are the stills.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:00:53]:
So they have a speakeasy next to the stills. That's great.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:58]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:00:58]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:00:59]:
And again, it's like, it's all— they're playing the vibe game, but they're also making good spirit while they're doing it. Like, I'm— in the time we've been doing this over the past few years, I'm really enjoying the wave of craft distilling that's going on.

Leo Laporte [02:01:13]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:01:13]:
You know, that people, they get it. Like, these guys started in 2020 knowing exactly what they wanted to do, the style they wanted to go. I don't know if they knew what kind of whiskey they were going to be able to make, But they bought good gear and they bought a lot of gear. Like, there's 2 different still rigs in there too. These guys weren't scraping by. Like, they spent money to really set it up well, and they did a destination in the process. And good on them for it. It's a sideshow without a doubt, but a good sideshow.

Leo Laporte [02:01:38]:
We're seeing things like that in Petaluma too. The next time you're out here, we'll take you to Grifo. Uh, I, I— this is— there's so many whiskeys, so little time, I guess.

Richard Campbell [02:01:47]:
Yeah, well, you know, It's a good problem. You know, how many weeks can I do this? I'm falling behind.

Leo Laporte [02:01:53]:
Well, it's like beer. I think it started with craft beer.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:57]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:01:57]:
And now that it's legal to do your own stills, it makes perfect sense. It's a real—

Richard Campbell [02:02:02]:
And all of these companies that made these craft brewing gears like Abe have learned, make stills too, right? And your customers will come back.

Leo Laporte [02:02:10]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:02:11]:
You know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
Well, there you go. Uh, no sideshow here. That was, uh, that was Front and center, this is a 3-ring circus of fun with Mr. Richard Campbell. You'll find him at runasradio.com. And of course, he does another great show called .NET Rocks with Karl Franklin. That's always great. And those geek-outs are especially good.

Leo Laporte [02:02:37]:
Paul Theriot is at theriot.com. His wonderful books are at leanpub.com. Actually, If you want the books, the best thing to do is become a premium member at theroat.com. You'll get all the books as well as a membership. You don't do tote bags, you do books, which I think is more appropriate.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:54]:
Maybe I should look into that. It sounds like it'd be less work.

Leo Laporte [02:02:58]:
Well, I would say get a tote bag to put the books in, but because they're digital, there's nowhere to store the bits. You just—

Richard Campbell [02:03:04]:
It could be a little bag for a USB key.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:06]:
A little USB key. Yeah. Full sleeve thing.

Leo Laporte [02:03:10]:
A little bitty bag.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:11]:
It's an idea.

Leo Laporte [02:03:12]:
The books include, of course, The Field Guide to Windows 11, constantly updated, De-Insidify Windows 11, constantly updated, and Windows Everywhere, which I'm glad to hear you're going to do a little more on. That's great. That's the history of Windows programming frameworks. Just for people who are curious, during the show, we were benchmarking, and we'll talk about this a little bit more. on intelligent machines, which is coming up in half an hour. But amazingly, I'm very, very surprised. I thought I was going to be running a Chinese model on these dual Sparks, these local Sparks. I did not need to get 2 because NVIDIA has shipped a model called Neutron that is in fact faster.

Richard Campbell [02:03:58]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:03:58]:
Better than either of the Chinese models. It was the only one to get 5 out of the 6 Very difficult challenges that we devised for it.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:11]:
Every battery that separates careful from sloppy?

Leo Laporte [02:04:15]:
Yeah, every battery of tests that separates a careful model from a sloppy model, it passed. And it only got one wrong, and it's the same one everybody else got wrong. It says—

Paul Thurrott [02:04:27]:
Is it how to pronounce the rut?

Leo Laporte [02:04:29]:
No, it's a genuinely ambiguous log question about audio layers we were working on. A headset thing. Now it's saying, want me to crown it as the incument? Usually, uh, AI doesn't misspell things. Now I'm starting to worry a little bit. Uh, is this real or did, uh, Jensen Huang take over my browser? And, uh, yeah, yeah, we won, man. We won, everybody. We won. Thank you, Paul.

Leo Laporte [02:04:55]:
Thank you, Richard. Thanks to all of our wonderful winners. And dozers who join us each and every week for Windows Weekly. We do this show on Wednesdays, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch it in the Club Twit Discord, of course, but you don't have to. We also stream on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. After the fact, on-demand versions of our shows available, all of them at the website twit.tv. In this case, it's twit.tv/ww, easy to remember.

Leo Laporte [02:05:26]:
For Windows Weekly. There's also a Windows Weekly YouTube channel with a video. We do audio and video of all of our shows, uh, and you can subscribe either to audio or video, or if you're a real glutton, subscribe to both. They're free. Why not? Cost you nothing. It's a little hard drive space. Uh, of course nowadays hard drives are precious, so maybe you just pick one. Uh, it's up to you.

Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
Thank you everybody. Have a wonderful week. Paul, we'll see you next week in Mexico City. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:55]:
No, I'm going to be in Pennsylvania next week.

Richard Campbell [02:05:58]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:05:59]:
Don't forget to bring your whistle with you. The people in the country really need to know what it's like living in a foreign land.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:05]:
Oh boy. Yeah. Just a constant cavalcade of noise.

Leo Laporte [02:06:09]:
Why do they blow the whistles?

Paul Thurrott [02:06:11]:
Because they have them, Leo. Why would they have whistles?

Leo Laporte [02:06:15]:
You know, that's actually, Mike Elgin posted this. He and Amira, of course, travel all over the world. He says, One way to judge a city is by vibe. And he says there is no city in the world with a better vibe than Mexico City. He loves it.

Richard Campbell [02:06:28]:
Dude, no, Roma Norte specifically.

Leo Laporte [02:06:31]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:32]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:06:33]:
So they're blowing whistles out of sheer joy.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:36]:
Well, this is down— they're not doing it here. The whistle is downtown. But yeah, it's like an army of police officers. No weapons, but they have plenty of whistles.

Leo Laporte [02:06:46]:
Oh, that's right.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:46]:
And they're going to town on the These things.

Leo Laporte [02:06:48]:
They're trying to get traffic in order.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:50]:
Come over. All they're doing is making traffic worse and louder.

Leo Laporte [02:06:54]:
You know where there's no traffic? The beautiful Madeira Park, British Columbia.

Richard Campbell [02:06:58]:
Oh God, listen, both cars were out the other day. People panicked.

Leo Laporte [02:07:02]:
The only traffic is the loons going, woo.

Richard Campbell [02:07:05]:
We did have a car show last weekend. The wooden boat show and the car show was up, and the cars come from the mainland and stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:07:11]:
The wooden boat show.

Richard Campbell [02:07:13]:
Oh, the wooden boat show is fantastic. Every time.

Leo Laporte [02:07:16]:
I love those classic old wooden motorboats. Oh my gosh.

Richard Campbell [02:07:21]:
They clear all the shrimping boats and stuff out. They move them all off and raft them up, and then all these big wooden boats come in. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:07:30]:
If the wooden boat could get me to the mainland when I have that heart attack, I might just do it. Don't worry.

Richard Campbell [02:07:34]:
We have a very good hospital here, and it does have a helicopter pad.

Leo Laporte [02:07:38]:
Oh, okay. Yeah, but you still have to take a helicopter to get there, but that's okay.

Richard Campbell [02:07:41]:
You'll be fine. But it sounds like we know what weekend for you to come up then if we go up on the weekend.

Leo Laporte [02:07:46]:
Wait till the helicopter's waiting.

Richard Campbell [02:07:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:48]:
I'm not going to have a heart attack. I feel fine.

Richard Campbell [02:07:50]:
You're fine.

Leo Laporte [02:07:51]:
I just— that's what always makes me nervous about living on an island is that, well, where— what happens if there's a medical emergency?

Richard Campbell [02:07:56]:
Yeah, not an island. We have, like I said, we do have a very good hospital, and then we do have 20-minute medevac to the mainland if necessary.

Leo Laporte [02:08:04]:
Perfect. If it's not an island, why do you call it the mainland?

Richard Campbell [02:08:08]:
Uh, because this is land here. You cannot drive over to the rest of it. Like, because the mountains are that high.

Leo Laporte [02:08:15]:
A virtual island.

Richard Campbell [02:08:16]:
We're on a peninsula, right?

Leo Laporte [02:08:21]:
A difference without a distinction, I think.

Richard Campbell [02:08:23]:
Yeah, we still need a ferry to get here, but we love not being the island. No, lots of islands around here.

Leo Laporte [02:08:28]:
Oh no, in fact, you know, Stacy lives on Bainbridge Island down in the States, and that's also a beautiful spot. But again, an island makes me nervous, that's all. Yep, just of a certain age.

Richard Campbell [02:08:40]:
This is the good— there's lots of folks of a certain age up here because it's such a nice place to live, and that hospital's very equipped for it.

Leo Laporte [02:08:47]:
That's beautiful. All right.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:48]:
It's a beautiful place to die, just saying.

Richard Campbell [02:08:52]:
You will be great as you go down.

Leo Laporte [02:08:54]:
I think I'd prefer to die in Mexico City surrounded by life and vivid excitement and—

Richard Campbell [02:08:59]:
And lots of whistles.

Leo Laporte [02:09:00]:
And whistles.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:01]:
Lots of whistles.

Leo Laporte [02:09:02]:
Thank you, everybody. I hope the whistles keep you smiling, and we will see you next time.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:05]:
See you next time on Windows Weekly.