Canadian Whiskey and History

It's time for Windows Weekly, Paul and Richard are here. We have lots to talk about Uh Paul has some thoughts about rewriting Nepad The title might give you some idea. We'll also talk about Why Microsoft quietly extended The life for Windows ten. And a little bit about expensive hardware. Yeah, it's the topic of the week This week seet time This episode is brought to you by Black Hat USA. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades, it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented pressure tested More than a hundred hands on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lectureries reading from slides, and hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work accross the four areas defining security right now, AI and autonomous threats Cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's Briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access, plus business hall entry You also get breakfast, lunch, arsenal live tool demos, on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the warroom screening Black hat takes place from august first to the sixth in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work This is the room and we'll be there too. Prices rise on july seventeenth. so book before then. Use the code Twit for two hundred dollars off your briefings pass at black hat dot com slash us dash twenty six. That's BLAK HAT dot com slash US dash twenty six Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tright This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therat and Richard Campbell. episode nine hundred and ninety recorded Wednesday july first, twenty twenty six Don't be nostalgic for stupid It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we cover the latest news from Micro Soft and here we are our softies of the hour, Paul That And Richard Campbell Paul is of course with Rot. com Rich is from ot net Rocks and run is radio. com and Together, they formed the dynamic duo of Microsoft Journalism What have used Fatman One of these's Robin. I'll let youide. The other one is bad girl. You figure it out. You figure it out Hello, gentlemen. M Richard's back home, which is nice. It' been home for a while. It's been a few weeks in a row. Oh, has it? No, I guess I wasn't paying attention. It'sweird. Paul is well, home is where the heart is and so he's at home in Makunji used to was where the property ownership is, but now he owns in both places. So what do he Actually, do you own a Mcunji now Yeah, we do Oh, you bought one, huh. Good for you. Yeah. we were renting it originally, but yes. I don't know about it. ye. Yeah some well with the subscriptions It's real. that's all I to say.. probablyrobably has more to do with Stephanie than me, but no, it's like I said Stephanie last year sometime, I was whenever this was Um I was like, you know we're spending lot more time in Mexico than are in Pennsylvan We should buy a place in Pennsylvania.ast expecting her to, you know, explain why that was ridiculous. And she's like, I was thinking the same thing. Oh my God Okay, I've inflicted you with something that's terrible, but careful Well, that's good. Now you have homes in both places and you have children, so it'll all work out Yeah, I have infinite money. obviously And infinite money. As I keep telling my daughter her refuses not to be in school. Meanwhile, my bititcoin while it's locked in values plummeting. I watched it go up N much did it go down That's how that works. Yeah. That's not what we're here to talk about today. Today gathered together Dearly beloved to discuss Microsoft. Yeah, what's the latest po? was that sounded an awful out like a wake or a funeral It could be or a wedding. wake or a wedding, One of the other It's the husband. No, cbration Last week was so busy with Windows, I wouldn't be surprised if this week would just be quiet. It was quieter, but by the way, part of the reason is we're literally today as we record this is july first, right? I can't say the date, but fiscal year This is the beginning of the fiscal year. So you know, we've been on kind of a Dathell watch for a little while Meaning like three years. But a lot about Xbox, but just Microsoft in general and personal tech in general too, I guess, because obviously a lot of layoffs and then in the scheme of things with Xbox, game closures, studio closures, you know, et cetera. So my LinkedIn feed has been filled with retirements. just Yeah. I've been getting emailed from people. and it's interesting Someone this is from some I think it's like an internal Microsoft email thread, but it was the basically the kind of takeaway I had a year ago build, like a year ago May when I was out there and it was all this terribbleeness going on. And they had done a series of really poorly done layoffs, including a set right before Bild opened where it was so bad that there were people who supposed to manand boosts at the show who would gone You know, and they never Yeah, no one thought that was to figure out, you know, they laid off everyone from a booth. likeike every we were there. It's like that booth never got built it's' great doesn't exists. Exactly. So they've learned some lessons since then. so One of the things we've seen this year is that they offered certain employees who've been there a long time and have accrued a lot of whatever points they if you know, Microsoft points or some achievements whatever, whatever they are. you know, these their Microsoft rewards points and they can take an early retirement and whatever. And I apparently that's been very successful. Microsoft does not To my knowledge ever said what percentage of that group, but it was at least thirty percent of them or thirty three percent something like that which was their goal and that worked out. And so One of the rumors we'll call it for now because we don't know is that when Microsoft does announce layoffs apparently next week now, it will be a smaller number than anticipated because they got enough people to kind of voluntarily And soll we'll see what happens there. But I do feel like last week, a little bit every day this week so far absolutely kind of sense of dread the morning for me. and I don't even work there. you know I'm kind of braced for the, Microsoft lowers the boom kind of news. each morning and it hasn't happened yet, but Mal, I certainly heard a lot of reorg conversation going on too. So folks are things are being moved around. there seems to be Oh It's like the frost giants are hurling stones at each other, like there's lightning bolts up at the upper echelons. And the folks further down are being pushed about as Everybody loves to be evaluated. Everyone loves to be found lacking because of some arbitrary new rule that know you have to get rid of Xra percent of people, whatever the heck it is There was one person who had said, which is something I had sort of written maybe a year a half ago, whatever that was, it's kind of worse Be there and not knowing what's going to happen that it would be just to get laid off. you know, like at least well there's some certain I've certainly see people doing retirement that way. It's like, I might get laid off, I might not. I'm going to control my destiny and get the hell out of here. Yeah, right Yeah, and I think Gig Wire I published story maybe today, yesterday that was kind of the that too. some older guys who were at Microsoft for a long time were like, look, I just I was happy to be able to pull the trigger on my own schedule, you know, was sort of my own schedule, at least of my own volition anyway. So self determination has some power to it. Yeah, it's too bad that we even have to talk about this, but you know, two hundred twenty thousand employees Gh, this is not this is not a I mean late machine. You know, It's a fraction of the size of Amazon, but then they have warehouses. Yeah, I mean, most of those employees are drivers and warehouse people, you know, Yeah Anhow, as far as actual news, since we don't have anything to say there yet. actually I, I meant to look this up. So remember some time ago I had mentioned that last follow of someim, I said, you know, it's weird. We haven't heard from Phil Spencer in a while, you know? Yeah. And it's like, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not look this upp So maybe I'm wrong, but Pavan Davalorei, who runs Windows, started a podcast, had one episode Did he ever make another one? I don't actually know. I don't know that I don't I meant to look this up this morning. I forgot. I'm not saying he's gone. I'm sure he's still around, but like ye in the sense that it's easy to start anything, the trick is keeping it going He says, looking at two gentlemen have doing podcasts for over twenty years You know, that there's some skill or whatever you want to call it into doing the thing, right? So we'll see utate presumably he went down to, you know, building twenty five and used the facilities that are already set up and good to go. Y that doesn't necessarily mean you can make the time to do it. plus there's always the question of hisis PR team decided this was a good idea. He did one. and when he came out it, he says, I'm never doing that again Yeah, that could be. the same He doesn had all those experiences with folks. Yeah. yeah. he's not super into the spotlight. You can kind of tell that, but that's kind of what I like about him, you know Generally speaking, that group, not him necessarily, but the whole group. and then Xbox, same thing under Aseshashama have been very good about You know, communicating what they're doing and providing a little monthly recaps. Okay, here's all the stuff we fix in windows this month, et cetera. It has, you know, it's been a nice little You know, a couple of months, I guess we'll call it so far. So think he she should make more videos, but I guess we'll see. Yeah, it also depends on how glib you are and how much scripting you want to do there. you know, people pick up on the authenticity in that space. So right or better written You know, butbe that's more of your style. Yeah, so the format of the first one, which might be the only one again, I have the look, was with an interview with Mar Marcus Ash who was a great guy And I feel like just doing that sort of thing where you're you're hey,re you're letting people who are doing some work get out in front of people, which is nice. R. It's always good when' put somebody in front of somebody your hand. Yep. I think that's I think that's great. So I just you could just do it like that. He doesn't have to be the one that communicates, Hey, we did it. We won, you know mission accomplished, whatever Um, but I I Yeah, just if you just do it just for that reason, I think it'd be good, you know, so yeah. Okay, actual news. and interestingly, this occurred without any announcement whatsoever on Microsoft's part. You would have thought that U this would have been a big big deal, but sometime in the past week or so, they silently updated the page they have on the Microsoft website for the Windows ten extxtended seecurity updates page. page, whatever program And they changed the date. someomeone just went in and edited the year. So instead of ending in October of this year, it's now going to end on october thirteenth, twenty actually now it's october twelfth, twenty twenty seven. This is probably when I'm doing this quietly is you wonder if it's a typ Well well so as I said that, I was thinking almost the same thing, except that now I realize they actually had to change two parts of it because the original date was october thirteenth, twenty twenty six, twelve, twenty twenty seven It seems purposeful. I did do one of those wayback machine things to see. When it changed, the most recent one I could see that still had the old date was in May. So sometimes this past month U But yeah, I mean, so that's great. And just so you know, people don't understand what this means or don't remember or whatever. If you have a Windows ten PC and you either did not update to Windows eleven for your own reasons or it just does not qualify Microsoft offered to consumers for the first time the ability to get extended support. I think they were originally planning to charge for it. they got some Negative feedback on that and just decided to do it for free for a year, right? Now they've been doing this for businesses over several Windows versions down probably for up to three years where they escalate the cost year by year, which makes it pretty expensive toward the end. this is the first time they've ever offered this to consumers And of course, when you When you hear this, A, you're like, you know, the initial reaction No, that's great. That's a really good idea. And then you're like, well, hold on a second. Like what's going on here? Like why what's happening? And if they're going to be shipping these updates to businesses anyway, why wouldn't you just let people keep getting the updates too? I mean, what's the difference? But I mean, those updates are there, right? And then of course, just the whole, are we really ready for this thing? I mean, as we were heading into that month and You know, Richard, I know was wondering like, are they actually just going to extend this? you know? Yeah. And they didn't ever say that and, you know, the year almost not a year, but, you know, nine months, whatever it's been has gone by No one's really talked about it and u clearly have gotten, I don't know if they use certain metrics or however they decideed to do this, but They just quietly know made a little change. Made a little change. I never said anything, ' I guess they don't want tona necessarily encourage it either. but yeah, I mean, obviously they want people I wness eleven. But it's also about paying for tech support, right? Like that Microsoft has to maintain people's skilled in tech support for ten for longer Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I mean, you know, if you're an individual, I don't know how many people going directly to Microsoft for support. that typically is the responsibility of the PC maker and by this point, they're off the hook anyway. You know, I suppose you could they must offer paid incident whatever, but I assume most of this is Most people just don't bother. I do find it interesting that You can you could right now enroll and it would still would be free and it would just work through, you know, the new time period. you don't have to have done it already. If if for some reason, you have a Windows ten PC you haven't opened up in a while. you can throw that thing together and it could be supported through next October. The numbers must work for them that it's enough have moved like and the ones that haven't moved It's enough difficulty that you're just like, ah, keep supporting them I would like to insert a conspiracy theory into the middle of all these facts because what the heck. I wonder, of course, what this has to do with Windows twelve if that ever occurs. that does this say anything about the timing for some next major release of Windows, which may or may not be called Windows twelve? Like is this that thing that twenty six H one becomes Is it going to happen next year this year, you know,, is it done to, you know, line this up so that By the time Windows ten is truly not supported, at least for consumers, there are still two major versions of Windows that are out there. maybe You can make an argument for that that by twenty they might have beteta bits flowing around by twenty seven That sounds like a new cereal, maybe. Beta bits. Beta bits Yeah. It's the type you get in a bag like that's unmarked, but it looks like alphabets. And the shapes they're not really letters. They're like mathematical symbols or Like is that an umlot? What is that? it's the cereal you can make cartoon swears with You just playing with your serl and then you start laughing to yourself. a crazy person. Anyway, whatever. So this is good news. I mean,, you know, there's no way around that.'s good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good's good It's good. And then in the insider program, only one major development, I guess. They announced, as they've been doing, I kind of don't like this. I guess there are different ways to do this, but they announce a bunch of new builds all at once, now in the same post. and then they don't really say much about what's in them in that post. So you have to go to all these sub posts to kind of figure out what it is. I know there's a lot of overlap, and I guess I sort of understand it. It just makes the whole thing rather tedious. But the two main things that came out of this set of updates that date back to Last Whery whereere am I? Is it Friday? Yeahah, Friday is one, they're making this change, which I actually kind of wondered about because and you know, I'd been updating the book. I did an episode of Hands on Windows about this. If you have the new Taskbar experience and you go into Taskbar settings, they didn't change the like the name of the feature that has been in Windows eleven for a while, but didn never work correctly. So if you scroll down to the bottom of tasks is at the bottom, actually not the bottom, wherever it is in task bar behaviors, it is the bottom. There is an option called showh smallmaller Taskbar buttons whichich is accurate until now Because if you turn if you turn this on or if you just made it like always like always on, the task bar buttons would get smaller, but the task bar stayed the bigger size. and it's like guys, what K of so What's the point? I know. But in this new version of the task bar, they didn't change the option name, but if you actually turn that to always now or in the new version, if you have it, it actually does make the task bar smaller And I just thought that was kind of weird because it's not just the task bar. So one of the changes that's in the set of insider bills is they've changed the language of that. So in other words, instead of it being the old option, it actually has a new name where it's more accurately says, let me see if I can find this thing. because I don't have this build yet or I don't have this feature enabled yet. but I think it just says it doesn't matter what it says. It's just more accurate. It B basically it says, it's just task bar size. It's like small, large, you know, or automatic or whatever. So good, that's good. But the other change is Microsoft this past it was probably May announced and then started implementing a new Windows Inider channel system, right? So instead of having dev beteta Canary and release preview. they now have experimental and then one hundred and eighteen other subchannels as part of you know, a simpler insideer program. But the weirdness of this and this is something that's really bit me a lot because again, you know, I'm doing these recordings for hands on windows, I'm writing the book or whatever. I want to see these new features. So you bring up either a new computer or reset a computer You have to until yesterday, basically, you had to go into settings, say, yes, I want to be part of the inside of herom. I want to be part of the deev, you know, channel You have to booot the computer. You have to stall the latest, you know, dev buildt. Then you opt into the new system and then you can go into experiment, whatever it is. It's like this multi step program. But they're actually changing that now so that now this is the default Windows Windows insider interface inside, um setting So you will in fact see experimental in beta and not the old stuff. So that's good. So I mean that's good. I'm glad that actually came together pretty quick. so that's kind of nice Oh there we go. Yeah And then as far as the rest of those builds, God help you all. I have no idea. This I don't think there's much. I literally looked through every one of them. I was like, nope. Nope. Oh o, no, nope, not there either. Okay. Yeah, it's not a lot going on. I don't know why Yeah I'm kind of surprised. Maybe we're not at the end of the Windows segment or anything, but I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention the extension of Microsoft support for Windows ten for another year I mentioned that at the top of the show. Oh there it is quietly extensive. It so quiet. I didn't hear it. I'm sorry. Yeah. We've Trump it, but Microsoft didn't want it. They don't yeah, they don't They didn't say it. They don't seem to be super interested in talking about it whichich, you know, I guess I should came with. Is it that they don't want people to do it you think? or this that they u I don't think they want to call attention to it. I like when they kind of just quietly do the right thing. You know, there was a long period of time. and I mean, like eight years, something, or maybe longer where you could bring in your old Windows seven Vista, whatever product key And it would activate eight and then ten and it worked like forever And I think I might have even worked on a lot They often announnce deadlines on that. and I don't know if they ever turned it off. I wonder if we could find key if we could still. No they actually, they did eventually turn it off, but it took them many years and the original promise was one year And it was nice. There was no reason to turn it off. like it did nothing bad for them other than retire old brands of windows, which is really not a bad thing is right thing Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we can pause briefly in this fabulous program. to mention our fine sponsor For this segment of Windows Weekly, Z scale. 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We're confident that Zkill is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements. Thank you, Sib With Z scaler zero Trust plus AI, you could safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity Across the business There's Zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity li. You can learn more if you go to the website Zcaler d. com slash Security, that Z scaler Come slash security. we thank you so much For support in Windows Weekly. uort us too when you go to that address, so make sure you do, Z scaler Slash security Now let's talk hardware Yeah. we should started bad week for Apple. I know. it' a bad bad week for everybody, really. You know, we have an AI segment. mayaybe we need like a component crisis segment. like can if you guys we were all alive during the hostage crisis with Iran. America like D six twenty seven you know Yeah, exactly They are handed No. it is the AI me cris I guess in some ways kind of go hand in hand. I have had listeners asking me about are you going to do a show about the hardware cris? I'm like, what am I going to say? I know. . All were gonna to do is just complain every week about how much more expensive everything is, you know Um And it's no to go down ever. Do you think? I mean, this is this pr a debate, right? Yeah, I don't know. That's the worry. I do feel like if they go down, they'll plateau higher than they were before. if that makes sense. you know, But I but again, we don't know when is going to end. We don't know, we don't know, you know. You do have the problem that what are we at three companies that make ninety plus percent of all the memory? Yeah, Micron, SK Heinex and Samsung. Yeah. Right So That's pretty collusive at some point. Well, and there's a lawsuit actually in California against them. for price fixing. They're not building new fabs. Oh, I guess Micron supposed they can't aroundround in New York. Well Yeah, So Micron, I guess some of those companies could, but But here's the thing, why you know Um There's really no incentive for them to do that when you think about it. They're charging incredibly high prices. These things cost billions and billions of dollars to make. They take years and years to make. Yeah. And by hundred get this thing New York State fab for Micron aud. Yeah. if you once you get this thing done U there's a pretty good chance you can't charge the prices you were charging when you started building the thing, which is a big problem You might have this all this capacity that never goes used, there you go. That's a huge problem And there's only so much demand for Well, you know we haven't reached the, you know, the end of it, but there make there is sell every there is a make, I think. Right at the price they have. So if it somehow made sense you could instantly spin a thing up and keep charging that price, they would do it. It's not going to solve our problem because they're not going to sell that stuff to PC makers or device makers. They're going to sell it to AI companies. Well, and even it's four years away, right? Like whatever it's going to happen That's what all the companies are saying. It's like twenty thirty before there's even a chance of this Yeah,. Yeah, this is a big this is this is not a, you know, why doesn't Apple just make iPhones in the United States? It's like you use the word justust in there and I gott to say that that really lot of conversation. Yeah, you this just betrays a lack of understanding of how these things work. So there's no Yeah, there's no solving it. And past couple maybe two weeks ago, whenever it was, we were talking, you know about this So as we will for a lot this year. We'll talk about it for Xbox later, but you know companies that are better positioned to kind of withstand this, so to speak, are now starting to fall as well and Apple being the biggest one. So I did wake up one morning. I actually noticed this as it was happening. I don't know why I did this, but I went to the Apple store and said we're down right now. We'll back in a little while and I was like, o that's not that's not. They don't have anything coming out now. This is not a new product and I would say except for iPhones, they basically raise the price in all of their You know, their major So Some of these are gigantic. increases depending on what know in Apple, I don't remember exact prices and like things like Apple TV, but like Apple TV four K, whatever the latest one is went from, you know, two hundred to three hundred fifty or something. likeike it's like some of these like jumps are pretty big. I think about that is I doubt they're making new Apple TV's I doubt that this is passing along the costs of making new applees. Yeah, right And my product. I got that. byy the way, it was one fifty to two hundred fifty, not what I al said. But yeah, these things all went up pretty That's a cost go upice. That' It's a big. I had bought an iPad pro back in I guess May and that That and every other iPad Pro is two hundred dollars more per configuration, you know, than it was at the time Boy did I save a lot of money to raise that a price They didn't raise the price on the iPad on the iPhone because they fig concerned about the i cry So they offset the cost by raising the price on the other products more. Yeah. And they will raise the price on the new ones those cost that much moreoney. Of course. iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods. But now remember the AirPods don't have RAM or hard drives. The iPod The iPad has RAM and SSDs As does the iPhone Yes. Yeahah, I figured they're going to do let's see, No, it was the watch. The watch has Ram but no storage anyyway. the watch phone and AirPods did not go up. That's the only product Okay. But I bet they all go up in September, right? I think this is reasonable to expect. So So here we are. this is the world. I mean, you know, we have these smaller companies in the PC space like Microsoft, you know, not a big PC maker. We have big players, HP Lenovo, etcetera, Apple, you know. And yeah, we've reached the point of There there there's no one immune at this point and that's bad for everybody. And we've already talked about how bad you know, the surface price increases were this year. They just, you know, announced those new products. And we're just going to see this everywere. I talk about this isues laptop, you know, this is a couple hundred bucks more expensive than it was when, you know, between the time they shipped it to me and the time I wrote about it, the price of that went up. I mean, this the world is crazy Um So there's that. So Apple, I think Apple as the canaryian in this particular ch minine maybe what of the opposite of canari is because they were last, but ye. yeah. I don't know. Yeah, the guy who called in sick because he wanted to watch TV. I don't know, whatever they are. You know, there you go. So there's no escaping this is the bad news And then Microso deals for manufacturing now also have to raise prices. So Yeah, what a world. You know, like big big is big tech is not just terrible to everyone else, They're terrible to themselves. you know. they Apple doesn't have the ability to go to whatever supplier and say, you know, you got to give us some of this. say No we don't. We have someone paying a lot more than you over here. sorry. It's incredible. So that's the world, you know,'s Th these things are businesses. I mean, you know, why doesn't Apple just suck it up you know save us from that cost increase as customers because Apple is a company, not a charity. and despite their marketing They're really in this to make money. so sorry, you know that's that's the world. you don't like it, you could buy somebody else's product. isn't raising prices. That's the quest. Yeah, exactly, noobbody. You're stuck. so that's that I don't remember the timering anymore, but sometime in the past month or so Microsoft announced the new Qualcom Snapdrag and X two based sururface laptop and Surface Pros, right? And there are multiple models of each U One of the things they had said at the announcement was that they were going to start they would sell in the future. configurations with eight gigs RIM to did that All these things started at sixteen. These are C pilot plus PCs in the same way that micro the base for a co pilot plus BC? Yeah, it is. Yeah So Microsoft quietly extended Windows ten ESU by a year and they also quietly released those eight gig configurations without telling anybody. So if you go to configure one of these, you will in fact be able to buy an eight gig version of the It's probably the smaller of each like the twelve inch surface probe because there was a thirteen inch and then the thirteen inch surface laptop whereas there's also a thirteen point five and a fifteen inch model there They start at eight hundred and fifty and nine hundred and fifty dollars respectively They announced those things before or they didn't announce them, I'm sorry. They added those things to their website to buy before Apple announced that they were raising prices. So at that time it was like, well, the MacBook No, also a gigs a ram started at six hundred dollars. U And it was like, you know, but now those are a little more expensive. I think the base price is probably, I assume, it's six dollars ninet n cents or whatever. it's a little closer. The I mean the Microsoft ones are still more expensive. they have to be. But the hope here is that the work that Microsoft and Apple respectively are doing to their platforms this year to make these systems more efficient and more resource friendly will make that experience better I wouldn't touch an eight gig PC, you know, with your hands.. I don't It seems like an unwise solution to the problem. mean toy an extended warranty on your existing machine and stretch out another year or two We talked about this last week, I think, but this is compounded by the fact that all of these computers basically, the RAamsy of the sodered are integrated into the SOC. and there is no way to upgrade this later. And that's a huge problem because you can make a compelling case for saving money today and getting less storage and RAM than you might want with the understanding that in the future, there'll be a sale someday or whatever it is prices actually come down, whatever. You'll be able to upgrade that it's okay. It's not ideal, but it's not a thing. for the vast majority of PCs. I think've only for all the I don't know how many I have review so far this year, but usually it's like twenty to twenty five in a year. I've only seen one computer with upgradeable RAM myself, which know is anecdotal, but there just aren't that many of them. No Um The drive for the Ultrabook for maximum thinness and so forth drove us to solder on components. Yeah, ye. the was so we were so busy copying Apple. We sort of never thought about like how we might better differentiate Yeahah, what the outcome might be, etcetera.. So the market also accepted it too and said, oh, I can't change the rM. whatever. I never changed the rAM It's so troubling. And this too is a thing. It's there will be exceptions to this. of course there are some laptop models.. possible the laptop I'm using right now might be the one. I can't remember which one of This is a thinkti P one whichich I think has I think they're called cod DMs, or there's a new name for it, but they're kind of a smaller, thinner, you know, lighter dim kind of card. So there are some, but this is very uncommon in the portable space for sure. gig like Surface Pro, eight gig Surface laptop, not super interesting to me U, but You can at least configure those devices with more RAM and more storage at purchase time They'll pay a lot for it. I mean the eight hundred and fifty dollars twelve inch sururface Pro goes from eight hundred forty nine cents to ten forty nine cents. so it's a two hundred dollarars price increase just to get sixteen gigs a RAM, whichich honestly for sururface, I would to say it's pretty good. L that's actually not too bad, but it's still real money. I mean it's kind of tough You know, same thing on the surface laptop. It's nine forty nine to eleven forty nine. So you know, you have these options. You could spend over three grand on a surface and you could spend I think over ten grand on a MacBook proro right now if you wanted to. God another the thing is I'm not going to spend that kind of money, but I would love a Mac studio that had enough RAM that I could run local models because it's very good to local models. They don't even sell them. Yeah. So that little top m is now ninety six gigs. They can't Yeah. I don't I'm not the Apple Rumomor guy, but I do read up on this stuff and I don't remember a day I don't remember anything like anything exact, but I know that is coming and it might that might be a twenty twenty eight thing, but eventually You know, maybe it's like an M seven by that point, whatever the schedule is, but the plan is to have that kind of thing in the future, but it's not going to happen this year. I mean, you're not going to see that anytime soon. And which must be graping apple a little because they have this hardware that's really well suited to it. They just can't get the RAM You have to wonder if there's anything that can be done with Apple Silicon to make this work better with, you know, less RAM, which is the big thing. you know, this the Gemini Nano model I don't know. I don't know. Uh Okay, so there's that. And then of course, you know, when you hear this, you're like, well Microsoft has sold these sururface Go, sururface laptop, Go, these low end computers. Now, as these were coming out just a few years back, several years back, whatever it might be, they were using the Inquivent whatever the names are, you know, in modern days of what we used to call pentium or Celeron. Intel has a wildcat chip set coming out that is the modern version of that's up. So it' be pretty good, you know I mean, ArM announced Qualcum rather announced the Snapdragon C, et cetera. But apparently Microsoft has discontinued those lefto. So they hadn't been refreshed in a long time. But Zack Boden over at Windows Central says that they've ended production. There are no versions in the pipeline. They weren't co pilot PC compliant. Yeah. and also, you know, surface specifically consolidating brands, right? They want to have fewer computers And this is a lot like the Insider program. So it's primarily Surface laptop and Surface Pro, but there are three different versions of laptop and two different versions of Pro. and there are multiple versions of both because they come with Intel and quversions. So it's actually it's still kind of complicated. So I think Microsoft's official answer, if they have addressed this be to say we don't need those anymore Because what we have now is the eight gig configurations of serervice laptop and Pro. Yeah An eight gig configuration of either of those products with a call C Snapdragon C, I would be vaguely curious about, but they're they maybe they're not ready. you know that's not what they're offering. So the eight hundred fifty nine hundred fifty price is a Snapdragon X two plus. Actually it might be an X one plus. Let me just Let me look, Yeah, excuse me. I'm sorry. it's actually lastast year's plus. It's not even the X two plus. it's the X plus from last year Sounds terrible. It's not. and that's in fact, we'll talk about that in one moment. The my experience last year buying what at the time was a six hundred dollars snapdragon X, like the very basest version of that ship on a fifteen inch HP laptop is wonderful. That computer iss still fantastic today. This year you kind of step up to an X two plus. and you know, I just reviewed in I think it's an I ideDa pad Slim five X, which is at eight hundred and fifty bucks. fantastic. you know So those low end chips are actually very good. I would be more willing to accept a low end snapdragon than an intntel chip any day. I mean, there's no doubt about that. I don't know if a Snapdragon C will be cheaper or maybe they went with the last year chip because that actually is cheaper. I don't know. I mean, it's Microsoft, who can say, but maybe they got a good deal in them. They went to a yard sale, they were bunch of them in a basket. I don't know M that's what they're doing. So that's a thing. But you know, we'll see if this evolves. I don't know. And then I'm just mentioning this because I just reviewed it. I don't I don't usually call out individual reviews, but I have now had one experience with that highest end. Snapdragon X two elite extxtreme chip. and this is the one where they integrate the RAM into the SOC. It's not just, you know soldered on. it's like you know dramatically faster access to RAM, right whichich I believe is probably a bigger deal than the chip itself, honestly. And for the reason I just sort of stated, which is that My experience over these past three years now with various levels of X OG X, you know, X, X plus. x extreme and the next two plus extreme and nowreme sorry, x. two plus x to elite and now x ellite extreme is that Unless you're doing something insane, which I have never been able to figure out what that could be on an arm computer They just all kind of work really well, you know If somehow this thing magically played triple of games and it just worked, I guess you could make that case. There's no version of a test that makes sense to me where I could demonstrate that running some local AI task, whatever it might be Um doubling the resolution of an image in photos or, you know, your pick your little t whatever it is that where I can say, Yep, no, this thing is like twenty five, fifty percent, whatever number faster. I don't see that. I don't know what to say about this. This thing is wonderful. It's a little expensive 's probably more future proof and a lot of it has to do with, I think with the speed of the rim, honestly and the amounts because these things come well started with forty eight gigs per RM, which is a curious amount. I think we can all agree, but now they have a twenty four g gig configuration as well to kind of address the price increases. I someday there will be a thing. I lookook, people can run benchmarks. I get all that stuff. You can I don't care about that stuff. I just use the thing. and I got toa tell you, I build quality notwithstanding, you go from a X two plus to an X two you know, lead extreme and you're doing the same thing. whatever it is, Visual Studio, compiling, running an app, I don't use Photoshop, but affinity, you know, doing whatever with graphics, editing video, whatever it is It works great on both. and I don't know what to tell you, like it's just not that different the ramp matters more, you know Which is again a problem right now because RAM is stupid expensive. I'm looking at specking a machine out and it doesn't even tell me how much RAM I get in it at the, um, oh, at the Aers Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it's twenty four or for eight. It's twenty four or forty eight. And yeah if you get the X two, I think it comes with forty eight. like you don't really have a choice So maybe we should now have a serious conversation about how much RAM you really need Well, this what bothers me out of RAamM is more Yeah, so well we've always said that. But now you can't get more. No, no. So I still believe that look for anyone listening to this show And you know, it's sixteen or thirty two or more. I mean, no doubt about it The thing is when Apple announces something like a MacBook Neo and everyone's like, o my god, I can't believe it's only five hundred bucks or whatever the price. like this is like I don't mean to demean it in this way, but this is what Chromebooks are for. Like a Chromebook is not typically used all day long every day, although some people do. as a computer, it's a secondary device. It's like you're mostly on your phone, but sometimes you need the big screen and the keyboard and all that kind of stuff And that to me is what the MacBook No is. that to me is what any eight gigabyte machine is today. That's not all day long every day. You sending a kid off to school For four years, start with an eight gig laptop is a punishment That is not right. But that's the neo. A lot of people don. I know and that's why I don't recommend that because people maybe, you think. No, not for any amount of time because it's just a future proof issue. If there was some way to configure it was sixteen. You know, if that was just an option which it will be right next year or whatever twelve. But okay, that's fine. That's a step up. You know, whatever it might be. I mean, there's always like these not always there's often these weird amounts. likeike when I bought my sururface laptop and again this year Um, you know, it's like sixteen it's not sixteen, thirty two, sixty four. It's like sixteen twenty four you're like, what? You know, thirty two, forty eight, sixty four, right? So's like, okay. Yeahah. So you get these half steps, right And that's fine. anything is better than eight. You know, nine would be better than eight, but whatever Um Anything is better than that. And if your goal is to actually use this thing all day Use the computer, not just have the computer and use it sometime, but use eight gig is not enough This is what I liked about Copilot pllus PC. It established an acceptable baseline sixteen gigs or AM, two hundred and fifty six gigs of storage, which that actually is kind of low. And then Apple did the same thing later that year when they came up the new generation of Maxs later that year. sixteen became the baseline And that's the right number, you know, except now excuse me, I'm sorry, my throat is. Dry here. You needs some you need some ram. he's low on ram. N low ram. in a throat. Yep. n two nanometer water. Yeah So but I mean, it depends on what you obviously there are look, some people do need More This is the fact, right? Some people do. and they know who they are. mayay they're gamers, maybe they're engineers, scientists, programmers, whatever. Most people though, over buy and they do it because of a just in case kind of a situation, right? It's like you never know. you said the words future. Yeah. But But to me that's the happy medium. I mean, because you Laving out the fact that you cannot upgrade. Sorry, I don't know what's going on here. It's you know, that's something you do have to think about. so fourour years in high school, eight to twelve, would that make the difference? Yeah, maybe Sorry, I got I gota figure this out J take a break takeake a break and we'll come back with more in just a minute. Sorry. Paul coughing. I know, I don't know what's going on there. That' sorry. It's relentless. I'm gonna do an ad. That's what I'm gonna do. That's why the ads are here to actually separate the u u you know, give you guys a break. In other words, they used to say that the, uh The newspaper, news stories were just there to separate the ads. And I think that's still true to some extent. Our show today, not true. No You you matter Paul, you matter to me. Our show today brought to you by Cohesity. This is a new sponsor and I'm really excited about them. Uh I'm sure in your back of your mind, you're thinking, well I know that it's inevitable at some point we're going to suffer a cyber attack, but I don't want to think about it right now. But if you're a business leader If you're a security leader, It's probably best not to put that us you know, off, but to think about what happens If you get attacked after a major cyber attack, I would suggest that recovering everything right now isn't always the fastest path back to business Cohesive, he would say the immediate priority is restoring a trusted operating core So the minimum systems dat, the minimum processes that you need to keep the critical, the mission critical operations running Do that first. That's why cohesity champions What they call the MVC, the minimum viable company I love this idea. It's a framework for defining protecting covering what matters most first. If you scramble to get it all back up and running, it could be a long time. Look at Jaguar Land Rover more than a month. More than a month That's why it's so important to focus on the minimum viable company. 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Have you thought about this? I'll tell you what, you can learn more When you go to cohesity. com slash resilience. coohesity, resilience everywhere I really like this. I think this is really an important thing to kind of consider What's the most important core of things you can get going? Inhesity help you do that? cohesity. com Sash Resilience We've got Paul's minimal viable voice back. I I think the so by the way, we're having a crazy heat wave thing here in the East coast. Its be hundred degrees tomorrow. It's ninety six right now. Yikes That. But so you know, the AC iss cranking. But I also I usually keep a couple of windows cracked, like in the bedroom, for example. I actually close those to. I wonder if it's not just like AC like It drives out here. M well be. Yeah, sure Anway. anything anything that keep Tell me I will I will make up ad if you need it. You just tell me when you need it I think anything that makes me speak less is fine. So it's all good. Anyway. Yeah, so look, just to kind of wrap up the whole component crisis thing, we're screwed. Okay. so we do have some AI stuff this week. You know, we might as well benefit from the reason for our component crisis. Remember that memory? you can't buy. I understand the sentence you just wrotad. It's like so the first story is kind of bizarre in a way. so HP, right, the world's second biggest maker of PCs is partnering with Op AI and U. the reason you're having problems selling PCs is going to somehow be the thing that helps you sell More pieces. So here's the thing. So this is a tough one. I love HP. They make great products. I'm not really dumping on them or anything like that. but HP, like Linova does the same thing. you know they depending on the type of PC you buy, there's going to be like the stuff bundled on there. Some of it's going to be from third party, some of it's going to be from HP Some of it's going to be useful and some of it is not. And if it's a consumer PC, there's going to be more of that is not stuff, right? crapware as we call it. One of the things both these companies are doing, whichve this kind of thing has always bothered me and it bothers me more, I think, with AI is they have AI chat bots of their own that use whatever on the back end. It doesn't matter who cares. Nobody wants another chat bot and I just I will never understand this. I just don't quite get this. Their partnership with openp AI isn't just about making that chat bot better. In fact, we're not entirely sure exactly what it is, what they're doing because they can't really be specific y. This is something that's going to kind of evolve over time. But they are looking to provide AI based experience, of course this is their words, store, partner chat and voice experiences So this is something where customers and partners can get answers more quickly, complete whatever workflows, you know, et cera, et cetera And then internally to kind of help with, you know, customer service and whatever else. And they've been evaluating the open AI frontier model since I think February, if I remember correctly super complimentary about it, which is a little whatever. but We'll see. They did also hint Yes. PC sales are down They're probably going to do some layoffs. But if you call them AI layoffs, then your product stock price goes up. Yeah, I didn't read this, but I think it was Ford that had laid off a bunch of people months ago blamed AI and then back. Like yep, justust kidding. We needed this guys back U I think we're going to see some of that wrrong came' do it in the wrong order. like You get the automation working, show that people are actually redundant because they're not doing anymore, and then you lay them off. J lay them off and then we'll figure out the AI thing Yeah. this is not that's that's that's bad leadership. That's bad decision making. It's stupid. Yeah I mean, thes side is you get a quarter showing, lookook, AI worked, ourur incomes are up because we laid a bunch of people off and it reduced our costs Then the next quarter when nothing works and your customers are all pissed. Yeah, you have to get them back I mean Obviously, HP is not talking about layoffs right now, but you know we'll see where that goes. But the difference between HP and the other two big companies in the top three of the PC market, Dell and Lenovo is that Dell and Lenovo both still have their server and now what we would call cloud data center business. HP remembers split off There's HP, as we're calling it, which is computers and printers. and then there's HPE, HP Enterprise, which does that other half. Datas. Yeah. It's another other half. it's like seven five percent Okay, but they they' their other thing. So today, what we're seeing on in the industry, excepter with HP is that Dell and Lenovo are growing very quickly month or quarter over quarter because they have this growing data center business, or two businesses, right? And HP does not have that HP like Lenovo also sell and no, not like Dll actually, mostly like Lenovo, also sells other devices. and there's the obvious devices, keyboards mice, et cetera, cameras, but also just different things. know, they sell all kinds of peripherals and sort of smart devices. HP or Lenovo rather has a big business, you know, Android tablets smart devices of all kinds and they do all that kind of stuff. So HP kind of hints that they're working on what they call a suite of agenic AI devices that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, increasing you play efficiency And so these things apparently going to require what they call again. In their words, always on inference And hardware optimized for running Agenic AI workloads twenty four seven Um HP. I feel like has kind of gone away from this little Lenovo is much bigger in this space right now, but for many years was doing lots of experimental PCs, but also other devices that you kind of use around PCs where maybe you have this scanner that you know, you would use in a professional environment to you know for scanning, obviously or whatever line printing and whatever different things. But it seems like maybe given the downturn in PCs that might persist for some years, they're trying to expand where they can, right, which is not into servers or the data center like Dell and Lenova can do, but rather in this new direction. So maybe there's something here that I'm not privy to because honestly it's pretty vague, but it is kind of curious. It's like we've embraced the company that's putting us out of business Good luck with that? Well I mean you want to do a project to optimize your firm that's not doing well for various reasons. Hopefully you do it in appropriate way where when it has success, then you make changes to optimize. But you might as well go with the so called expert so Yes. Yeah, I mean I mean, how many years is open AI got experience helping enterprises automate with their tools? T Right. And is it really experience or is it Yeahah, I don't know. I don't know, lookook, maybe this is going to be the greatest thing in the world. I find it curious. No, I mean, they're pretty, you know, the origins of that company are a responsible group of engineers and hopefully responsible engineers pilot this project and give us real results Yeah, I mean the people I know there and the people I meet there who kind of are behind the scenes and work on the hardware, fantastic. I mean, they really do make great computers, but they're also constrained by the world as it is like everyone else. so you know we'll see what that looks like. K kind of interesting. U I had to look this one up because I have to say I wasn't sure. you know, Anthropic announced a new version of their what they call the clloud Sonnet model, version five And at first I was like, wait a minute. I'm like, is this something I could run locally? Is this is is like an SLM? you know And it's not. it's a cloud model. It's you, all the big players have their biggest, you know, what they now call frontier models, but they also have these more efficient models that are faster less expensive, et ccer. And then of course, they have the SLMs and in some cases they'll have open source versions like gamma and so forth Um This isn't, you know, so it is a cloud model. basically what this thing is is a is something we're starting to see a lot where These companies realize that their own cost overruns, which involved just requiring massive amounts of infrastructure to get anything done are a huge problem and are a big blocker to profitability. and they're trying to make now more efficient models across the board. So they still offer those the big heavy models, like in their case, Opus four point eight latest version. But then they have this thing, which when you look at the scores where they compare them and compare to the predecessor, this thing is very, very close in almost all categories to the big heavy expensive model, but it's dramatically less expensive and faster. Yeahah.. And this is I think this is this is going to be part of that, you know, I always call it orchestration because I'm not sure how else to describe this, but You're going to have this collection models. someome of them going be very focused on whatever particular task or workflow, whatever it is ome of that going to be more general and humgous, You know, figuring out which one to use and which time is important And, um You know, they're starting to do smart the falls for people So they don't overspend because they're starting to charge, you know, individuals for this stuff now too, which is important. And you know, you could override that if you like, look, I want the expensive one. I know what I'm doing. You have to go do that manually, but you can do it. So this is just interesting as always whether people really know one way or the other. I often ask them like, why was that one better than that one? Like what's your metric? What are you actually testing Well, right. And a lot of people would say, I just want the best one. It's the reason I bought a three thousand dollars computer. You know, like I just, you know, just the g was running in the cloud anyway. You could have run it on a That's right. pack a gun with wings. Yeah, right. Did we talk about Mythos being available again? No, we did not. So yeah, I didn't follow the exact trajectory of this, but it probably had been Mostly unavail,' call it for the better part of a month, I think it was or two weeks or two weeks. Yeah It was shut down. feels like back on the twenty seventh. Yeah, it felt like an eternity The world changed while it was gone and suddenly China is on top. Yeah, rightight? Yeah. Right, exxactly. It craz to be Yeah. I'm looking right now to see I still don't have Fable back, but it'sed fable was supposed to be today. Yeah. o Yeah, we talked about the reason this is bad and it's to me, it's really about the companies, especially, but governments too, right? They're using this to look for vulnerabilities in their most critical software Yeah and then fix that stuff. this whatever we can go back and forth and we always will, but pros and cons of AI in this case, and there's a lot of argument to be made. but this is the clearest best, you know, most defensible use of AI. mayaybe that there is. like it's great. I hope someday we hear what went on for these two weeks. Yeah like I thought it would be the weekend Right They shut it down on the Friday by Monday, be back. I'm kind of stunned. It was two weeks. Did nobody clue in you were impairing all the white hats trying to make the system safer? I don't know why. I mean, this is a government thing and we don't exactly have a functioning government. so it's, you know, no it's it's a problemly to the citizenship test because somebody it you a huge own goal this week Be what happened is a lot of people said, o And by the way, not just people in the US., but people around the world. if the government can just block an AI Exactly randomly for no apparent reason and without That's right. explaining. Yeah, we better not be dependent on A mmeris AI move. We were already in we're already in a period where Europe, especially, but the world has an understanding that we need to be pend of the United States because we cannot trust this country to do the right thing for us. Why off course you can't Um, and this is this drove that home very nicely. I mean, this is, you know This is this is why It's not just access to the best AI chips, it's national security I mean, I just look at myself. So the first thing I did is I said, well, what else can I becauseuse I was in the middle of a fable I know it was going this is going to end with the word deepsak isn't it? You're like Well, Deepsak's actually really good V Th then there's GLM from Z. AI, which is about a tenth of the cost and is very good. And then there are there's Quin, there's a number of Chinese, but these are all Chinese models. Yeah, R. There are some I can run locally and that like. look, this is like anything else. We all have opinions about China in this case and whatever Let me tell you the first time you get into a a Chinese electric vehicle like I do in Mexico And you're like, I'm sorry, didid the future happen? And no one told me. Yeah. It's astonishing like how good these things are and how inexpensive they are. To extend that analogy, this is if the American president decided, you know, let's ban American cars. R? Right And all of a sudden everybody discovered how good the Chinese EV's were Yeah. And then three weeks later, he says, Yeah never mind, let's not ban him, but it's too late body know. Yeah. Everybody now knows So and by the way, anthropics always already said when Fable comes back, Fable and mythos apparently will be available to the public today. But when they come back with massive restrictions, they even said, in some cases, when you're coding with Fable, it will drop back to Ous four point eight. So prepare, You know, the clock has started in within minutes, you're gonna to hear people going, They nerfed it. It's no good anymore. It's crippled. They can't Well, it could never live up to what our imaginations thought it was anyway. Right? Yeah Well that's funny that's my back of the book topic. It's like we're already we're nostalgic now over something that happened three weeks ago. You know, Remember the good old recly when AI was open to everybody, we just go, you know, yeah, it's crazy. I actually been it was an eye opener and I've been very happy with running a local model for a lot of my work, I still use Cawud for hard de coding But I don't have to use it for everything. and I think It's just risky. It's bad for anthropic An anthropics sort of brought this on themselves by scaring everybody Yeah, you know, you don't want to scare President Trump because he has a lot of power And you scare him, he's gonna he might react rather reactionary. Yeah I haven't noticed that, but I'. It's like stepping on a cat's tail, you know? It's like ye like where did that come from? you know? Yeah. So anyway, it it's yeah, we'll talk about it a lot coming up on intelligent machines, but it's I think between now and the time you do, it will probably change, right? In other words those models will probably arrive and then we'll see may already start getting stories from people like, yeah, they screwed this thing up, you know We'll say We'll see what happens, by It is crazy. I logically any anyone who knows even a little bit about this stuff, all of us certainly and people listening whatever, you know, can look at the world the way it is and understand that as AI improves, local AI improves, you know, that the gap between the two is probably going to shrink, that at some point we get to that what I think of as like the good enough scenario, whatever. talk idedally you have a system that's orchestrating the movement between those two plateaus or whatever so that as if you need it, you know, it's like the CPU boost thing they've just added to Windows, like for one second, you got to get the full power and go right back down so you don't scrip your battery life in this case, you know, we're going to do with AI. but You know, a lot of the early third parties maybe fourth part, I don't know how you' going talk about this, but like you have browser makers is a typical example, companies you've never heard of that are making these little AI things, you know. And when you use something like you know I'm not calling these companies out, I don't really use this stuff, but you know brave whatever might put AI in their product or Firefox is doing this stuff Your initial reaction to this If you actually use it is like, you know it's like, okay, it's doing the thing, but it's not very good. It's like a child's drawing compared to our Leonato Da Vinci thing or whatever. But those things, you know, but now two weeks have gone by and they're getting a lot better. So sometime last year, Proton, for example, released Lumo two point zero This is not a local A I thing. this is actually Coud based AI, but it's, you know, proton. so it's privy first, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a good example of a thing where, you know, I tried it out and I was like,, okay, you know, it's doing the thing, it's doing the chatbot thing. It's okay you know, there's a free tier for this like there are for a lot of AIs and then there are these pay tars you get through whatever protons, subscriptions, et cetera. But they just released a major new version of this one and it has, you know, it has all the keywords, you know, memory, projects, right? what they're calling custom Lumomos. This is three years ago, we would have called this a oh my Godd, I almost I'm going to forget the term Remember Microsoft ye, custom GPTs? Remember? we called very briefly, we called them this remember right. I rememember those? These words yeah. Microsoft gave it to well, sold it to individuals through what was Copilot Pro briefly, and then they took it away and then they took Copilot Pro away too Um, you know, it's multim modal. it's uh, you know, it does all it does all the stuff. So um this, you know, I'd say this is a good example. you have to, you know, you you going to pay for it most likely. u some amounts. I mean it's less expensive than big AI or whatever Buts this is an example of something where it isn't a good place. does meet needs. Im I can't say most, I don't really know what all needs are, but and this is how this stuff is progressing. And so this is t this, by the way, European, they're tied into that EU sovereignty directive that they're working on there.' player in this space. so in this little tech space, right? So that's that's interesting to me. I'm this is again, in the sense that all AI is always getting better. I feel like the local AI is Yeah the Microsoft thing became Sout Right? They shut it all down, reorganize it. The Microsoft thing. That's their agent. and now yeah Google their agent. So this is their personal AI agent. the Yeah Yeah, that uses an individual like Leota said, Spark for Google. ye. Yeah. I use Hermes because I decided I didn't want any company. So the this is going to become more of an issue too is privacy. The companies now are snarfing up everything you send to it, everything in the prompt, all the copy, everything They're sending stuff that you send to someone else. They're just grabbing the bits as they fly by. I mean they're just repay. peopleeople are more concerned about this That's why, by the way Microsoft and Google are creating their versions of openen clloth. They don't want you to use something local. They want you to do everything on the cloud, right? That's better for them U So I'm using an open source one that it sits on my hard drive, all the memories on the hard drive. and what I really want to do is also use a local model because then nothing goes out of my network. Yeah, right. Unfortunately local models are quite not up to the but I think to get there. I mean they get they are They are going to get there. Yeah. I'm using one I think that I'm very, very happy with and it's all So ninety percent of what I do I'm not good at this kind of stuff, but the Sonnet five I mentioned earlier is a it's like a one million context window if that makes sense. I'm not really the language off. Okay. whatever, Nothing's a million anymore. million. Okay. I look at this and I think to myself Oh, context window. you're right.'s one million the contxt.. Yeah I'm just not good with these terms the This is the type of thing that not three months ago, but six, nine months ago was just the expensive models in the cloud, etcetera six months from now will be local. You know, no doubt about it. if it isn't already. I mean, so these lines are blurring. there is a There's local, there's cloud, but there's also like, you know, the big companies and then the little the mistrals, the protons, the, you know, whoever else Chinese companies, Wheverver you want to define these things There's such a mix of this stuff and there probably will be for the foreseeable future. And I really I don't keep hammering on this, but I really feel like Orchestrating between them is the key, you know, because that's why the agents important exactly. They just change so much that the to the brain. Harness being yet another awesome AI word that was invented two seconds ago, whichich drives me crazy. give horse. you I get, but you got the bridle, the harness. Yeah. and you're under the horse's butt and he's taking a dump No, I I get I get the relationship. I just don't, you know, but I mean, it's just but it's its like the Here's a way to say think of it. I gott to get a way to think of it Think of it as a robot with hands and eyes and feet. and then there's a brain. What you want is your own robot That's the harness or the rig or whatever. And the brain, you can put different models in. I don't want to say always use codex, always useonet. So I have a local model right now. this is the model I've been using. Somebody Larry, I think in our Dcord said, tryry Ornus. It's amazing It does everything. But what I've told Ornith is when you need to do code, don't do any coding. You're not smart enough Use a f. and it does And that's the that's why the harness the root when you said that to it did it go Oh You know It's so funny because you do answeromorphize think I't want to hurt its feeling. Or he's like you know what Leo, you're right I'm terrible. No, he doesn't care. It doesn't it says, yah, sure. notot a problem I've never once had it say You're hurting my feelings It doesn't have feelings. It's software. So you have to get over that a little bit, but but telling it to, you know, if you need to do something With vision, use Gemini. If you need to do something with coding, use Caud caveat that that determination is going to change, not maybe not day to day, but you know, as we go forward everyvery once in a while, you know, whatever the time frrame. All of a sudden, this thing is better for that thing. you know, whatever it is. So what I've been doing every week on Sunday night I said, go out, look at all the models. seeee what people are saying See what the benchmarks say And redo your delegation chart that's they'd have a list of things. if it's this, this, this is, redo it. It changes every week depending on what's the best that week Leo, you are describing want to be careful here, a mid nineteen nineties Mac And it has some terrible amount of RAM back then. I don't know what they had back then. Yeah You get Photoshop on that Mac. Yes. And you have to go into the settings for Photoshop and you tell it, this is how much RAM you can use. Exactly. That is a terrible system. Th those days? I do. I just off course they do. You know, like I said, ideally, like like instead of you, like he having to say it and then it' I don't does't automatically. Okay every Sunday night. Yeah yeah. All right, At some point I had to tell it once. Yeah. do this every Sunday night. It should just do this automatically and on the fly. It does now I don't want it to do too much of its own volition. I like the idea that I'm saying this would be a good thing to do. Okay. But you might not, But I mean most people do, right? I mean Well, this is the yeah, you're right. This is the most people do want that. you know And then you give up by doing that, you're going to let the frontier models do, you know, these big companies control it Well, get away from. No, of course. But I mean, ideally, what you're really doing is saying, look, these are the things you have accessible to you, whatever they are. This is the free thing, the local thing, the local source thing, whatever it is. In extreme you know situations, there's not you might have a paid subscription, whate it is. okay it's big tech, little tech, it doesn't matter. And only use that damn thing you know, maybe you have to be told or even asked or maybe you, you know, have to be part of the loop. whatever whatever your rules are. You know, you establish that and that's what is what you're doing Re really when you think about it, but Um, but this should work for everybody, you know, like I ideally this is so it will it will should absolly run from the, you know, I mean, I mean, you know Come on this is what I do. This is what you do. It's what we all do. We live on the edge cting edge, which it never bites me in the butt ever. I don't know about your situation, but I've never do it for you guys. That's what we do it for. I think it's mental illness is why we do it maybe But it's but a little, you know, but if my mental illness can help others, that's okay. Yeah Um, yeah, I yeah, I don't I don't know. This is I don't know. this is a weird world. I think Leo just mentioned using Gemini for image creation, which is in fact excellent. I don't always do this, but I often will throw the same prompt through Gemini and then it's Microsoft desesigner, but it's co pilot obviously. And not always, Um Most times, I would say I' prefer the Gemini version, but you know whatever, that doesn't matter. They have whatever version of Nano Banana they're on now. they have personalized intelligence, which is a way that you can opt in and connect Gemini to all of your whatever' Google apps, likein sorry, Gmail, Google, Clendar photos, et cetera. And what they've done is made this is US only unfortunately for right now A couple of months ago, they made These terms are so weird. it's because they they're not used consistently, but it's essentiallyally personalized intelligence in Gemini And if you use it with image creation, means you can go to your own Google photos And then it was only for Google AI plus Pro or Ultra subscriptions. Now it's free. Obviously, there are limits, but anyone you you have to sign in but you don't pay for it. And if you're in the U.S and you're over thirteen or eighteen, depending what you're trying to do Um It will use personal intelligence to connect Nano banana to Google Potos And u And then use that as sort of an inspiration, if you will, you know, and also a I'm going to call it a grounding in the sense that it knows like what you could look at your photos and be like, all right This guy takes a lot of photos of cocktails for some reason, takes a lot of photos of food on a plate in a restaurant for some reason. N lot pictures of his family, but whatever. Maybe he writek certain colors or whatever it is, but they get an idea like where you travel, like what you're doing, et cetera. So when you say very general things to it They cle it like make a picture of my favorite things, you know, with me in the middle It will pull that from Google Photos. It's kind of an interesting capability if you're a narcissist or no. But I mean, like maybe you want things to have a certain style or whatever. if you have a certain style, I do not. But it's kind of an interesting idea And at least it's free. you know, I assume within two seconds, it will eventually be international as well. But interesting stuff. And this is the gut check moment, you know, G to connect Gemini to your Gmail, you're going to connect it to your calendar, You going connect it to, you know, it already knows what you're watching on YouTube, I guess or Google does, but that's a that's a scary little moment. you ever see someone Grab the remote your TV and turn on your YouTube and you're like, o, H here we go. Like there are gonna be questions. You know I never leave my YouTube logged in for Yeahet use YouTube on the phone, I cast it on the TV, you cast it from the phone. Yeah, you're smart. But yeah, mine is just it's ridiculous, you know puts up with me anyyway, the point is but you can open this up to Gemini and have it have a little peek at your soul. And you could do that or not do that, I guess, but it is interesting that this is a thing So anyway, there's that. Notion continues to amaze me in some ways because I keep waiting for them just to be like, lookook, you've been using this damn thing for several years now. We've never charged you your sent. Come on, man. They still have not done that. They do have Notion AI, of course, they're getting heavily into the Aenic stuff. but over the past year to two years They made a couple of small acquisitions and then launched Google Mail, I'm sorry, Google Mail. Notion Mail and Notion caalendar U These things to me have never kind of fulfilled what I perceiveed to be the promise of them because really what they both are are front ends to Google services. They're just like a kind of a way to It's honestly a way to get into that ecosystem so that you can then migrate over to their ecosystem is kind of how I see that. So Notion as the all in one does everything app You can have those views inside of that app, you can have the standload apps, et cetera, et cetera. But they never push that either beyond Google. So if you wanted to use, an outlook calendar with nototion calendar or whatever or outlook with notion mail, you cannot. It's always just been Google And then they announced this past week that they are in fact winding down Ocean Mail in September. Could you explain this because I read this and I don't really understand why So I can explain it in the sense that I didn't understand why they announced it because the way they announced it, it was just like, so you've created a front end for another service Like why? you know, And I think the reason is what I said. I think it's really about You know, there's this notion as a sort of a little tech company. Google is very much a big tech company. veryer popular, GMail is very popular Rather than reinvent the horse, it's like, look, all these people are using this thing, many are using it for free. just get them in here And then what we're going to charge them for really is not Notion mail, right or Notion calendar, because there's no value there per se, but rather for Notion AI. And that AI will do things against the data that's in Gmail and Google Clendar that you might want to use in the projects or notes or whatever it is you're doing in Notion, right? And okay, there's some sense to that, I guess But again, I don't understand how it never expanded beyond just Google. L That never made sense to me. If you can have a third party email client, it should support email, you know not jail. It's weird But they're getting rid of it. Their excuse for this, I actually do not buy. They let me see if I can find this quote, Yeahah, what they said was, you know, we Notion launched this with the belief that you know, the inboxes blah, blah, blah, whateverver. But what they say is that now that their own agents have gotten more capable, we're seeing more users, they don't say how many, hand off email workflows to the agents. And so over half of Nion mail users are managing email without ever opening their inbox. Oh, that's I sing. I suspect that most people who use Notion mail never open their inbox either. they just don't use it.. So don't That's the real problem. I don't really understand it. But so what was it? It was an interface to Gmail. Yeah. So you know how Notion looks. Like Notion has this kind of minimalist look to it. Notion, mail, and calendar have that look and feel, but for email and calendar respectively. There're standalone apps like on the web on mobile I guess on desktop as well But mail was Mac only, but I'm not really sure. But they're also integrated into Notion itself the main app, right? So there are the views and ways to access that stuff. To me, what this was all unnecessary. I sort of appreciate they were trying to make a Google Wspace alternative that would be cheaper or know not Google whatever, that's a useful thing to try Um, But really What they're using Gmail for here in Calendar is a data source, right And in the context of Whatever you're doing with AI and Nion, if the primary data source maybe is your Notion notes or whatever projects, or whatever you're doing there, you're going to then have a selection of probably thousands of other potential data sources, which will be or not be, but could be whatever email you use, whatever calendar you use, wh whatever data, who cares? And Slack chats and whatever it is, who cares So should have gone into more plugins, Yeah, this maybe should have always been just a plugin, right? Yeah. I guess keeping people in notion was the idea. like notion they were expanding the notion of what notion is, meaning, you know sorry, you know we're going have these three main apps maybe, and that made sense for about two seconds Look, the Notion app, the core app, that the core thing that Notion is is Obviously super successful. They're done great way. the thing we're managing this show from So ye, yes. And I listen, I've tried so hard to get rid of this thing that is so successful and works so well and it just never work it just never makes sense. and I will keep trying, you know, not because I hate nototion. I just this is what I do, but Notion has withstood every assault, every challenge. it's always been great. These other things though, I just never really saw the point. and you know I go back and look sometimes and I'm like, I just don't get it Um, It does make sense to use Gmail, like I said, as a data source within Notion, especially if you're using Notion AI or the agents they're doing now So that makes sense. Justifying it, it's like, well, you know, people were managing their email with agents is like, really? like, okay. I mean, I don't know what your email is like. I would love to have an agent, man I'm looking at my now. it's terrible. I'm gonna to take away from that. It's like I wish I wish maybe there is a way, I don't know. who can say but Um, I doubt that people were, you know just interacting with notion agents instead of their email things like I wonder if the mail stuff was just costing them money and not making them anything. And I don't think it ever ye. it just didn't make sense.. But in the end, refferencing AI makes it look like you're competent Exactly. And by the way, for whatever it's worth, I get the blame for everything. No the credit end the blame, right? depending on the situation. It's like horical. Notion A might be great. I actually don't know. I'm not dumping on it. there' need to have a business model and make money is I have no problem with it You would be sad if the product went to work. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely alternatives, but yeah, this still to me is still the one I like. I have some thoughts. Do you want to hear my thoughts or? Yeahah, I do. Okay. 'Cacause I noticice a Claud openA I'm sorry, anthropic has announced this Claud Slack thing, they call it cllawed tags. sameame idea And I think it's the same goal with nototion, which is If they can provide and who knows what AI model they're using, they probably don't have their own. They're just interfacing to somebody's frontier model, right? But if they can provide a way to do it inside where you put your data, whether it's Slack or notion, then they get access to your data. That's right. And that's gold for them And that's that same conversation about privacy that we had earlier is I'm not sure I want to give them that. The sort of Microsoft focused approach to this, which I think Richard will appreciate is that And as is the case in many times, Microsoft was actually kind of onto this pretty early. If you think about what loop was is, you know, one of the ideas there is that you you can move to this new thing and use this as an app if you want, but you can also use these components anywhere, including where you are now And that, you know, and then, you know, take it even further back. I mean, the idea behind Mike one of the ideas behind u Microsoft Teams, the other one being let's kill Slack, was that we have this ecosystem of whatever, and we know that people today in our ecosystem are using they live in mail. They live in oututlook. This is the center of their world. But there are these younger employees who look at this thing like it's grandpa's oldmobile, and they're not interested in this. And so instead of forcing everyone just to move to this new model, we're going to let people do both And so you could have people working on whatever projects collaborating. And the old email guys could do this throughoutlook, the newer young kids, the hipsters, whatever could do it through teams in chat and do all that kind of stuff and This is Microsoft' actually pretty good at this. I mean, they kind of saw this, you know, they don't They don't always nail the implementation, maybe, or however you want to say that. But U and it's not that the loop or team slash, whatever model look model is and has anything to do with AI to kind of apply it to the AI era, at some point in then probably two seconds from today, if you spend your whole day in Slack, you'll be doing this stuff from Slack. And maybe you're accessing the Nion data source, but you're doing it from Slack You could do it in a reverse direction. You live your day in nototion and you have Slack and you have email and whatever data points, and because this is your UI. I mean Everyone Wh makes anything related to productivity right now is trying to figure out a way they can be the center of your world. And they're all going to in this new AI era And they're going to try to get you to connect to the things you use elsewhere so that you can stay in this thing And I think that for notion, what they're, you know, done on some level is smart, but the goal is still the same. It's like we want you to keep we want to keep you in notion, you know. and the more interoperable you make it, the more possible that is. that makes sense because I'm not sure it makes sense to me, but I think I think that's what I meant to say something something to that. You know, in the PC world we had a phase where everybody was building their own machines. Yeah. And except for you, Richard, most people realize that it's fine and better, maybe even cheaper to buy a built machine. It's cheap to And and it has better warranty. ch.' Let own AI here now Yeah obbvious, you're doing Actually, that's ancellent comparison. The first PC I owned was one I built. and the reason I built it was because I didn't have any money and that was cheaper, you know?. I could use an Intel three hundred eighty six SX chip and it was cheap You know, you got to choose everything. You got I had to choose everything. That's the way it was. you know, like I you go I mean, I didn't have place to buy all this stuff, I bought a bunch of crap and whatever I put it together a computer and it works somehow. And that made sense until it didn't, you know? Right for most people And you're right, that's exactly what's happening with A. Building those machines last year, which I'm glad I did, but it cost more. Like theyve learned anybody who still wants to buy components will pay a premium. And that's even before the markups hit. I think the last major PC I built was with and for my son and I believe he still has it, although it's really probably horrily out of date. It's a gigantic ball. It looks like an next cbe it's humgous That was another big. Well this one was this one was Yeah. But this thing fractal north cases, they're big Yeah, they're beautiful too. They've wood faces and stuff. I pay for them. I don't know how it came up the first time. I'm really confused by that. He later brought it back from college and we took the whole thing apart, cleaned it because it was just full of dust put it back together, came up again and I was like, wow, that's a two for two. I don't know I don't know how that happened, but It seemed like it work it worked fine. I mean, it was good. but Yeah, you don't do stuff like that. It's I don't know. And I finally moved a rolling rack that was the remains of my old house brought here with my old rack mount workstations over to a friend who's still doing that stuff. who was grateful to have it because they're hard to come by now and it's one less thing than this house, which I'm happy to be rid of You know,. And I got toa tell you every time I look at these fractal North cases, like they're very pretty You know, it makes a difference stuff that's nice to look at Did you ever get on the are you gonna ever are you getting a steam machine speaking of? Probably not. I don't play games religiously enough. and I'm part of the PC master race anyway. L that I mean, it is a PC. it's, you know ye I already have one. I have a very nice one. It's got a fivety niney in it, right? Like I'm good. Oh yeah. arere you suggesting that that's better than integrated graphics site. Now. do I have a dear friend who's an ex valve employee who lives in wine country and insists that I come and spend a week or so with them every year no matter what, tyypically when the wine season is on and we'll certainly have more than one of these because he's that kind of guy right Yeah. He's also got the PS five and the PS five pro if you want to compare No I will get a chance to play on a steam machine probably this fall. Yeah, I am curious about it Well, if you want to go wine tasting brother, we'll go up there to Cologa. I'm not a big fan of wine Gaming Yeah You sorry, when are we going We'll block that out in the fall and we'll go stay up there and we'll play all the video game machines and we'll stories of working at Valve and Blizzard in all those fun places. And he's not a big fan of wine, but I keep stocking his wine sh she. Wellll we'll go hit a few wineries that I like and buy a few bottles and be a few Uh but yes, that'll be good Yeah H. That would be fun. It's always enjoyable. They're talking down here in a couple of weeks for ' everybody' we have a whole bunch of friends, including my wife and I whose birthdays are all in July, so we're hosting the big July out of control party, which we'll know this on the property. So yeah good. I figure we're about fifty plus with the locals included. So trying to sat I want a couple of briskets, a whole bunch of ribs, a whole bunch of salmon It'll be a good party H Interest'e. All right, I think this would be a good time to just remind everybody You're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat from theat. com versus books are at leanpub. com. But if you become a premium subscriber at theot. com, you'd get them all anyway. It's part of the deal, including windows everywhere Field Gide to Windows eleven and Dan shit ofy windows. Richard Campbell, is that run isradio.ot com. That's where. net Rcks and Run is Radio is two podcasts live. And we are so glad you're here. For Windows Weekly and now On with the show Is it Xbox time? Yeah, and you know, it's a bundle of good news. So we talked about the incoming Microsoft Fayoff, et cetera. We don't know how that's going to impact Xbox. We know that Xbox is going to be part of it. You know, the rumors kind of continue, et cetera. B the way, like considering that normal turnover for a company that size is like twelve percent, thirteen percent or thirty thousand people a year. Yeah. This is silly. Yeah. so this is literally playing press games to talk about a layoff of five thousand five hundred people Right. So if the rumor is correct, two point five percent of the workforce, which is five thousand five hundred people, it could be less than actually, which is lower than expected. You know, that I don't remember I don't remember any numbers, but I mean, I feel like last year, there were multiple layoffs and a lot of them were high single digit percentage, you know, So These are this is smaller. It doesn't mean it's the end of it, right? This is the problem. No. They've seem now had a routine policy You know, for Xbox specifically, it's not just like we're losing people from teams. it's You know, this is a vast collectionough of game publishers game studios, you know, designers, programmers, you know, game makers of all kinds, right game titles, game franchises, you know and a lot of these things are up for grab. and this is the problem. So we're kind of we're waiting for the to see what happens where we have this hope that att least in some cases that Microsoft can do the right thing, so to speak by letting those employees, those teams, those studios even leave and go on and continue the thing they were doing, maybe. And this is the type of this is the weird, this kind of weird financial part of it. You know, obviously these things are assets of whatever kind and you know, these things being games and franchises and so forth. But if you're We're just gonna cancel and stop doing the thing Do Is it harmful to let the people who are working on a thing just take it and run, you know? Does that make any sense on a spreadsheet somewhere? I don't know. And maybe it's a case by case thing. We'll see what happens. There will be acquisitions, you know. Other companies might hire some of these people, obviously, We'll see, but its all right now, it's all kind of up U in keeping with the Apple price hikes, it's almost like Microsoft saw the news was like, all right, let's raise Xbox prices again Um they are raising Xbox prices again. So they're discontinuing the high end two terabyte Xbox series X a model which they released just last year h currently placed at the price at eight hundred dollars is going away. Um And then all these consoles are going up by one hundred to 's two hundred maybe or maybe maybe one hundred one hundred fifty, depending on So we have Xbox Series S in five twelve and one terabyte configurations and then Xbox sereries X in a digital and non digital meaning there' an optical drive configuration, one terabyte. And the prices you know today are three hundred forty nine c to five doll ninety nine cents and will be forty nine to seven forty nine cents starting on august one in one month Yay. I just don't know. I guess the reason you buy an optical drive is because you actually want to own the game Or you have whatever collection of games already maybe, right? I mean, yeah, I was just talking to Brad about this. This is a tough one because anytime you say you make any general statement or digital is better forames like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. what about, you know, I have this library and I have, you know, they have reale value. I can bring them to gamestop, whatever sell them, whatever I can hand them to give them the kids, whatever Yeah, you know, fair enough, you can't do that with digital for sure. you know, we've passed the point where You can even buy a game on a disc and then just start playing it. There's always like a day one, you know, in there's updates. Oh yeah, no, it's just it's a nightmare The bottom you make a great point, just because you own the medium doesn't mean you're going be to play the game. Yeah As soon as you plug it in, you're going to need patches. And if they took the game down for whatever reason, you're not getting the patches. Yeah. this isn't in the notes, but Rockstar, which makes GTA a reveal that there will inect be retail packaging for the GTA six But it's going to be a box with a piece of paper and a piece of paper. with a code where you can go get downloaded digital.. So this is like we're giving this so people we're putting this out there so grandmothers can buy it for their grandkids and they can give them something at Christmas. And that's smart It's a little weird, but okay, fair enough. Okay, so there's this and whatever. And then I didn't, I don't think we had any fresh rumors last week. Now we're talking about the possibility that undead labs in Arcane Lyonene, as in Lyon, France, might be among the ones getting pushed out the door tryrying to figure out who makes what here. Playground No, Undead Labs is was acquired with playlground games. Playground games makes the four' Horizon games lately four hundred fifty six, I think Undead Labs latest games stay decay two stated to K three was one of the games they announced in that recent game showcase, right as was thea game, which mightd also get under the ex. That's kind of weird Um, and then Acane u is the those guys may or at least Arcane Leon is, um Disishonored, which is a pretty good series back in the day Death loop, which I never played and u blade, which is the Marvel graphic novels here,raph comic series, you know, the Wesley Snipe movies played the vampire with the Sword And so we'll see. They're going to try to get rid of those guys probably and then also double fine, which makes psychonauts to kiln and do Keper, I think is the other one. It might be another one. So they're local. They're here, I think. They're not. Well again, I feel like a lot of these guys will have a future. you know, it's just, they'll be fine You know, and like, well, I don't know fine, but I hope they're fine. But you know, because they'll set they'll either set up a new studio and make something completely original or they'll get grabbed up somewhere, talented game development. to I would like there that outcome is great. But I would like it to be even better if possible. I'd love to see In some cases, if the game IP they were working on could go with them. you know? Yeah, it seems very unlikely. I know, I know. But if you're not gonna to literally ever do anything with it. Yeah, you know. I bet you couldn't even get Microsoft to respond to the inquiry Yeah. Yeah. Because there's nobody there who's gonna to be able to answer that question. The So the only little asteris here is this is obviously a horrible PR moment, right? Whenever this happens, this will be bad If they could soften the blow by just not say how magnaneous they are. you know, how wonderful we are as a company. We're so great we think we're apppple all of a sudden. You know, we're just going to do the right thing for the world and we're going to let this stuff go free not free, but'll go set it free, whatever, however you want to say it.t It's going to be every case. It probably won't be any cases I still think there's an opportunity there. I wish they would take advantage of it. The question here is when you buy a company Especially a game company, what are you buying Are you buying the titles? Are you buying the people? Yeah, both, right? I mean, and maybe But maybe the thing you thought was the reason ends up not being the primary benefit. Always the question is now that I've laid off the team, could I actually restart the game? Yeah. Well this is the opposite of this was the, you know, came out of a question somebody asked me, which is why wouldn't Microsoft, you know, Sony's failing with Bungie, why not just bring them back in house? And it's like guys, it's been like ten years longer, I think. There's a whole company inside of Microsoft that used to be called three hundred and forty three indndustries that's now called Halo Studios that is probably hundreds of people have been working on this thing. They have transitioned to a new gaming engine that is not the old Halo engine. Yeah. And now you're saying We're gonna bring back those people yes to year and try to integrate them into this There's no way. You know? Yeah way There's no way. Well, there in lies a g. So you may And so I would argue It's not even the games youve bought or the people It is the title And maybe the art But even there You're going to rebuild everything if you starting These are you're yeah, you're buying Yeah, you're it's these are assets, essentially, like you' Yeah Yeah. But and here's the bigger question is at what point do your shareholders get angry with you? Uh Right? You paid X many billions for that company. you know, what did you buy? Like what did they turn that into? Microsoft spent seven point whatever billion dollars in OKA and ended up having to write it down. I think was the termies at the time. That's a lot of My question is when is it a write down? Microsoft spends sixty nine billion dollars in activisation. Now that's not in any danger of being written down. I don't mean it like that, but this sts are a little higher a and they have you know, World of Warcraft cash flows, they have a whole bunch of cash flows that are making money off of that right now. Y not sixty nine billion dollars worth of money. you like that No. But it makes the AI economics look a little even more ridiculous. It it looks better compared to that at least. mean There is value there. I just you know, you you risk completely screwing up your relationship with the community You know, I think that rooman's floown it is right Yeah The real question here is I'm not even not even debating whether they're going to serve the community well. Right orr they they're going to serve the product well they serve their product. I'm not talk about that. At what point do the shareholders actually get angry? At what point do you actually have to call it a write down? What do you have to get rid of? And this is where I'm saying, They're never going to let the IP go because that's the cover for not being a writeown So one hundred percent you were I agree with you. Microsoft, just like like Apple's not going to not raise prices because that's the right thing to do, you know,. They're a company, not a charity. Not a charity. Microsoft, however, is in kind of a weird place right now where they might do the right thing for the wrong reason, you know, in other words, just like for example We don't exactly know why Microsoft is trying to fix Windows eleven right now, but we have theories. One of those theories is that they actually need this thing to work correctly themselves because they're doing this whole agigantic AI thing and this actually has to work. and it's a selfish reason, but they're trying to know, they're pretending to actually pay attention for change. And you know what? we still benefit from it on the other side, right as users of the thing So as gamers, as Xbox fans as whatever it is, or fans of individual games or studios or whatever If there's some version of this where they end up doing the right thing and it's only to pure moment, you know that maybe saves their market cap a little bit on one on that day or whatever it might be I will take it just to have the victory that is, you know, that accompanies it. you know, we'll see if that is what happens. But yeah. now I can imagine because I've worked with folks like this before, a good team being dumped by one of these large corporations reforming And then they've got to decide, are we going to write something new? or are we going to try and take IP from this big end? Yes. Yes. And as a game you play there, you do what Miguel and Natt did with attachment, right? How do they get mono and so forth? It's like Make us a deal to license this to us so we can do something with it, which you're going to do nothing with. So you don't surrender the IP, it's just a license. or we're going to build the alternative without you In my own little world when I was leaving Penton, I went to my boss and told her I was leaving. And I said, I would like you to give me the suuper Pci for Windows. Just give it to me And they're like, whyy would we do that? And I said, because I'm driving I think it was at the time, forty, something percent of the traffic you're getting at WindowsignD Prot com was coming through my site. So I will just continue doing that And that would be the agreement. L like you know, dontay any money I'll just drive the traffic. And she was like, Ohh, that actually makes a ton of sense She's like, I'll, you know, throw it up the whole chain or whatever. And it went up through three levels and everyone thought it was a great idea. Then I got to VP, whatever's name. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to name the guy, but knocked him on the phone. and he was like, Yeah, no we're not doing that. That's an asset. And I'm like, yeah,, I understand He's like, no, he's like, this is worth like a million dollars. I was like, all right, goodbye And uh and then they stopp using the brand and the URL and you know, like to like mononths later, you could have just I don't know. people make bad decisions. You know, I I don'tway, No. I mean, he made the right decision for him because he had to say to the board why he did it. and it's same problem Better to let the asset rot and make it valuable somewhere else. That's than And I swear to God, that's the same situation with these products. pllus I also know gamers well enough to go They'd rather write something new any I was thinking about that as you were saying it. I feel like for a lot of these people and it's case by case, but you have some team of game, you know game makers working on whatever titles and now you're laid off and your game is not happening and it's going into the limbo and there's nothing and you're like, look, we love working together. We're going to keep doing this And it's like, you know, the thing we've been talking about it, you know, over dinner we always had a game in off is yeah I I do think there's going to be a lot of that And there's no game better than the one you haven't written yet 'cause every you in socks. ight Like that's always the perfect game So right Yeah, that's the reality is when those folks get together, they're gonna We had take on one of the things they always wanted to make. We did the same thing. We briefly had this thought that it'd be fun to have the old screens Sabvers shows Yeah that I did twenty five years. Of course. I mean, on our network. and it'd be fun to show the old show from like two thousand and say, here's what's changed in the last twenty six years. Right. And so we went to NBC Because they own, you know, Comcast bought it and they own the right And they said, no, Right Be they're like, hey, we were never doing anything with this. B We just discovered you want to like get something. Oh, it must be worth something. We said we' reedroom Yeah. you know, they have the tapes, Well at least they did stored in some storage locker in LA somewhere They're paying them monthly fee. I don't know if you follow newsle. Maybe not. Well I don't know who owns it now. It's all very confusing. Comcast is trying to spin off NBC, but U That's what I thought maybe we could call him again Once they spin it off, maybe they'll be more interested. I don't know. Look, we just want to hold a bucket as you dump the trash. C we just have the, you know, Yeah ye And they said no, right They didn't even like high b They didn't even say, yeah, you can have it, but it's going to be thirty five million dollars or something. They didn't Yeahah, I mean, they could have said, they could have said, Well, we want this and we would have at least negotiated. but it's so sh much trouble. Yeshead We don't So who knows those tapes are probably all long gone now. You know a lot of them have been pirated and put up on YouTube. You can see a lot of old episodes on of YouTube, but it would be nice to have the original master. Of course, of course. Put them back up with commentary or not, whatever And obviously you're the ideal outlet for that. I mean, it's Well, this is what happens when you don't own your own content, right? Yeah, right That's right It's one of the reasons I started Twit way back in two thousand five because I had that bad experience with tech TV and I said, you know, I could probably do the same thing and It's like Taylor. I feel like I'm like Taylor Swift. I wanted to ownt. That's interesting. This is So this is what you're saying is that Twit as an organization is Tech TV Leo's Leo's version, exactly. Is that what you exactly you nailed it. Okay. It really is. I just just trying to make sure I understand. It really is We get the masters, so we thought we'd start over. There you go. That's funny. Unfortunately, I don't remember the melody so we had it Right. I guess that's tely what theothot com is as well Yeah, it is, right? Yeah it is. Yeah And you know what? you did just fine. You did You know whatough you did too, by the way. I feel like Both of us probably would have just done the thing forever if they had just exactly left this the frick alone exactly You know, It was That's what knicked me out the door. Right because I would never have had the incent. I never would have done it. I never would have done it. I was happy to be there, you know And it just they made it so awful and terrible and, you know, whatever, they they They made it impossible for me to stay, but U I would I would have just stayed Travis Kelseiey and I are engaged. No in the marriage. You gonna move the wedding location of the giant stadium Yeah. That is so funny because we spent a long time yesterday at MacBak Weekly talking about that. and people were very irate. like I don't tune into this show to find out what's happening with Daly's wife. R But Well but they do tune into this show to find out what's happening. That's why they listen to Windows weekly. Exactly that' what said. Tune in tomorrow. Wellll cover Yeah. Yeah, yeah U actuallyctually, I would like to just before we get to the back of the book because that's what's coming up next. But I would like to take this opportunity to give us a little plug for TV Leo's version, AK A, Twit Now, yes, we have ads. We've actually done it's funny. We've actually done business wise a lot better than tech TV did. That lost Paul Allen who owned it at the end Hundreds of millions of dollars, we've never lost money. because we couldn't. Re I didn't have Paul Allen's fortune to spend So we've always been profitable, but here's the thing In order to do that, we' had to scale back. We had a big studio. We got to a smaller studio. now we're in my attic. We had lots more shows. We've cut back to Just the basics Uh, and I don't I just because We're bootstrapped But thank goodness, the club came along. Lisa had this idea back in COVID As advertising started to dwindle, she said, you know, whyt we have the audience support us to the extent they are willing to and can And it's made a huge difference. And I want to thank everybody who's a member of the club and invite you Dear listener, who if you're not a member, and I think if you're hearing this, you're probably not. to join. What do you get? Well, first of all it's ten bucks a month. one hundred and twenty dollars a year. There is a two week free trial. There arere also corporate and family plans, so you can get multiple members at a discount What you get for your ten bucks is ad free versions of all the shows You don't even get this plug You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a really fun hang with some really smart, interesting people you also get special programming that we do in the club, things like our Well coming up a week from Friday, our AI user group, which is always fascinating. We got some really smart AI users In there we do the photo show with Chris Markquart cooastal is the word of the month. We're doing pictures illustrating Coastal. It's a great way to getet your pictures kind of Coaching from Mr. Mark where else talks about phhoto News. We have a coding show off by one with Jeff outwood and one of these days we will cover coding in that show. Anyway, there's a lot of great stuff. Micah's crafting corner. We have Mica's media corner. Our next movie is the Matrix. That should be interesting. Stacy's book cllub We try to make it fun, but the main point of the club really is I think it's important to be completely independent. I don't want to be owned by NBC. I don't w to be owned by anybody. I don't w to beholden to any of the companies we cover. I want to give you And we do Honest coverage without fear or favor because we represent the users. Paul does, Richard does, I do Your support makes that possible. Twit d. Tv slash club Twit. If you want to join the club, we would sure love to have you Twit dotiv slash ub Twit enough said, donon't want to belabor the point. is la Saga Masamosaais on his b.uanda sonora, says Grio Can. bl. st in. Alientin make a s byas It when the fivees cless of a year. Noh wills w the w El Signor de L Sier Semporada Fina, Martes Siere deejulo, Alas Mueio Chocentro, Portle Mundo, I Pacock I should actually though, I love these little discord real quickly because he get these great Illustrations from Joe Esposito. He does this, by the way, not with AI Yeah He does these does the old fashioned way. does the old fashioned way, the Photoshop way And I don't really know what's going on here. This is is is like an eighties thing? It's like Indiana Jones, what's the little Michael Jackson looks. Yeah, but the the tiny Mary Lou Rton. Mary Lou Reton. There you go. rings. That's that's men. Okay. Well, I think in eighties, you know, I don't know. I love what did they call that font the font, the checkbook font at the bottom? I love that too. That's like the Bte magazine font almost Anyway, thank you, Joe. Ozaro Art Foundry He He takes old computer ads and turns them into. Yeah. It's awesome. All right, now back of the book timeim, mister Paul Thorat. Wh offft for us? Probably actually have all those outfits off. So I do actually. Yeah So Dave Plumber, former Microsoft engineer. he's just here for the likes and the su whatever. I look I subscribe to his channel. I actually love the guy that is apparently not been pointed back in my direction. It's fine. He doesn't even know who you are. comeome on. That's what I mean. which is Like I said, it's fine. It's but and look, I watch every video he makes. I just It's my thing, you know. I will agree with it. Yeah, and part of the problem is I don't He almost never does anything that helps anybody. Like what I mean is like if you're a tesch enthusiast, you're a developer, especially, you're technical, whatever it is, you're older because you remember all this stuff from the nineties. sameame reason you would read like a Raymond Chen post on what used to be MSDN because he's just talking about like APIs and programming things from like twenty years, thirty, forty, you know, it's great like it has nothing to do with anything And if you enjoy that kind of thing You're going to love Dave Plumber. like I it's very and I really find it interesting There's also, you know, it's like he makes YouTube videos. So there's like a click bait kind of element to some of the stuff where I'm like what So I just came up with it. It's like tired of bloated windows I fix Nepad and I'm like again, Like youve fixed it again Like, what does that mean So I watched this stupid thing and he look, he already he did this last year sometime. he did some vibecoded version and opPad, which was pretty good, by the way. But he's been working and some other people have been working on like assembly language Like OG notad style like well, not OG, but like nineteen ninety style notepad, whatever. And like and then it turns into one of those programming challenges where it's like, how small can we make this thing? you know? Well, it turns out you can they can make it in two point five K, which is like, you know, which because of cluster sizing on disk is actually four K. You know, there's nothing you could do, right? I mean, it's like stupid big And, you know, and by the way That's fun That has nothing to do with fixing the your perception of bloating in windows. whether that' reallyag bigger than that Yeah, everyMP three file is a hundred times bigger than that. Yeah. But what does this solve, you know? L like, okay, are you going now go to every single application windows and remake them as tiny, you know, whatever kilobyte SMA language executables? No And also if you try to run this thing on your computer, you're going to get a smart screen warning because guess what? It's not, you know And I don't quite understand like what are we talking about here? Like what is the point of this? And one of the things I see a lot out in the world right now and one of the things I have to really tried to repress in myself is just like this nostalgia thing, right that You know,oke, I joke, but I'm not really joking. I talk about like how hipsters hipsters, as I define it are people who are nostalgic for a past they did not experience. It's like when you have young kids are like I'm going to listen to vinyl. I'm going gonna have an Pod now. I'm going have you know, an instant camera instead of using smartphones and online stuff and whatever. and it's like, yeah, how are you? I mean, but okay Look, I liveved through all this stuff. like you guys, I was part of the original generation of people had Vide game consoles, home computers, as we called them at the time I grew up with this stuff,? I've seen the world evolve. it's mostly better. It's not always better. You know, we talk a lot about that, but U Nostalgia, I mean, look, I have my points in time where things were better, but I mean, I feel like It doesn't have to be technology, but most of the time we're nostalgia for something, it's not because that time was better The nineteen fifties were not better than today, the nineteen eighties were not well, the nineteen eighties were better. but the thing is it's mostly because of the age you were at the time, you know The reason it was better in the eighties for me is because I didn't have any responsibility, you know? Like I didn't have kids or a wife or a car, or a house and a mortgage and whatever it like you know what I mean? Like I just live day to day, who cared? You know, The whole world was wide open for me Yeah. And That's what you're really nostalgic for. You can't recapture it exactly. This was a couple of months ago probably, but I had written that article about you know we've kind of what we're missing in this modern world. And I was comparing, you know, you have a commoder sixty four, you turn it on, as a basic prompt. Well, it says ready, but it's a basic thing. And ty you can make your own programs. you're like, oh my God, what am I going to make with this thing We don't really have that today. Like technology is so easy. It's just there. it's uneasy, but it's just there. It's everywhere, you know And then I finally realized, you know, two, three weeks, whatever into this that like AI is the thing that gives can give us that. For all the problems of AI. The ability to make things with AI is rather astonishing and is kind of the modern equivalent of that thing that, you know, and and that's kind of the point like AI is new nuanced. It's causing all kinds of problems. We just talked about a bunch of them. U, but it also has these things that are good, you know. By the way Just came back. Fable is now Oh there go. Sa. And they're going to give us less than a week Yeah to play with it Get going, man. I hope that's enough time to rewrite the entire Twit salle system. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah Yeah, right now, you can use up to fifty percent of your plan's usage Limit on fable five I have a subscription so. Yeah. I will switch to Fable Bo. Very exciting.yway sorry I didnt me you but that's just breaking. I actually kind of figured it would happen between now where whenever we talked about it in the next show, I figured that was the time frame So. Anyway, look, I think the thing that bugs me about this is just the way it's promoted. Like you've solved some kind of a bloating problem.ike I do months and months of work to try to fix these things for people trying to, you know, there are entire categories of things I don't even care about personally, but I just go down these kind of rabbit holes because I want You know, whether you're watching the show or the my other podcast or the read my site or my books or whatever it is. It's like I'm trying to I'm trying to help, you know, I'm not just trying to like just like, you know, eject content out in the world. And it just kind of it just bugs me like If you're not going if you're not helping, like you just shut up and get out of the way? likeike what are you doing? Like you just it's worse than doing nothing. you know, like you're to me, when you're making noise, you're distracting You're just in the way. It's like, are we going to give fuel to more people to complain about it? I can't stand windows anymore. All it does is sell me stuff all day long and blah, blah, blah. And it's like I don't think anyone uses Windows more than I do and that is not my experience. What are you talking about? I do I see things. I mean, there are things, but I mean like, but I also I look at that and it's like, all right, how do we fix this problem And that's what I try to do. You know, I mean, I'm not perfect. I'm actually pretty terrible in many ways, but like I just see something like this and it bugs me because I like this guy. I'm into this kind of content I don't think it's anything any a normal person would ever care about But it's like you create this tiny notepad thing and you're like Okay The thing he complained about a year ago that led to him vibe coding a new version of Noped and then made this yet newer version was there was a co pilot icon in NPed, which you could remove yourself easily and is now no longer there So it's like what What are we complaining about? I don't understand this. There's nothing in Nepad that is modern. couldnot get rid of with the exception of one thing which is the tabs Right That's it. And you can configure it in such a way that you never use the tabs. So they're there, but you don't have to use them What are we what are we? Is this like we're still complaining about notepad This is ridiculous to me. Don't be nostal,. know stupid. you better be grateful that Mary Joe Foley isn't here. What is that? Oh, because of noPed, right? Yeah. about. wouldn't been I wouldn't have been say such thing. I wouldn't have said that in front of her. No. No, the bone I would always well the bone I would give anybody and including Mary Joe is that you know the modern version of by the way, Nepad as a I'm sorry, let me find the window so I can get the exact number. I talked about how small his version of Nepad is, right? It's pretty full featured, right? two point five K on two point five K, it's really four K on disk because of the cluster thing. The modern version of NPad, by the way, is three hundred thirty two K I mean, yes, it is exponentially bigger than his thing, but it's also three hundred and thirty two K Yeah It's this is not it's not Photoshop guys. like what Phill got an icon bigger than that Yes. And and there's also this thing that most people don't know about in Windows, which is that NPad is in fact the I should say the classic version of NPad It's still in Windows eleven. It's in the system thirty two f, you know, system thirty two folder in Windows, right? You it's it's a get getting the term. I would say If I fureget out the term of this thing. It's it's an execution alias. So the actual notepad is the old version. If you turn off in settings. you go to app addvanced apppp settings, I think it's app execution aliases. You can turn it off an opPad and you runs the old one. L it's still there. So I don't what are we fixing? You could do all this stuff. L what is this? Like do this is not a bloated dis You know, it's not terrible. Do you actually use NPad? I use NPad every day. I love it. Im sure. What do you teesus? do It's crazy to me Don't be nostalgic for something is not what you think it was like we I think as people, we just kind of remember the good thing, you know, so we have this like, oh my God, everything was better, you know. Yeah, everyone used to smoke on planes in the eighties too, by the way. That was not those were the days, huh? That was not better. One of my favorite se I was this was a business trip so that long, I mean, that recently, so to speak I was on I had I booked a ticket for the non smoking part of a plane And it was the row in front of where smoke started. Isn't that ironic? Yeah Like wait Okay. There's no non smoking on a plane where they all smoke. Guess what I'm not nostalgic for? That That's ridiculous. And Okay, Dickamous. Um, I recently I've been updating the book, you know, on and on and on, and One of the ones I get stuck on things. this is my problem. I always find these like I have to, okay, wait what what you and then like a week goes by youre like, what have I done? Nhing, except I've spent a lot of time doing it. And one of those things was it's like a consolidated Xbox chapter, which is like Xbox PC plus whatever the gaming stuff is, right? So there's, you know, there's the Xbox mode, which is new, there's the game bar, which is not new and the Xbox app, right, of course. And then you could do with controllers, et cetera but I wanted to address in some small way, like Windows eleven on arm gaming. fell into the review I just talked about of that laptop as well, where this thing has the most powerful processor Like how can I make games run or It probably really just run better because I don't know that I can do anything to run games that won't run, whatever. So I actually tried call these games. and I tried different C of duty games. I went back to Vanguard and none of them they don't even you can spend all day installing this thing and then you run it. It's like, yeah, no. it's not even going to run. like it crashes immediately. It's unbelievable The modern Doom series, like the Doom twenty sixteen, Doom Eternal, whatever the second one was called, they run, they're fine. The newest one Doom Dark Ages does not run. same thing. Stalls takes a while, crashes immediately does not run, you know. But in going through this little escapade or whatever you want to call it This is not new information per se, but if you are going to try to make anything work on Snapdragon for games, there's actually three things you need to do. There are settings in the in system I'm sorry, there are settings in the settings in system display, right? Go to graphics. and you can actually determine or configure How auto super auto, what's it called super I guess it's auto super resolution, AutoSR works with individual apps, but in this case games, which is smart., you want to make sure that's set up correctly. There are sometimes settings and games you can use in combination with that. Like you can go into a game and say I'm going to run this at a lower resolution, but I'm going to use autoSR and it's going to visually make it look like it's running at a higher resolution. And that can help The best thing to do and this isn't curiously is not pre installed at all recent snapdragon PCs is you get something called the Snapdragon l panel. And it works a lot like an NVidia app would work where you can use it to download drivers and then it will auto configure for individual games. And it does that. And actually this is super smart to have because a, especially on Snapdragon, but know, maybe not unique to Snapdragon, you absolutely have to have the latest graphics drivers, especially. And that's the way to do that And then you can go in and individually configure how games work to a degree that you can't just in the system. And actually that got some games over the top. you know, like I was playing u U I think it's called Tomb Raidor Definitive Edition and the default settings using like Windows and just having the game optimize itself I was getting fifteen frames a second But then when I optimize it's not even playable it's terrible. And then it's great for screenshots. It's not good for playing But then I went through the Snapdrag and control panel and just had it kind of autocig well didn't autocig I actually went ahead and made some changes. And then I went into the game and just I lowered the resolution, but that ended up bumping it back up And by the time I was done, I'm still getting I'm getting over one hundred frames per second. I went down to sorting need. wayay more. but by the way, it was it was in the two hundred seventy two eighty range when I went up. No, I mean, when it started, I was like, wait what So I'm like, no, I'mumpping up the visual quality. So anyway, if you're if you're going to go down this path, God help you, you're going to waste a lot of time But you need these three things. like you need to look at these three places. It's not just what's in the OS, you have to you have to get this snapdragon control panel, which is a quQalcum. It's key to making this work well. I'm glad we've got that now that we can try and optimize like that. Like theseese are all luxuries in windows. You can do a bunch of this, but you just don't really need to. Stuff just works. This is so this is everything I do, but you know it's so time consuming and then ultimately usually so disappointing, you know because some of these games are humongous and then you it just doesn't work, you know? Yeah. But you also hit me with the reality now just now which is just like They've been making video drivers for Snapdragon Xs for two years So they're only so good. likeike we forget the luxury of a mature driver set. If you any modern game, if you go in, there are custom settings for all kinds of things like vertical syinkc and frame filling and all think that are custom tailored to NVvidia U AMD and Intel chip sets, right? And usually dedicated graphics, but increasingly, you'll see this for integrated graphics too. U There was nothing for snapdragon, right? So Emulation is bad enough that like you know NPad doesn't run natively on arm. It does, actually. But if it didn't, it would be fine. No one would care. It's a small app a gigantic game that is Big graphics moving very quickly, hopefully, very hard to do to emulate just to emulate all of that. It's a nightmare U and for the for the person doing it, it is a nightmare as well because the you'll sometimes it's impossible to know like what makes the most difference or whatever And there's a lot of hit or miss, but that's assumes you can even get in the game, you know Um that's it's the one area where this thing kind of falls short. If gaming doesn't matter to you on a PC and you only have to have one PC, it's not a problem Um Gaming very much matters to you. This is not the way to go, unfortunately, it just is't, you know Yeah, no, fair enough. Unless you don't appreciate your time. But there's lots of people arguing that they're not going to buy our machines because of gaming. And so J basically saying is like, look, you can make it work The people that somehow you run some esoteric app or something that somehow it does not work on AM, which is like almost impossible to find these days. By nature, that person who will never stop complaining about this will inevitably have multiple computers and it does not matter. It's like or you have like, I have this printer like a brother printer from nineteen ninety two And it will not print from Windows on Am. And thus I cannot have it. It's like, do you have other computers? How much do you print? What are you talking about? Why? Does your iPhone print to it? Like what are you like what's why? What's the difference But it's a blocker for some people, you know? Yeah, without a doubt Run as Radio Well he's coming up Well, I am on a string of security conversations for better or worse, mostly related to the impact of LOMs on security both sides of the equation here But to last weeks show with Tany Jenka, we werere talking about helping developers to be more secure because they are the targets now of the black hats But this week shows with McKenzie Jackson. who focuses more on supply chain attacks specifically and you know various mechanisms that are going on there that are creating this problem. And so we were talking about, you know, some of the exploits that already happened and tools and so on and just this risk of it's one thing to secure the CICD pipeline. It's another thing where supply chain attacks typically happen because your internal apps take on new versions of code, typically open source code that have got exploits them and then you become part of the propagation chain. or you're using an application, a third party application that depends on those sorts of things and your place gets affected because it got deployed that way And as we talk through the challenges of evaluating all this and various testing tools and so forth. McKenzie said this great thing that just hit me so hard like wow what a solution, which is The White hats are working hard to fix these exploits But usually it's always post facto And so if you just wait forty eight hours after a new version of a library comes out If they's been exploited, that will be found andfixed within those forty eight hours So it's like just don't install the new bits and a whole lot of problems go away This is such an interesting policy from an administrator point of view to go to your dev team and say, Hey can we Do this Can we just make it a routine that When you go to do a build, you don't grab any bits and youer than forty eight hours old. It's just a new it's a new request. and's something I hadn't considered before and just the reality that overver and over again, where we see these exploits, they get detected. they get detected within hours. Right? someome were just a few hours And even then enough people had downloaded that there was a whole lot of problems, but the folks who hadn't yet were fine So you could just wait You might fix a whole bunch of problems Ladies and gentleen. Boys and girls. Children of all ages Well not all ages, Leo. Okay children over twenty one. Yes. It is time. Not in this country, he's just fine What is the drinking age of Canada eighteen D depends on the province We don't have an overbearing federal government saying they give you highway funds unless you Oh, look who's coming out of his shell on Canada Day. It is O yes, happappy Canada Day. Canada has multiple reasons to celebrate, not really. Canada today, but the World Cup as well Oh yeah, still in it. We're all shocked and stunned and thrilled. on the round of sixteen. That's exciting. Yeah, very exciting. Furthest we've ever been by far. And yeah, one hundred fifty nine years young for Confederation And I mean, I've been home for a while, so we've been doing this is the second Canadian whiskey. the previous one was I was in Denmark. so we were talking Danish, veryery good whiskey, by the way, But last week we did an East Coast. We did Glen Brett And so I got to tell the story of Cape Bretton and just how mad all of that was So it seemed fair that I would go to the West, essentially. And I found I've been meaning to talk about the Eau Clair distillery for a while because I'm making my way through these things. And then I found this ridiculous bott. It's got a moose on it. It must be Canadian. Yes. Ited moose. The guy who sold it to me said, I hope this isn an AI. and I'm like, I'm pretty sure this has been around long. and this is things from twenty twenty. Yeah, I couldt do this in twenty twenty. So don't worry about that close at the bottom of the bott See the mountain? Is that a mountain? Oh my Godd.'s a mount mountain in the bottom of Oh, I love it. I would buy it just for the mountain on the bottom of the b.'t. And the labels askew and torn on the edge. Like they've got this whole aesthetic going on this crazy bike. Cool And so this Rupert's exceptional Canadian whiskey and by the way, the mascot name is Rupert. But there's more reasons for the name Rupert. And for that, we have to do A little bit of history And that's what you sign up for when you do this, right Be this whiskey made is made at a distillery called Eauuccler, which sounds French Canadian, except it's in Alberta. But before Confederation, Alberta was not called Alberta. It was called ts land And you may wonder why in the world Anything was called Rupert's land because it was actually name for a fellow named Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was the cousin of King Charles II of England. And he was the first governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, which is granted control of the British Territories in sixteen seventy Until very recently, Hudson's Bay Company was the longest continuous operating corporation in the world. But it eventually became just a department store and department stores can't survive. and HBC is finally gone. But this was the place that traded two blankets for a beaver pt for three hundred years and the land declarations. Now you gota imagine King Charles the second got you know about this land, but nobody's really explored it yet. You're not terribly concerned about the native population that's already there, but you want to license it essentially. So you have to set parameters on a land you don't have maps for So how do you do this And so the deal, what Rupert's land actually was, the way it was defined was it was all of the land whose watersheds drained into Hudson's Bay So if you went to Hudson's Bay, which is that huge bay in the middle of the Canadian landmass, there' sort of off to the east a bit. and you go up any of those rivers. All of those rivers represent Rupert's land. And there was another territory that they defined as well called the Northwest Territory. The Northwest territory was the land that didn't drain into Huds's Bay because it drained into the Arctic Ocean So it was north and west of Rupert's land Now these territories were defined literally in the sixteen hundreds long before there were colonists. So when you fast forward to Confederation, which was eighteen sixty seven where upper Canada and lower Canada became the dominion of Canada, nominally we would now call those Ontario and Quebec. Although when Confederation comes to sixteen in eighteen sixty seven, and we talked about this last week, you also get New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Newfoundland doesn't come along. Newfoundland and Labador stay out until nineteen forty nine As part of the formation of the dominion of Canada, both Rupert's Land and the Northwest Territory are transferred to the Dominion of Canada. This is in eighteen seventy And so Initially, they just call it all the Northwest territories because it's north and west of Ontario. But they also shortly after that, make an area called Manitoba, which is the next Today is now the next province over from Ontario, but then it was not that Back then it was the Red River Stlement, and the Red River is the river that flows through what we now know as Winnipeg. And at the time in eighteen seventy, it was the largest population of Europeans, nominally Europeans, about ten to twelve thousand people west of Ontario. Now these were not strictly Europeans. These were many of the oginal generations of original settlers from the sixteen seventeen hundreds. These were the Meti And the Mati were the European trappers two. I know paired up with native women and essentially created their own tribe, their own group of folks. And M tea are a very powerful force in Canada to this day. And They were not happy with the deal that formed the Dominion of Canada and turned Rupert's land into parts of Dominion of Canada simply because they weren't consulted And so a bit of a rebellion was taking place there. They basically organized their own provisional government and started communicating directly with the British crown which really got the Min of Canada wound up. and so they negotiated quickly and carved out a little chunk of land two hundred kilometers to by one hundred seventy five kilometers, largely around what we'd now call Winnipeg and called it Manitoba just to keep those guys calm The following year in eighteen seventy one, British Columia joins and British Columbia comes to Canada a totally different way because of the rockies being so steep BC was actually populated by folks coming from the Pacific. So this is Captain Cook and Captain Vancouver and that whole dynamic. So it's a totally different process compared to what was actually going on. coming from the east. So everything east of the Rockies is Rupert's landed Northwest Territories, this was all part of that original for territories that now were being carved up. And so by eighteen eighty two, the federal government starts dividing the Northwest territory now into different regions. in the district of Alberta was defined as souther what we now call southern Alberta. There was the district of Athabaska, which is northern Alberta, and then the district of Saskatchewan and Asabune, which ultimately all becomes Saskatchewan. there's also the district of Kiwatin, but that comes and go in a relatively narrow period. It's a negotiating tool for trade and eventually it will come the rest of Manitoba Uh Actually, Alberta and Saskatchewan don't fully emerge until nineteen. Oh five Long ago, really. And that brings us to the Turner Valley Turner Valley in Alberta is about an hour today is about an hour's drive southwest of Calgary on the twenty two highighway. But in eighteen eighty six So while Alberta was still the district of Alberta, it's are part of the Northwest territories Turner family settled there to do ranching and farming And this is right along the Sheep Rriver which also has a very interesting geological form that captures hydrocarbons. And this is actually where Western Canadian oil industry Oil in general had largely been discovered on the North American continent in southern Ontario and Pennsylvania in the eighteen eighties. And literally it was these similar kind of geological folds that drove oil and gas right to the surface. could and was long before any sophisticated technologies around any of that. And early surveys of the Pho Canadian government that did go through Ruperland had said that the eastern part of the Rockies possibly had hydrocarbal formations where literally it was seeping up to the surface And so into this environment comes a guy named William Stewart Herron And also another guy named Archibal, Wayne Dingman. And it's funny how, in the early nineteen hundreds, everybody concludes their middle names and things Both these two had worked in those Pennsylvania oil fields in the late eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties And when they had found out that these formations were known in Western in Canada and what was now at that point still Rupert's land They immigrated And so Harin is consider the founder of the oil industry in Western Canada. and he very specifically came there looking for oil,ving had some experience there, and he bought a farm bought a farm off of a farmer that was near the river where he saw these seepages and creates the Calgary Petroleum Proucts Company in nineteen thirteen He partners up with Dingman And they believe they found the same formations that they saw in Pennsylvania that made oil and what they call wet gas very easy to access to. They're wrong And they will spend seventeen months drilling to finally strike what's called wet gas This is not Swed oil, per say. This is natural gas with heavy components in it The most interesting which is called a product then called condensate essentially natural gasolinee, stuff you could just directly burn And the natural gas, the actual gassiest part, they can't use This is before the pumping systems and containment systems and so forth. They want the liquid. they can't really deal with the gas. But the gas, if it builds up, it becomes explosive and very dangerous. And so attached to all of these early drilling rigs is a flare. whichich really what it is is they're burning the natural gas off. As described in the papers in the early nineteen ten s There was so much light at night you could read a newspaper They're not really doing any refining, they're not doing any piping. They're just using the condensates because they're valuable burnable fuels, right? NapA and benzene and those sorts of things. So by the nineteen twenties, the Turner Valley is this frontier boom town. People are flocking, they're grabbing any land they can. Everybody's drilling. thingsings are very pretty out of control. and in October of nineteen twenty a fire and explosion destroys the entire petroleum facilities that that Harron had built And unable to afford the rebuild, he sells it off to Imperial Oil for a bargain. Imperial Oil sets up a new entity called Royal Light Oil C. and one of their first things is to actually build a natural gas pipeline all the way to Calgary. So they stop flaring the gas and start piping it into this quote unquote city. I mean, it's the nineteen twies. so the plinkings are still pretty small in nineteen thirty six, Turner Valley royalties hits uh the proper crude oil zone and starts pumping real proper oil and starting to do refining. And in fact, that whole area becomes the majority of oil production from Canada right through World War two. And this will eventually end by the end of the World War two. The Leduke Discovery, which is up much further north south of Edmonton is a far bigger oil field and that becomes the focus and so the Turner Valley falls. to decline And that brings us up to more current time. So this was A little farming area became this boom town for about twenty five years, twenty thirty years for oil. And then largely its subsided and still wells and things in the area, but they're much lower producing Uh, and u, and those times have passed Now the Aau Clair distillery is in Turner Rally. and here's how that came about. Guy named David Feron, who had worked in brewerying. He was a VP for Big Rock Bwy, which is a large craftp brewery facility in Alberta. He's also into farming, specifically antique style farming with horses, horse powered farming. He he keeps big draft horses and so forth. and he was He at that time was in the business of growing barley largely for beer, but doing it with horse equipment rather than the old fashioned thing. And famously him with a group of his friends, they talked about we should start dselling our grains. At the time they were growing kind of barley that worked very well in Alberta called Metclf Barley, but they had just announced a new strain made in Canada called AAC synergy, which was better for making for dune distillation. It had low gluc can. so it was much easier to mash, highigh concentration of sugar. Today, it's the number one malting barley in Western Canada. but it was just beginning in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen Now there was no craft distilling in Alberta at all at that time There was Alberta Distillers, one of the largest manufacturers of spirits on the planet Today they do twenty plus million liters annually. They're one of the big eight distillers in Canada. There's also black velvet out of the left bridge, which is also massive. They really they only do their own branded products, but they do more than ten million liters a year And I mentioned a few shows. I was back in nine hundred seventy four, we talked about Centennial Rye, which is Highwood out of Alberta, which is not the same school scale, maybe a million liters year, but still a big, what we call a medium producer But the laws are not set up for small producers in the twenty ten s, right? They're built for these bigger producers. They have these expensive markups, essentially, excise taxes for any distilled alcohol and so you pay these big markups. And one of Farrren's first initiatives was to create craft a seilling law to get craft a seilling law set up similar to what BC has, California had pioneered and made its way up to the West Coast, Oregon and Washington and so forth They don't get exactly the same thing. What they actually get is a discount on the markup or on the excise tax But not if you sell in stores. If you sell in stores, you pay the full market But if you sell directly or at farers markets and you produce less than two hundred forty thousand leaders of ethanol So this depends on the ABV. you get a discount and a substantial it could be less than half And so That means if you're producing one hundred thousand liters a year and it's only a forty percent, you're producing forty thousand liters of ethanol. and you're allowed to go up to two hundred forty thousand liters of ethanol. So your actual production limits are about six hundred thousand liters a year So They take over this old theater in Turner Valley. It was built in nineteen twenty nine during the oil boom times. and this is this building was barely used. Back in the boom times it was very busy, but at that time it was just sort of a community hall type thing once in a while for events and so forth. It was owned by the town And so Far buys it outright from the town to make it intoro ducillery. it's literally on main street right beside the twenty two highway He also hires a master distiller out of Scotland, a lady named Caitlyin Quinn. very few female master distillers in the world and probably the only one in Canada. She was educated at the Hrt Watt University. and she's into that angle on barley because they go after specialty local barley with thisAC synergy barleys Her whole approach is let's go for those flavors, l's focus on the barrel The equipment is small, stainless steel mash tons and stainless steel washbacks instead of wood, but they do the very long fermentation, typical of craft distilleries up to ninety six hours And copper pot stills in the Scottish style, so onion style stillills, but they were actually made in Canada They do age in ex bourbon and sherry casts. So the first distillations happen in twenty fifteen and then they got to lay up for a few years. So they also start making a gin in of vodka be able to pay the bills. They do that two year old release in twenty seventeen, just a little bit, gets scooped up right away because it's just innovative. This edition Rupert's exceptional Canadian whiskey went into barrels in twenty fifteen and was bottled in twenty twenty. So this should be at least five years old. And aging happens pretty rapidly, especially in southern Alberta. That's a terrain that's got very hot, dry summers, so sort of like Kentucky and very cold winters And so there's these huge temperature swings, but always with low humidity means that they battle the loss of water problem that often their alcohol levels go up, but that the draw into the wood is very, very strong And so you're going to get a rapidly maturing whiskey for itss time living in those conditions And they only lay up about two thousand barrels right on the facility site there. So It doesn't go very far This is only forty percent so the nose on it is pretty gentle. Not a ton of color in there But it's not, you know, it's a young whiskey and they they say sherry castp, but I don't think there's a lot of sherry color from this All right Yeah, that's a that's a Plain old Canadian whiskey man. That's that' straight barley, like you can get that. You've got none of the rye notes or anything like that. It's got a nice heat to it But it's It's just a straightforward. Nothing too exciting No no big burn J just a bit of warm, very gentle on the mouth. Yeah, I'd call this Canadian whiskey all day long. It doesn't do any those big, rich creamy notes It's more of a just a straight sipping And at forty dollars Canadian a bottle and sorry, not exported. They don't make enough of it You would not hesitate to put this in a mix. or drink it neat, throw an ice cube into it This is a proper drink for Canada D betweenetween the moose and the mountain kind of can't go wrong. So that's Western craft style whiskey And it sounds pretty darn delicious Yeah. made it they made a distinctive bottles. It's got a little taper to it, you know, they've had a little f I like the mountain in the bottom.. the mountain's a very clever idea. Just L at that a little bit of a mole on it. and it's got stamped in here, Turner Valley soil and toil So they are doing that. You know drain to drain to bottle thing. They're doing a proper craft style and again relatively small production here So you got to you got to seek this stuff out, but super Canadian and I thought for Canada D A little bit of the West cooast story And Super Canadian, ladies and gentlemen, that's what we call it Super Canadian Well, that's that's Window's Wigly for this particular July first. Thank you so much. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, Richard is at run isradio. com. That's where you'll find not only run is radio, but also the podcast it does with Carl Franklin. net Rockx. And that's where the geekouts are as well. You have that new geekout on the data centers, right Data centers of space. Space. Lately, there's been a lot of talk about what a bad idea. Data centers space I mean, I might have been likely Oh my God. I mean, seem well I was willing to give it a, you know, sometimes your knee jerk reaction is right You know You know that I'm getting since I did that talk and it's on YouTube and getting a lot of traction. So the I hype talk A whole lot of people ask me if I do a talk on how to build data centers that don't suck Oh ust the regular ones. Love that idea. Yeah. Don't suck what though? Don't suck electricity, Don't suck water, D't suck what? electricity. I would say just don't make people angry You will stop we buil data centers for a long time without making people angry. Yeah, but there weren't so many of them, you know Well, and they also think companies are behaving badly, right? Yes it is they are they are doing that gold rush thing. Yes, they are just trying to exploit every way they can. So Come anyway I pass it by a couple of organizers and you're like, sign us up. So I'm like o God, I gota write another one. Okay it now That's good. That's good.'s Uh, Richard u Also does those whiskey segments and if you like them, there are a whole bunch of them Yeah onnline at Tita TV slash whiskey And somebody's been working hard. I presume it's Kevin because there's been a bunch of new ones at it. Kevin's cranking him. He's actually on vacation. He's so exhausted from all of that But we're up to we're up to Ned. We got I went and re I watched the Ned. Oh, Ned was fun. I enjoy much fun Yeah That was your Australian story. It was one of the Australian ones, yeah. Y' maybe ten weeks behind. that we're catching up. I don't think we'll ever fully catch up, but we're down That's all right. There's plenty to listen to. How many episodes are there? There's hundreds now, right? Yeah, one hundred and forty, something likeible incredible. N not running out of whiskey, let me tell you. No, Sree No, Sirree. But I do july fourth in Snahhoma. so I suspect I'll be coming back with something American. Do they do yeah, you're gonna to go for the fireworks. That's why. Oh yeah. Well, this is this is sort of the rural area north of you know, King County there where it's the kind of place where people make their own fireworks. So it sounds like an artillery barrage most of the time So I got to go and just have so much fun Yeah they bl it blowed up good. It blowed up real good. Re off the rod. I bet you have fireworks in McCunje. Oh my God, there's pop up fireworks stores everywhere here. If you want to kill yourself Pennsylvania's a great place to be Or at least blow off the finger or two. Yeah. Yeah Yeah I don't was it Pennsyvania might I't know it was Pensylvania or Tenessee, where we on one of the road trips, we stopped at a place that had was a gas it was gasoline. Yeah and fireworks. Amunition and fireworks. Yeah. I' like this is a perfect combination. Yeah. And while we're sitting there a guy in H one with the pintil mount for the for the fifty cal on it Didn't have the gun, but he had the pin to pulled in to get gas too. Like might be in America. U Mr. Torot is thot. com That's where you'll find all of the goodies, the articles. Join the premium section and you not only get more articles, but you also get the books field Guide windows eleven Windows everywhere. the Initify windows, you can get them yourself, of course If you want to Now we do this show Every Wednesday, eleven AM Pacific two PM Eastern eighteen hundred UTC. You can watch us do it live if you're in the club, of course you've get it behind the velvet rope access in the Club Troh Discord But the unwashed masses can also watch live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick And they're really unwashed at Xs, if you really want to hang out with the unwashed masses. X is the place to be. After the fact on demand versions of the show are available audio and video at the website twwit. tv slash Ww. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly and of course B best thing to do be subscribing your favorite Get it automatically That way, the minute we arere done, which we are Have a great fourth of July, haveave a great first of July, Richard and a fourth of July. You get double Do they do fireworks in Canada or just o yeah The it in a much more controlled way. Well, everything's a little saner in Canada We used to have here in Petalumas what they called safe ins Sane fireworks, which means they were boring They still thought that was too dangerous, mostly because of the fire danger, so we don't even have those anymore You just have tos California, the whole place the Tinderbox. It is. really it actually is probably wise not to have people lighting things especially things that get out of control so easily. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend U Enjoy the World Cup And we will see you next one. Play Morocco next. When is that?