Windows Weekly 980: Running Outta Tolkiens

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. We're going to debunk that recall security vulnerability. Talk about Paul's hands-on review of two new Windows laptops with the latest Snapdragon X2 Elite chip in it. Plus, a lot of AI news and Xbox 2. It's Windows Weekly next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Clips. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Farad and Richard Campbell. Episode 980, recorded Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Running out of Tolkien's. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest from Redmond. I was thinking of calling this the Redmond Gazette or something like that. The Redmond Report. Dredman Report. That's all right. Europe continues. Doing his best impression of Walter Winchell. Hello, Mr. T. Hello, Leo. In beautiful Mexico City, therat.com is his website. Richard Campbell is in Australia today. Richard, are you in Sydney? Yeah, I'm in Sydney proper. Right downtown, actually, George Street, across from the old train station in the hills in here. We've got a conference for the next couple of days. Wave to a satire. I guess he's in town. Apparently he's in town. What's the conference, Richard? NDC Sydney. NDC stands for Norwegian Developers Conference, or the increasingly incorrect Norwegian Developers Conference. The Norwegian Developers Conference in Sydney. It's also in London. and Porto. You should find somewhere farther from Norway. The good news is they still actually do one in Norway. So it's Norway. The Norwegian part is just vestigial? Yeah. Okay. It's owned by Norwegians. How about that? That matters. That counts. Yes. It's owned by Norwegians. For now. Winful. You know, Sacha was on our minds yesterday during MacBreak Weekly because we talked about Tim Cook's retirement, announced retirement September 1st, and a new guy coming in, John Ternus, who has been the hardware chief at 21, 20 years of that. Did you see my deja vu photo? No, but I will. I'll look for it. Is it in the show notes? I'll send it to you right now. Well, and you probably will talk about this later, but one of the reasons Satya came up, because people were saying, oh, he won't do anything to change, you know, that Apple, it's all baked in by now. And I pointed out. Like a pie? Yeah, like a pie. I pointed out that when Satya Nadella came in as the new CEO, he made massive changes. He dumped the Nokia acquisition, killed the Surface RT that had already been built and was in, you know, the warehouse. I mean, I feel like, oh, you're thinking of Surface Mini. Mini, I mean, yeah. Look, he will make change. The question is going to be how long it takes. Will he wait a little while? Yeah, I think with Tim Cook, because they endlessly promote themselves, they kept talking. He's like, Steve Jobs said, don't make decisions based on what you think I would do. And we were like, look, it's impossible not to do that to some degree. But then you look at all the stuff he's done, and you're like, no, you didn't think of him at all. this is the picture from Therat.com of Ternus on the left and Tim on the right and I saw that and I was like oh this is really reminiscent of something Stephen Elop and Sachin Adela how did they not know that this would be referenced that's just terrible the Microsoft Nokia thing worked out great oh that's what this was from because Elop is the CEO of Nokia and he's holding that beautiful phone we all loved. Yeah, we still have them and love them. Everything's going great there. Was that it? I can't tell. It's probably a 1520, but yeah. Man, I miss that phone. I would love that phone again. Yeah, no kidding. We've lost the script on certain things. But also just like Apple briefly did the iPhone 5C where it's like unapologetically plastic. And it's like, guys, come on. these things were solid polycarbonate so you could dent it and it wouldn't lose the color because the color was permeated there was an ad where a guy threw it up in the air and hit it with a baseball bat I one time in the Boston subway jumped up to grab an exposed girder that I could reach and then my phone fell out of my front pocket, it was a 920 probably blue and the screen popped right off, you could see all of the guts inside I cracked that thing back together like a little lobster, and it was fine. You know? No problem. Yep. They were ravenous. I miss that, for sure. You know? Yeah. Just, like, those things are solid. Yeah. I kept my 950 shrine for a long time. You know? A little corner with a couple of candles. A little band, right? A little band wistfully. Unapologetically canceled. That and my band, too. They sat together in a saddle. And you're Zune? Is Zune in that? Is Zune in that? Zune would be the brown one. Of course, the brown one. We could all make a graveyard of lost. Yeah. Lost tech we adored once. Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of, we were talking about it yesterday, the pump. Pilot and the pre. Wow. Yeah. The kin. The pre is a good example of what could have been kind of scenario. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of that stuff. Like the Amiga falls into this category. The Amiga, your first love. Yeah. Or maybe your first love was Delphi. Maybe it was your first love. No, Delphi came afterwards. But, yeah, as an adult, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Atari 400 was my first love. Yeah. I mean, I had a Commodore 64, but I, yeah, the Amiga was. Nobody loved the Commodore 64. Well, I mean. It's really great. 40 columns 64s. There was even a song. How about the Vic 20? Remember that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. When 40 columns is just too much. Anyway, we're not here for nostalgia. I just thought I'd mention. Because to his great credit, I think, Satya Nadella took the reins and, I mean, literally took them. Yeah, and made it his own. And steered the ship immediately without a delay. and Cook's going to be executive chairman. It's not like he's going anywhere. Right. To me, the Cook thing is more like Gates and Ballmer, where Ballmer becomes CEO, but Gates is still around, and there was a lot of friction there for three, five years, whatever it was. I mean, it took a while for him to kind of let go. And I wonder, Cook's always going to be looking over his shoulder. He specifically said he wanted Gates around. He wanted him doing reviews and stuff again. Right. I mean, this is a different era. Yeah, but he was also building a version of Microsoft that didn't allow for sexual misconduct, and that's just a mix with Bill Gates. That's not a thing. Too soon, man. Too soon. Oh, geez. Well, with that sobering thought. Yeah, I mean, I don't – we'll see. I'm really curious. There's some terribleness to Apple under Tim Cook that I think needs to be addressed, and I hope he does address some of that stuff. and I'll be surprised. You definitely come from the hardware space. You see where the winning cult is inside of Apple. It's very protégate. Right. I mean, but, you know, Satra coming to Microsoft to become CEO, we have an engineer, and it feels right, you know, for whatever reason. Apple has never really had an engineer CEO before. So this is good, right? Well, it's interesting. I mean, he's a product guy, I would say, for all of Tim Cook's experience, 15 years presenting. And, you know, he obviously knew the products inside and out or whatever, but not really a product guy. You know, not like Steve Jobs was. And no one is like Steve Jobs was. But this guy makes hardware. Like, he understands this part of it. And that's Apple. That's still the core of Apple. So, yeah. I think it's good. I mean, the other thing we're talking about is that Apple's hardware has almost always been good, but Apple's software has slightly especially been cast. It's always been terrible. Let's not pretend this is a new thing. It's always been terrible. I don't know if this fixes that problem. Well, it doesn't fix it just by him being there, but we'll see. We'll see. That's the thing. You know, as a CEO, he'll have maybe some different priorities from Tim Cook. We don't know him very well. We don't know what to expect. No, he's a real non-entity. I mean, I've been looking everywhere. and there's very little you know, German says well he's decisive like Steve was and Tim Cook is more of a consensus builder, but I don't know if that's true I don't know either again, what's going to make the difference is what we see happen so I don't know, well then the first like I said up front, I mean how quickly he institutes whatever changes to me is the big deal so we'll see I don't know. Yeah. Sasha was a largely unknown for like two years before he was CEO because he took over server and tools, right, from Bob Muglia. And suddenly was very visible because he was the point man for Azure. Just at a time when they really do something with Azure. When Nadella took over, did he favor Azure? I mean, were his changes related to it? It was his job. Yeah. No, I mean, that's why he was made. The general direction was set before he arrived. I mean, we had different terms for this, but it was like three clouds or something. I don't even remember anymore. Yeah, three screens in a cloud. Three screens in a cloud, yeah. Microsoft was going to cloud computing regardless. So in that sense, knowing that this would be the new era for Microsoft, he probably did make a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, one of the arguments was that when you're in the cloud, then Windows isn't as important. You want whatever operations you want, including Linux. and, hey, your CEO was the guy who said Linux was a cancer, so is that going to be good? It's hard to step those things back. Yeah. But, yeah. I mean, Balmer had a perception problem. I think he had all the ideas that were implemented over time with Nadella, but he knew that the board and Wall Street were never going to accept it coming from him, and he did the right thing. You know, he took the sword. he'd done his main job which was get them through the Department of Justice crisis and that had happened so it had wound up really in 2011 in the end and so from that point on it's like alright dude yeah I mean you know and as Bill Gates further stepped back from his at that time chief science office or chief software architect or whatever it was software architect You know, Ray Ozzy came in and obviously was instrumental to getting Azure literally started. I mean, and this was under Balmer. And that did pretty good. You know, it's still doing okay. Yeah, I mean, I think for Apple, the big issue is going to be the transition to an AI first. Yeah. One would argue that's what Cook bobbled. Yeah. Or Cook said, look, I've done my 15 years. This is a good place. He said this, actually, literally. We're financially strong. We've got a great product lineup coming out. Of course he would say that. But all of that's not untrue. Well, you don't know what their product lineup is. Ben Thompson said that too in Stratechery, that this is a turning point. But it is clear that this is the fork in the road now for every company is what's our AI strategy, right? I feel like, look, when Tim Cook took over for Apple, one of the criticisms became over time. He doesn't have this hit like Jobs had. He doesn't have the vision. He had the big back-to-back product hits, right? But the truth is, if Steve Jobs was still alive today, they would never have duplicated that success. There's no opportunity for that anymore. So he had some kind of middle-of-the-road hits or whatever. But I feel like Jobs was completely against the iPad Mini. It was like the first thing Cook did was shift the iPad Mini. Sure. So for John Ternus, though, there's no way Apple is going to continue its rocket trajectory for revenues or market cap, however you want to measure it. This is going to be a new era, and they're big. I mean, Inertia is great, and they have a really good ecosystem that helps keep people there. But, you know, we'll see. It's going to be interesting. Tim Cook might have walked away at the right time because you can look at that rocket trajectory and say, I did that, and then maybe – Hand it off? So you can see – Like a relay race? Yeah, and now the next guy is like, you know, it's not going to be as exciting to some degree unless he does something else that's maybe more product-related that is exciting. So, you know, we'll see. But, you know, Steve Jobs' success was never going to be duplicated. Tim Cook's financial success is never going to be duplicated. Yeah, he turned it into a $4 trillion company. Yeah, not bad. Although the article I wrote about it, I put up Microsoft's market cap and Apple's market cap, and they're almost identical. So when you look at, you know, Sachin Nadella coming in, in his case, I think 2013, 2014, Tim Cook was 2011. They were both in the $300 and something billion market cap, and then both got up to $4 trillion at some point. Microsoft is back down closer to $3 trillion at this point. Isn't that interesting? So maybe it's not those companies. Maybe it's the time. The time, yeah. Well, but they benefited from completely different things. You know, Apple is so strong in consumer and devices, and Microsoft is not. And Microsoft's success was all on Azure growth, really. I mean, just in the perception of the business. Right, really. I mean, the class. I mean, I don't want to say they're complementary, but they're different. They're just different. They're both very big, successful companies, and they're both freaking terrible, by the way. Let's not forget that part of it. Evil, what do you mean? Yeah. I mean, both of them rode in shitification to success. I mean, they both did, so whatever. You can't. I would argue what was in common is the investment environment, that there was all of this money to put into a time when tech was dominant. Well, and we may be in a new wave. I mean, there's a lot of money flowing for AI right now. Yeah, and it's going to be flowing for the hills pretty soon. In the Discord. I bet Tim got solid advice from Apple Intelligence. I have not. It's like, hey, Siri, should I retire right now? Yes. It's raining. No, it isn't. What? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail you with that. No, it's fine. I didn't put anything in about Apple because I wasn't sure. There's not much to say, honestly. We have to wait and see. Tim Cook is rightfully celebrated for making a lot of money for Apple. But the one thing I would just point out to enthusiasts in our space, right, is Microsoft roughly is successful. Same sort of trajectory on the chart there. everyone in our world is bitching and moaning about the quality of Windows 11 about Co-Pilot everywhere there's a lot of complaining about what I would call a certification and for some reason we're also but now we're celebrating him for financial success over on the Apple side and it's like guys we're doing the same thing with Microsoft it's just that you're so firmly in this community that you only see the bad stuff but you can celebrate Apple's success for some reason you don't even use Apple products who cares Like, it's a bizarre, I don't know, double standard maybe. I don't know what to call it. But I would credit Microsoft's financial successes to Amy Hood, frankly. But whatever, whatever, who cares? I mean, hugely successful companies, both of them. And not necessarily as friendly to consumers or users or developer partners or whatever you want to call them, as maybe they should be. And I think the problem for Apple is that they are so aggressively promoting how awesome they are all the time, it flies in the face of what they actually do. you know and I have that little bit of a problem you know seeing him give the golden award to the idiot child that runs our country that you know we're going to suck up to authoritarian regimes like China you know and it's just there's this terribleness there that I think in the name of shareholder value the funny thing is I said to somebody when the news first came out on Monday I said And, oh, Tim obviously just can't take it anymore having to deal with government. Yeah, except that that's going to be the job he's going to do. That's his reward. That's what he's going to do. Like, should he be getting something good for this? Well, I think we decided yesterday that he loves Apple. And he decided wisely, at least from the point of view of Apple's future, that since he's got those relationships and they're good relationships, maintain those and take some heat off of time. I was going to say, the nice thing about what he's doing is the new CEO doesn't have to deal with that stuff. And he can focus on the product roadmap. And it's, by the way, not just the U.S., it's China. And Tim's got a great relationship with China, right? It's the rest of the world. Everybody loves Tim Cook. And John Turnus can be the jerk. It doesn't matter. He doesn't seem like a jerk. He seems like a really good guy. We'll see. We'll see. They put somebody we all agree really is a good guy, Johnny Surugi. Oh, my God. The guy in charge of Silicon. That guy is a genius and was going to leave Apple. That's right. Right. And he threw everything he wanted at him. Yep. And you need to retain that talent. Like that guy is why Apple Silicon exists. So he's basically taken Ternus' job and more. He's added to the portfolio. He's in charge of all hardware now. Yep. Which makes a lot of sense. But that's the guy you want. You know, you see these people on stage at industry shows sometimes. There was a guy, he's gone, he's at Adobe now, but the guy used to run the computational photography stuff at Google probably as long ago as like the Pixel 2 came out and talked about, you know, the photography stuff. And you listen to this guy and you're like, oh, my God. Yeah. Like this guy's a genius. Like he's like, yes. And I feel like the guy running Apple hardware now is in that category, you know, kind of a, I don't know, Dave Cutler is a little bit of a stretch maybe. But that kind of personality where you're like, yeah, you need this guy, you know, running the show. He knows what he's doing. It's good. All right. Now we can talk about Windows. Yeah. So Apple's doing great, but Windows is doomed. No, no, no. Just kidding. But am I? No, I am. So, this actually happened right before we started the show last week, and I didn't look into it closely enough. But the same security researcher who, after Microsoft announced recall, said that there were all these security problems, and the way he discovered that was by pulling it out of an insider build and removing all the security controls, setting off a six-month delay, which was like seriously, has two years later come crawling out of the woodwork to say that he has, yes, discovered a security vulnerability and recall. Now, this time, to this guy's credit, he told Microsoft ahead of time. That's what you're supposed to do as a security researcher, right? And Microsoft investigated the issue he raised and said, yeah, this is not a vulnerability. We're not doing anything. That was the end of it. It was like, okay, sorry. And it basically has to do with the difference between the vault, meaning the secure enclave that's protected by virtualization-based security that has your recall data. And it's the sort of thing, it's not quite a social engineering attack, but it almost is. I have problems with people claiming vulnerability when the first step to reproduce it is, all right, sign in as a user. Wait, what? Sorry, you're saying I have to be using the computer for this to work? Well, that's, I mean, if you can get into the computer, I can tell you there's a lot more data in my web browser than there is in Recall. What are you talking about? Well, also there's a little irony in all of the kerfuffle about recall because now everybody's putting OpenClaw on their system and giving it access to everything and then having it sent it out to the third parties. There is not a modern personal computing platform on this planet that doesn't use some form of screenshot-based technology to do image and text recognition in real time. They all do it. There's something on your Pixel phone called Pixel Screenshots. screenshots. I mean, AI is really good. You can test this for yourself. Go to Google Photos or whatever photo service you use and search for something you know is in text in a photo somewhere, like the sign of a store or something. Find that stuff in two seconds. No problem. And that's why they do this. Anyway, look, yes, I suppose once you've signed in as the user with that data in recall, I suppose, oh, and then you have to go through Windows Hello ESS and also sign into recall to access it. But once you've done that, yeah, I mean, anyone could access the data. What? Come on. Look, the negative reaction to recall was so bizarre to me. It still is. It is not a feature I want to use. That has nothing to do with security. It's as secure as anything else that's running in Windows when you're using it. Actually, that's incorrect. It's way more secure than anything else you're running in Windows when you're using it. It's a different level of protection. It's actually kind of unique. But for me, it's also not interesting and particularly useful. But, you know, this is one of those empathy things. I think, especially in our community, a lot of technical people are like, who would want this? And it's like, well, not you, but you understand some people might, right? Like, other people have different needs. I mean, some people think visually. They're like, I was searching for that green sweater on Amazon, but I can't find the link. And you can type in green sweater, and recall, we'll find that pretty damn quick, because AI is really good at that. As long as you're on the right machine. Yes, right, which is my initial complaint. I told the story, but when I met the guy who apparently invented this, he said, listen, I got a couple of concerns. He's like, here we go. I'm like, oh, no, they're not the concerns everyone else is going to raise. This is completely different. I said, I need this to be, this won't make sense to me unless it syncs to the cloud, and I get this on every computer. And he goes, yeah, no, we know. That's in the plans. It's an idea. But we knew we needed to nail the one computer use case first for security and all that stuff. And this is before anyone raised any issues, by the way. Like, they had already secured it really well. But, yeah, I mean, so whatever. Anyway, I feel obligated to mention this topic, even though it's ridiculous and pointless. But, you know, whatever. Anyway, Microsoft said, yeah, we're not doing this. We're not changing anything. It's working exactly right. Yeah. Yep. So there's that. There's that. Last week, probably Friday, or was it early this week? It doesn't matter. Sometime since the last show, Microsoft released new builds across every single Insider channel. Wow. All four. That means there were two, right? There were two in Canary and two in Release Preview, right? Because they're, well, in Release Preview's case, they're 24 and 25 each too. Most of this is not super interesting. You know, the Canary stuff is stuff we've already seen elsewhere, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. but to me the release preview thing is interesting because this is what we're going to see in Patch Tuesday in May. Okay. And there's actually some features in here. So this has been kind of a quiet year for Big Bang features. Yeah. None of these are going to change anyone's life per se, not in May, but one of them will have longer-term implications. So there's the Xbox mode, which is going to replace game mode, which used to be called Full Screen Experience, right, was only on the gaming handheld, so that's coming to all PCs. That's cool. You know, improvements across things like File Explorer, haptics, if you have like a certain kind of a smart pen, for example. The drag tray is being renamed to drop tray, and it doesn't matter because you still just want to disable that thing. It's the most terrible UI I've ever seen. And some other small things. But the big one, which, again, won't actually impact anyone the day it's released, is that Windows 11 will now support agents on the taskbar. That thing they announced back in November at Ignite, where, remember, Pavan D'Avalori got in a lot of trouble for having the temerity to tweet about the one session he would be at, and everyone just crapped on Windows and said, nobody wants this, which is a lot like the recall thing. You know, nobody wants this, said one guy who doesn't want anything to change. You know, it's like some people want this. So we'll see what this looks like. This is the question. Is this a little twitching icon? Like, oh, I have something for you. Oh, guess what? Yes. Well, hopefully not twitching, but I don't. This kind of comparison is a little strange to me. But in Microsoft's language for this, what they're saying is that agents will appear as if they are apps, meaning there will be a icon on the taskbar. You can use that icon to click on it and whatever UI will come up to thing on the agent, and it will give you – you can see what it's doing. If it needs to get your permission for something or get some feedback or just tell you it's done, it can pop up a toast notification like Windows apps do. So they're trying to fit it into the UI. Normal app flow, right? Looks like every other app. So we'll see. I mean, I don't think that the initial, you know, two or three agents that will work with us, you know, the things we get through Microsoft 365, like Researcher, are going to be broadly interesting to people. But there will be others, and there will be third-party agents, of course, and we will see. It will be interesting to see if big companies in this space, you know, Anthropik and OpenAI, et cetera, take advantage of this UI somehow with their own products. because there's no reason they're agents and things can't do this too. I mean, they have their own UIs, and it makes sense. You think ultimately Microsoft will publish an interface? Oh, definitely. Any of these tools can. Yeah, I mean, builds coming up, this would be the obvious time for that. There must be something out there in some early preview, I don't know. I'm curious to see this. You know? Yeah. So I don't find this offensive yet, you know, which is sort of like saying, I don't see PC makers bundling software on a PC to be offensive. Oh, have you looked at the software? You know, so it depends. It depends on what it is. I just think back to the sort of Windows 8, the flippy, twisty little, you know, click me, click me, icon. The old Mac OS X thing where the icon would just bounce and you had to address it or it would never stop. It's like, let me know when this is annoying. You know, boing, boing, boing. Yep, it would just never stop. Never stop. So sometimes people are software UIs get in front of people and things change. We'll see. We'll see if this makes sense. But this is what they came up with, and we're getting it. So was it November to now is what, six months, not even? Yeah, five months, four months, five months, I don't know, whatever that is. It's pretty quick. I mean, they must have been working on it for a while. And we'll see. We'll see what it looks like. I would like to take a break before we talk about those new Snapdragon laptops. Okay. Because I know there's one still sitting on the doorstep in Pennsylvania. The best one is back home. That's okay. These are actually very interesting. Yeah. No, I'm very interested. This is the new Snapdragon X2 model. 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Now let's take a look at some snappy Snapdragons. Yeah. It's going to be hard to show it to you. How snappy are they? Yeah, they are snappy. So there are three levels of Snapdragon X2 chips. No, actually there are four levels. There are more models than that, but there's plus on the low end, elite, and then elite extreme. The one that's waiting for me back in Pennsylvania is the Asus, which is the Elite Extreme. So obviously that's of interest. But I got an IdeaPad, let's see, 7X, yes, that has an Elite version of the chip, and then a 5X, which is actually a larger laptop, but, you know, whatever, that has the Plus. And if you know anything about these chips and the previous gen chips, there was also like an X. So there was X, X+, X Elite. This time they don't have just an X2. But although I feel like the chip that's in the bigger of these two laptops is what we would have called last time just X or X2, I guess. Meaning it's the lowest end version. And this is all binning, right? Like the extreme part is it's extremely unlikely for the whole chip to work. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, but that's the assumption. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe by this point, I mean, obviously, they still are planning for tiers to some degree. I mean, you know, they have to have a range of chips at different price points, et cetera. It's weird to me how many elite models there are, and that's probably almost certainly, I should say, binning of some kind, right? That's the most of it. Yeah. So it's the most likely outcome in manufacturing. But, you know, I went through the kind of setup rigmarole I do on both of these things, and they're both, you know, the lower end one, which is the bigger one, is much like the HP Omnibook 5 from last year. This was the one I bought with my own money. It was $500 or $600 at the time. It's the lowest end Snapdragon X chip you can get, and it is wonderful. And this, the, I'll try to, it's kind of pointless to show it, but it's just like this is very much like, to me, the successor to that, right? It's that kind of a thing. But the other one, so this is, you know, this is your basic Copilot Plus PC, right? 16 gigs of RAM, 512 gigs of storage. The one with the higher-end chip, though, has 32 gigs of RAM and I think a terabyte of storage, I'm sure. but it occurred to me after doing all the setup on both I was like you know I should test games on this again this is so I'll write this up and I'm going to record some Hands on Windows episodes tomorrow so I think I'm going to do that as part of that as part of those recordings but the games I tested I would say the ones the first one I tried didn't work it was weird I wanted to try something a little newer than the stuff I had been testing so I installed the latest Doom game, the Dark Ages. It comes up fine, it looks fine, it starts, and then it does a little thing where it's going to run the game, and then the game never comes on. You can hear it happening, but you can't see it. So, based on my experience since then, I think I'm going to try it again, because I realized later that the AutoSR stuff wasn't running automatically, and there were some other things that I could probably do to make it work. That one I'm not sure about, but after that, it was like Half-Life 2. Yeah, some kind of DirectX bonk or something. Yeah, I've never seen this before. I don't know. But Doom 2016, which, you know, did run, I think, on the first X. Control, which is actually a really resource-intensive game. It's a game I have on the MacBook Air I have, and it does not run well on that laptop at all. But it runs awesome on this thing. It recorded me to install the .NET Framework 3.5, and I was like, are you serious? Like, are you kidding me? But okay. But it runs great. And then Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, which I think is the first of those two games now, but eventually three games. And I had to install the EA app to get that going. But other than the Doom game, So these are all from Steam as well, right? These are not ARM native. They're emulated. Yep. And they all run great. Like, great. I mean, like, not like, oh, this is okay. I mean, like, no, this is playable. It's 100% playable. So that, to me, is actually a big leap, you know, forward, because the game story on the first gen was like, eh, you don't want it for that. You know, I mean, you could find games. You'd have to really look, and, you know, you could look this up and figure out which ones do work. Did you feel the difference between an Elite and a Plus? Yeah, well, so, right, so I didn't, so at first I was like, I'm just going to put it on the Elite, right? But then I was like, hold on a second. Let me try the Plus, you know. The only one I've installed on there so far is Half-Life 2, which, you know, again, 20-something years old. This is an older game, but looks awesome, right? I mean, they run on a watch. Yeah, it runs identically, right? But, of course, it's an older game, but it runs beautifully on a plus. So that's kind of cool. But, I mean, day-to-day, just, you know, you run, you know, web browsers or I use Affinity for graphics or whatever it is. It's just normal. Like, you know, you don't really – I could have the biggest portable workstation, you know, with NVIDIA graphics, or I could have this little X2 Plus thing, and those apps all run the same. Like, they just work. Anyway, I'm excited to finally have something, so I'll continue with that. And then I'll see if the extreme is actually extreme when I get home. But, yeah, I'm glad this is finally happening. It took a long time. Okay. So there's no, I'm trying to figure out which one I want. Yeah, I mean, give it some time. Obviously, there'll be like a rollout over time from different computer makers and different levels and so forth. And, you know, we'll see what availability is like. You know, remember the highest end X Elite, I'm having trouble with the names here, was not available anywhere, right? Right. You shipped it in that dev box and I think went well. I got one in my weirdo dev box Yeah and that it And it was just I think there was it might have been in like a Samsung Galaxy book maybe but it didn it wasn broadly available And so we'll see if we have that problem this time around. But I'm curious, that's going to be the big thing. Well, that and I came here, I really punished myself. And I did this on purpose. I had review laptops I had to come here with. So I didn't bring any Snapdragon laptops here. The only one that I have is the one I had here, which is an X Plus, like a 14-inch laptop, which is fine, you know, whatever. But I kind of want to compare this to, like, Surface Laptop, which has kind of the mainstream X Elite chip that's the most common. Well, and Aaron lies the question. Will there be a Surface X too? Yeah. Yeah, I think there will be. Yeah. And will I buy it? That I cannot answer. So we'll see. I don't know. I mean, I just reviewed today. I've been in the Surface ecosystem for a while, but it was Dell before that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I've never really owned a Lenovo. Yeah, the ThinkPads are awesome. Yeah. Well, these are IdeaPads, but, you know, they also do ThinkPad. And I've been handing out old HP laptops like crazy, and I have nothing but respect for them. Yeah, no, HPs are fantastic. I like the Surface Laptop 7, which is probably, or maybe the HV Omnibook 5. I mean, those are my two favorite laptops. Even at the new doubled price? Well, that's a problem. But, I mean, that's not shareable. I'm sure that's going to be universal. Yeah. I mean. I love that. I think Pad X1 Carbon. I think it's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Although that whole X1 Carbon line were great machines, regardless of the chips. It's different. The only thing holding those things back is they're Intel-based, right? So you have those kind of reliability issues. And to keep that happening, Intel and Lenovo have a partnership where they create this like Aura edition. They have a couple, a handful of, you know, unique features. Yeah, that's what I have. It's an Aura. Yeah. It's like they're not, the Aura stuff's not particularly interesting. But this is that truck backing up beeping sound story where it's like, why isn't AMD on this thing? because the Intel of Truck has arrived with a bucket full of money. And, you know, they're trying to keep that going. I'd give anything to have an X1 with a Snapdragon in it. That's never going to happen. My impression of Panther Lake is pretty good, isn't it? I mean, it's really good, yeah. But it still has that same, you know, the little roulette wheel. Sorry, I don't know what that's starting to say for me. Where you open the laptop and you're like, all right, let's see what's going to happen this time. Oh, it's going to reboot from scratch. Okay, fine. I guess I'll wait. You never know what you're going to get. It's a box of chocolates. But yeah, the performance is incredible. The GPU in that thing is amazing. I'm still picking around to see which corporate buyers are putting ARM into their employees' hands. It's pretty reticent. It bugs me that I still see someone write a review of one of these things, and they're like, well, you've got to check the compatibility of software. It's like, no, you don't. No, you don't. It just works. I mean, there are esoteric older things. Like, you might have some random printer from 1987 or something or whatever. But, like, mainstream software just works, you know? And even games, to some degree, are starting to just work. I mean, this is the final frontier, so. Do you think it's going to replace Intel? Like, Apple replaced Intel? I pray to God it does. But, like, no. I think, you know, you've got to remember the big difference between, like, Windows and the Mac or just Microsoft and Apple in the kind of computing space is just the whole partnership thing and the diversity of choices, and that's a double-edged sword. You know, it leads to complexity, but it would be better for the entire ecosystem and for everyone using it for it just to switch to ARM for sure. I'd like to see the diversity be like ARM from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and whatever other company instead of get rid of Intel especially. So maybe my next machine should be an ARM machine. Oh, no, I remember. I don't use Windows. I use Linux, and that's one. So that's, yeah, Linux and ARM is still experimental in some ways, but I guess, like, the latest Ubuntu works pretty well depending on the laptop. I'm sure. I'll wait a year. I mean, I just got to see what happens. Yeah, see what happens. Yeah. I know what's really amazing is I use Claude to fix things. There was a little hesitation, you know, the mouse would freeze for a second. And I said, what's going on? And immediately said, oh, yeah, I see in the logs that it's trying to sleep the second screen, but there is no second screen right now because you unplug it in. So I'm just going to turn off that sleep in the kernel, and you'll be fine. And it did. It fixed it. I feel like I might have found that, but I know this is probably not. This is part of the back of the book thing, But I feel like when you switch platforms, whether it's today or 1985 or whatever year, you have this software, and it might not be on the thing you're switching to. And it's like, well, I've got to figure that out. And I think that's gotten a lot easier because a lot of stuff now is just kind of web-based or it's just cross-platform or whatever it is. But I do feel like there's like a Vibe coding personal software thing that could happen that could put things over the top. I think I talked about this recently. My AI is a great sysadmin. Yeah, just be like, look, well, just like you want to run Linux, you run a Mac, whatever it is. And you're like, but I have this thing on Windows. I need it over here. How do we do that? If you're a developer to any degree, you could do that right now pretty easily, honestly. Oh, yeah. If you're a normal person, I feel like. That's why they've got co-work. Yeah. Perplexity, computer, and all of these app-based tools that are more than chat. that they're more like coding tools, and I think that that's what's going to happen. Literally, yeah. And then, you know, you have a conversation about it until it's exactly what you want. And, you know, depending on how complex it is, I think being a coder still would help, you know. But we're rapidly moving into an area where that won't be necessary anymore. So I think that's going to help solve problems, too. It's going to be a big problem for the App Store, I'll tell you that. you know it's like when you can just design your own iPhone apps or whatever so you can expect John Tarnas now to fight that one kicking and screaming but I mean eventually it's just going to happen there's no way around it we gotta see what he does with Siri yeah you know it's too soon I guess because WWDC is less than a month away but yeah yeah that agenda is cast actually it's more than a month away but it's not it's probably already recorded Yeah, but that's going to be an interesting thing, too. Is it Tim Cook? Is it a little bit of both? Does Tim Cook kind of MC it and then hand off to other people? You know, we don't know, obviously. But there's a reason why the handoff is September 1, because that's right before the new iPhone announcement. Yeah. So that's when you get off to a good start. You can have a good quarter. Yeah, that should be fine. Okay. Sorry. We have these are all completely unrelated to each other, but I didn't know where else to put them. So the first one was a bunch of announcements across OneDrive, which is really OneDrive for business and SharePoint. And I kind of went through the list, and I was like, do these apply to consumer? Not really. Like, I'm not going to write about this. Who cares? But then there was one thing that said OneDrive supports Markdown natively. I'm like, wait, what? And there was a link to another announcement, and this does impact consumers. So this is consumer and business. and you can now view with formatting. So similar to when you will load a Markdown document, it's a Notepad in Windows 11, it will not display the codes, it will display like the formatting. So it does that. You can edit Markdown files and you can do that in a split view if you want, which is kind of the old-fashioned way to do it, but you know, the code view over here and then the layout, like HTML layout on the other side. So you can do side-by-side. Formatting toolbars, you don't have to learn the syntax. et cetera, et cetera. And from that, there's the button that's up on the left. It's like create or upload, drop down menu. And one of the choices now is a Markdown file, right? And this makes sense. I mean, Markdown is everywhere. This is the plain text format that is basically powering all this AI stuff we always talk about. And it's also really good just for light formatting. Plus it's plain text, so it's always going to work no matter where you are. It's really readable. It's great. So that's cool. I mean, I wouldn't touch OneDrive with your computer, but that's right. Markdown is the lingua franca for AI now. Yeah. We've all agreed. Right. I've just randomly been using it. I've been using Markdown since probably. Oh, I love Markdown. Yeah. Before it was cool. Somewhere in 2012 to 2015 because I use it for the books, and then I just use it for all writing now. I've been doing that for years. That's probably just an excellent nature to you, yeah. Yeah. I met a guy in, well, somewhere else in Mexico, but last weekend who was a writer. And he said, he figured out how they write about technology. He's like, you're going to think this is crazy. But I write everything now in just the plain text thing. I'm like, I don't think that's crazy. That's what I do. I'm like, yeah. He was like, I've never met anyone that does this. Yeah, there's nobody smarter than the guy who agrees with you. Well, but as a writer, right? To me, that's the interesting thing about it. a professional writer who was like, yeah, no, I just, I don't want these distractions. I'm like, no. Who needs a ruler when you're writing a story? You don't need, you know, invitation. It's like, you don't drive up anymore. I mean, it's kind of like how people used to write before computers, you know? Yeah. It's the same thing. This is, I'm living flowers for Algernon. I'm basically going to devolve into the point where my computing stuff is all just text mode now. I don't even care anymore. I don't need graphics. I don't need your stinking mouse. You know? I can do keyboard shortcuts. I do everything in the command line. I mean, yeah, so many people living in the command line these days. No, it's like a CLI world now, which is, you know, like Macintosh in 1983. I know it did not invent the GUI, but the first kind of mainstream GUI that everyone was kind of aware of. I mean, this is like 40-something years later, and it's like, are we really going back to before that? Yeah, sort of we are. I did a .NET Rocks episode about being a CLI world. It's like your first interface should be a CLI. And your last interface, as I decline into my senility and CLI. Yeah, it's going to be like a – we need like PETSki, so you can have like little character graphics, and you can have like the little pulsometer or whatever you call it is going to be like just text. Beep, beep, beep. This is very, very, very, very, very. Just hype. I want him to be M-. Leo has concluded his production of his life. That will be the case. It will just be like that. He's just going across the screen. I love the little Claude Cone guy. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. So we talked last week about Microsoft raising the price of Surface PCs And the reasons for that, and not just their component shortage and all the other terribleness, but, you know, they're not a big player in this space. They don't really get good pricing on this kind of stuff. But now we have rumors from Windows Central. I'm sorry. Actually, it's from someone on Twitter. But of the first next wave of Surface PCs. So it's going to be Intel Core Ultra 3, 5, and 7-based surfaces, and then in the summer, Snapdragon X2 Plus and Elite-based. No, I'm sorry. Excuse me. Yeah, there is. I'm sorry. X2 Plus and Elite-based Surface PCs. According to this person, he says Microsoft is not planning to offer any Surface PCs with the highest-end X2 Elite Extreme SOC, only X2 Plus and Elite. But those are kind of like the mainstream models to me. So, I mean, that kind of makes sense. That may help Richard make his decision because it looks like you're not going to be able to get the awesome, you know, the really high-end version. We'll see. I'll call you the question, do you need it, right? No. No, I don't need it, but I want to. You don't need any of these. I don't need all kinds of things that I want. Yeah, exactly. I would like to be entitled. Could you just leave me alone? No. I, you know, it's, why can't I just be like that? I don't, yeah, I know. Well, that's the point. I mean, that, that's why that HP Omnibook five was such a refreshing thing. You know, PC makers send me these things to review. They're often the highest inversions of what they have. And it's like, I just reviewed a laptop that costs over three grand to start, you know? Yeah. So you buy this thing as five, 600 bucks today, 800, 850, whatever. But, and it's wonderful. You're like, oh, these things can actually be great. Like, who knew? Incremental difference between the $1,000 laptop and the $3,000 laptop is small. Yeah, it depends on what you're doing, you know, obviously. But, yeah. So, there'll be something for everybody, I guess. And then I just, I don't know, this doesn't mean anything to anybody probably, but Microsoft has a rewards program. It's basically a way to bribe users into using Bing, from what I can tell. And they've started emailing people that are active in the program, so I haven't gotten this email, to tell them about changes coming to the program, which is going to involve having three levels. It's going to be like a member level and then silver and gold. And where you're at is going to be based on your activity, I guess, using these Microsoft services online and stuff. So this is tied into Xbox to some degree. it's tied into Bing, like I said, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, you know, whatever. And, you know, like other rewards programs, you build up points, and then you can redeem them for certain things. So, like, you know, use Bing for a year, then you get, like, a $5 Microsoft Store gift card or something. You know, it's like whatever. But I do think for certain people, if you're of this bent, this, you know, some people just fall into this and love it, you know. I just look at this and I'm like, yeah, I don't. I'm good. You mentioned the email. My immediate thought was, you mean both guys. Okay. Well, look, we live in a time and we are in a business where, an industry where you can't criticize anything without meeting every one of those people who love the thing you just criticize. So, you know, they're out there. I'm not one of them, but I mean, I'm fine. I don't care that it exists. I'm not against it. It's okay. I mean, look, if you're going to use this stuff, you might as well take advantage of it. It's smart. It's like points on a credit card or whatever. But when there's something for everybody, there's nothing for nobody. That's true. I think that makes sense. That's curiously correct. I think it's a deep part. Very existential for a Thursday morning in Australia. It's too much for 5 a.m., man. Deep thoughts with whatever handy. Yeah, Jack Handy. Jack Handy. I don't think we mentioned that because Richard's in Sydney, we started the show at 4 a.m. for him. So thank you, Richard. I appreciate your valor. Let's take a break. And, Richard, if you want to take a nap. Just in the dark and wearing a hoodie. It looks like your eyes are open. It is now 5 a.m. Oh, the sun would be coming up. any minute now. That's almost day. It is the fall there, right? Yes, fall. Autumn. It's just cooling down, but it never gets that cool in Sydney, really. Right. Well, yeah, take a break. Relax a little bit. There he is in his padded cell. And we will... I always try to find the corner of the hotel room that is not the bed. Yeah, I know. I hate seeing the bed. especially when it's unmade in the background. Paul will have a little pulque. Richard will have a little nap. And I will tell you about our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly, Threat Locker. Richard and I had a great time at Zero Trust World in Orlando. I'm still thinking about the spacesuit. But let's talk about Threat Locker's Zero Trust platform. They announced at Zero Trust World, or maybe it was later at RSAC, the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero-trust solutions. They started with endpoints, but they have added now networks so your network can be protected with zero-trust. And the cloud, I got a demo of this, and I was so impressed. By extending zero-trust enforcement to cloud services and your company's network, ThreatLocker really kind of zips up the rest of the potential vulnerabilities, ensuring that devices are validated through a secure broker before they can connect to platforms, the kinds that you're using, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub. This means even if your employee gets successfully phished, so users successfully phished, attackers cannot access those resources. They'd have to have physical possession of the user's trusted device, right? You can't do it remotely, and that really locks it down. ThreatLocker works across all industries. You get 24-7 U.S.-based support. They work on Windows, of course, but also Mac and Linux environments. And with it, besides getting zero trust and absolute protection against all threats known and unknown, you get comprehensive visibility and control that's kind of built in because you know exactly who used what, when. It's great for compliance. Rob Thackeray, end user technical architect at Heathrow Airport. Heathrow is under a lot of pressure every day not to have technical issues, right? You bring down Heathrow, you bring down a lot of air traffic. So there's probably a lot of pressure on Rob, but good news. He chose ThreatLocker, and in fact, he loves it. He says, quote, ThreatLocker was the most intuitive solution we tested, and the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews is very good. It is great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. I'm not surprised. I know the ThreatLocker people. They are a class act, a great group. It's no wonder ThreatLocker is trusted by global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition, too. G2, High Performer and Best Support for Enterprise Summer 2025. PeerSpot, ranked number one in application control. GetApp, the Best Functionality and Features Award for 2025. Confidently ensure that your users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. Offices, remote users, internal servers, and critical services can maintain smooth operations without the need to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions. Your end users will get the secure, reliable, and internal system access they need without complex infrastructure changes. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost-effectively with ThreatLocker. It really works. Visit ThreatLocker.com to get a free 30-day trial and to learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com slash twit. Remember that name. You're going to want this. Threatlocker.com slash twit. At the very least, get the demo. That was one of the things Rob said that was really, I thought, struck home with me when we talked to him at RSEC. Just running the demo tells you how much stuff you don't know about is accessing your network. You could just see, oh, my God. There are 15 remote access applications still running that we didn't know about. Threatlocker.com slash twit. Back we go to Paul and Richard and the subject for our next segment, AI. Paul? Yes, AI. I'm not sure if you guys have heard what's going on with AI. There's something. Yeah, there's something going on. We're not going to do anything. It's not a thing. Ed Zetron, I'm not sure. I'm sure Leo knows who this is. Paul, we've had him on the show. He's a character. Oh, boy. Yeah, he's a bit extreme to me. Corey, you need someone angering over there, right? Like, I appreciate Ed takes the hard line. Yeah. He's, yeah. So he had leaked, and then minutes later, Microsoft announced that GitHub Copilot is going to move from, I guess it's like response-based billing to token-based billing. And what that probably means is that it's going to get more expensive because in every request, I guess, there are tokens that get expended in making the request, and then there are tokens that are expended in satisfying the request. So this is going to change things pretty dramatically. They're also pausing new signups for individuals. and I think we're starting to see that, you know, this is where the price of this thing has kind of been hidden from us a little bit and as obscene as it may be to spend $20 or $200 a month on whatever AI, you know, chatbot as we used to call these things, that that doesn't actually cover the cost of what's occurring, you know, in the cloud. This is what I've been saying for a while. It's these all-you-can-eat subscriptions are really subsidized subsidies. And Anthropic has already said you can't use an all-you-can-eat for enterprise anymore. Individuals are still using it. Yeah, it turns out when you revealed that Anthropic had stopped people on the $20 plan from using code. Yeah. I feel like they're following Anthropic's lead. Well, there's a crunch. There's a crunch is what's happening. Well, they want to position it that way, but it's also markets are declining. The investors are getting jumpy. And efficiency is now no longer a bad word. You know, for a long time here, it was just many features as possible, as many customers as possible. That's all that matters. Now it's how much are you spending? Right. So if you give someone unlimited Internet access or, you know, whatever the thing is, or in this case, you know, unlimited or nearly unlimited access to AI, it turns out some people just use the hell out of that. And it's not necessarily good. and then I think the margins aren't tight, they're negative or whatever they're really bad in AI it's not even just money, it's constraints they don't have enough compute right, that's right you know what, like some idiot's going to sit there and generate images all day of like him as a superhero and it's like taking down the power supply to Toledo you know, and it's like maybe we need to be giving this or providing this to people who are paying us, you know something that makes sense So OpenAI is using this as a marketing opportunity, though. They're saying, oh, you can still use Codex on our free plans. You can't use very much of it. I'm not sure that they were free originally. It's a way of getting new customers. Do we call it, is OpenAI a pyramid scheme? What's the term? Yeah, it kind of is. I'm not sure. They're going to make it up in volume. Volume, yeah. That's one of my favorite jokes of all time. Both Ed and Corey Doctor are all over this whole, you know, these data centers aren't actually being built. They're not actually operational. Like, call it under construction. It probably never will be. Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly the point. So this is not in the notes. I've not written about this. It's something I feel like I want to write about it, but I know that when I do, it will be out of date in three months, and I'll write about it again and again, you know, whatever. But as AI improves, so to speak, the little asterisk down in the corner is that local AI, meaning like small language models running on a device against the CPU, GPU, and or MP or whatever, are also getting much better. And so you'll see all the big players, Google with Gemma, you know, they released the latest version of that early April, I think, is probably outperforming Gemini or whatever it was called at the time like two years ago or something like that. Like, they're getting to the point where these things are what I would call good enough, you know, capital G, capital E, you know, for some things, right? And so over the weekend, one of the things I did, you know, and I do this a lot, is bring up, I brought Gemma, I don't remember the version, there's like three tiers, the middle tier. And I just kind of make something up. And I joked, you know, I'm a Tolkien scholar. So I was like, I asked the question, I said, I want a summary of all of Tolkien's major works, how they relate to each other. Give me some guidance on where I should start in reading these things and, you know, yada, yada, yada. And kind of an overview of the history. Go directly to Silmarillion, do not come back. Yeah, exactly. Oddly, it was kind of the opposite of that. But I did this with Gemma, and then I tried it with Intropic Cloud, which I'm paying for right now. So I have to say it was pretty impressive, the Gemma version, meaning it was running locally on this machine. I did this on a MacBook Air, so it's running against just one of the Apple silicon chip. So I ran, I ended up running out of, not took, what do you call it? I guess context or just, you know, it hit a limit at some point, but it spewed out what was, what I would call a high school or college quality report on this topic, which I know a lot about. And, and then it, and, and I don't, I didn't print it out or anything. It was probably 10 to 20 pages long. It was big. And then it just kind of stopped because it was like, sorry, we can't do it. You know, we probably hit our limits. Because it's a local model, whatever. And, you know, the anthropic version, that thing went gangbusters. It was fine. But very similar. And I have to say, you know, again, is this the way people, is this what people do with AI? I don't know. But we're not that far from this stuff working great. Kevin said you ran out of Tolkien's. Oh, geez. Kevin? Yes. He really is good. Nicely done. Into the box. Two minutes. Feel shame. Penalty. That's a good one. No, I know what you're saying, though, is that local AI is only a little bit behind these big... Yeah, and the gap is closing. I mean, there'll always be a gap. And a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about in 10 seconds is, you know, new models, new whatever, all this stuff's happening. It's, you know, whatever. It's amazing. But also new models that are smaller and more efficient, right? Yeah, it has to be. I feel like this came up in the context of Microsoft AI maybe a week or maybe two weeks ago. And the idea, yeah, it was that Microsoft has a model now, MAI Image 2, and now there's an MAI Image 2 Efficient. And the Efficient version, I guess it's, I don't know if it's a smaller model in the cloud or a small language model you can sell locally. It kind of doesn't matter. But the idea was there'll be this workflow where you work at a creative professional outfit. You're making some kind of an ad campaign or a movie campaign where you need posters and different assets and artwork and so forth. And you would use the smaller, more efficient, less expensive model as you worked through what you wanted to do. But when it was time to go to production, that's when you open up the spigot and pay for the thing that's a little more expensive or is just expensive. because you're doing the final output. And so you'll go from something that looks great to something that's like flawless. And this, because I can't stop using this word, is in its own way a form of orchestration, right? That whatever you're interacting with should be able to understand the language of this is for testing. We're going to do it with the team. We're going to use this less expensive or no expense thing. And then you say, okay, now we've gotten the designs we want across the board for whatever this campaign is. Now we're going to go into production, and it will know from that language to use the big one. Okay. Yes. So in the past week, Anthropic released the latest cloud Opus model 4.7, right? Big improvement for advanced software engineering, et cetera, et cetera. but then they released a new I guess we're calling these products it's kind of hard to explain but obviously cloud which is sort of the chat bottom that's not really a great term but they came out with cloud code which was for coding obviously discovered hey this is actually really good for productivity so they came out with something called cloud co-work and now they have something called cloud design which is basically about democratizing the creation visual assets like I was just talking about, actually, and, you know, taking on companies like Figma or Canva, you know, those kinds of things. And, you know, again, I'm going to talk about this in the back of the book, but this notion that you could converse with a tool to create whatever the asset is, whether it's text or graphics or whatever, or an application, you know, is an astonishing development. And, you know, the asterisk is always like, if it works, but I feel like that asterisk is going away and is maybe gone in many cases today. It's kind of astonishing what's available now. And I feel like they're just going to go after every little thing that would require time, expertise, and or a lot of money to hire someone else to do it for you. You're going to be able to just describe it and make it happen. And I say that like it's happening in the future. I mean, it's literally here now for so many things. And so cloud design, I think, is kind of the next step along that path. On the open AI side, they also discovered the same thing. They have Codex. Codex is their experience with developing software. And they're not doing a separate one, so they didn't come up with something called like OpenAI Co-Work or whatever, but they are expanding Codex to work with productivity use cases as well. and that includes all the stuff we're all, you know, it's like we've become so familiar with this very quickly, but this thing has computer use capabilities. You can do this remotely from your phone to your computer, image generation, supports all these plug-ins, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So this thing works with every document type on earth that you can imagine can output those things as well, et cetera, and then integrates with, you know, across Microsoft, Atlassian, GitLab, whatever. I mean, it's astonishing, right? So this is where we are. When they announced this, which was days ago, the image generation was GPT Image 1.5. Now we have GPT Image 2.0, which is ChatGPT Images 2.0. And this is a much more precise, as they say, or I would just say high quality image generation capability. capability and now works for complex creative tasks. Like those things we were talking about earlier, you're doing a, an ad campaign or whatever it is as a creative professional. And if you, the announcement was to me, it was actually kind of annoying because it wasn't like text. Here's what we're doing. Here's some examples. It was like a, it's an interactive thing where you flip through all these different designs that they made with this product. It's amazing. So, you know, I just, just, it's crazy. It's crazy to me how fast this stuff is moving. Google probably had 17. Actually, Google today, I don't know if you saw their announcements today. Google announced like 30 different things today. I just saw the feed of it before we started the show, so I haven't really looked through this too much. But of interest to maybe mainstream users or just users, I guess, is some upgrades they made to AI mode in Chrome. So the big one, and this is really about integrating search, which is where AI mode comes from, right, and the browser, which makes sense. I mean, that's what you do. I mean, that's what all monopolists do, but it's good for people too. So when you use, if you are in Chrome and you get an AI mode result right at the top, when you open links, they're going to open side by side. Now, it's curiously, it's not split view, but it doesn't open it. You don't have to control click and open a new tab, which I think is kind of interesting. And you can also search across multiple tabs directly in the browser or from within AI mode, which is kind of interesting. This could include tabs that are just an image or PDF files or whatever, and it will use all that context when you search across Google search, which is using AI mode, et cetera, et cetera. So you're starting to get this kind of cyclic benefit or whatever. And, of course, it creates images because everything does now. And I hope you didn't go to school to become a graphic artist because we don't need you anymore. It's over. There's also this design tools. I mean, it's really incredible. I'm not sure I'd want to be a designer. You're quoting Jeff Hinton there when he said in 2016 that we're never going to be radiologists again. It's a dead thing. That didn't come true, did it? Yeah, the demand of radiologists has only gone up. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like he will be proven correct at some point, to be honest. I mean, given the way things are. It's a great question because part of this is just the how much stuff never gets made because people are so far behind. This is like you're watching a movie and the guy comes out of the cockpit and he's like, does anyone here know how to fly a plane? You know, which is not what you want to hear on a plane. Wow. And, you know, this season in the... I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I'm so sorry. Oh, God. I'll just remind you that... How are the automated pancake... Yeah, exactly. When you're asleep, every hotel is a five-star hotel. That's a good point. Unless you're not asleep. Then it's not. If you're not asleep, it's a minus-one-star hotel. You're just staring at the ceiling and wondering what's crawling on your foot. You know what I mean? It's sad. What are those jeans on the ceiling exactly? Exactly. Yeah. We stayed in a hotel in Paris a million years ago that we called Hotel du Shit. One of the two times in my life I've slept in a hotel in my jeans. Ooh. Yeah. Like, that's not bad. Yikes. So Mozilla, which I feel like is going to be in the news a lot this year, They have a subsidiary, MZLA, which I assume is pronounced Mozilla hilariously, just announced something called Thunderbolt, which is like sovereign AI for organizations and businesses, right? And there's actually a good point here because one of the biggest issues for any company, regardless of size, but especially bigger companies, I would say, is keeping their data private, right? that Microsoft spent the past 30 years building controls into every server and now service imaginable for rights management and to ensure that users can't forward an important internal email outside of their organization, et cetera, et cetera. But now these same companies, Microsoft and others, are asking us to trust all this internal data to AI. And it's like, and there's a lot of horror stories, obviously. So the idea here is that you're going to have, to you, the people running the company, where you want to go with this. It could be local, it could be privately hosted, whatever. It's kind of a plug-and-play, mix-and-match system where you can have commercial, open-source models, local models, like I said, integrate with whatever data systems over all the standard protocols, MCP, et cetera, and you kind of build your own. It's kind of like, I guess, build your own. It's like a Build-A-Bear, but for AI, And you know what? Actually, this makes total sense to me. I feel like even within something like Copilot, and I guess in this case I'm really talking about Microsoft 365 Copilot, but whatever, Microsoft itself will probably offer similar capabilities, right? Meaning, yes, you could use their models whenever those exist inside Copilot or OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever else. I feel like this kind of thing where you mix and match depending on your needs and data, sovereignty, whatever you want to call it, security slash privacy, whatever needs are. So anyway, this is not going to benefit any individual listening to this, but there's a wait list. If you are a company and want to know more about this, this seems like a good idea to me. Uh-huh. Good for them. And then to the point we made earlier about CLIs and command lines, you know, interfaces, Google in the past week released something called the Android CLI, right? And so we're going to see a lot of this. And this I played with. I have kind of dipped in and out of Android software development many, many times over the years. I've taken courses on it, which I paid for. You know, the language has shifted over time from, you know, Java to Kotlin. And the environments they have, you know, for creating UIs and things like that have all changed and upgraded, et cetera, et cetera. But the Android Steelhouse is really interesting. Like, you can – it literally is – you install it. You type Android, and then you get whatever the commands are. But you can set up your environment. You don't have to use Android Studio. You will. But it can create projects that are compatible with Android Studio. It can use all the templates that are in Android Studio, all of which have been updated, et cetera, to create, like, the basis for an app. You can set up an emulator. You can build your application from the command line, run it against the emulator, have it pop up on the screen over this command line, which I've done, and also to a physical device if you have it connected via Wi-Fi or USB. And then, yes, of course, it will integrate with Android Studio. So if you need to go to the next level, which you will for now, but again, like I feel like in time, like a lot of people are just going to do this. You're basically just going to sit there and describe what it is you want this app to do, whichever interface you're using. Android Studio will do this as well. It's fascinating. Like, this is taking over the world. I don't think people understand it. I don't, I mean, we talk about it here, and I'm sure we're talking about it in the other shows. But that's what I mean. But the software world is the world, right, in the sense that mainstream people don't have any idea this is happening, right? And they don't need to know about it right now. It's not impacting them. But it going to impact the software that they use whether it on a phone or in the cloud or wherever I mean like this is even well this will impact benefit probably but let say impact everybody to some degree even if you don't understand it's happening, right? Because the way that things are made, and in this case we're talking about software, is changing so dramatically. It's incredible. You can imagine when you think about that model, right? It's like you pay a monthly subscription fee for a service that does whatever you need to do. And whenever you ask for a change, it just does it for you. And so you essentially have continuous custom software. I think all three of us – well, actually, in Leo's case, this might not be as big of a problem because I feel like his wife is into this stuff. But we've all regaled or bored our wives with things in our industry. You know, like you can't help them. Like, sometimes something exciting happens. Sometimes we're excited about something. You can catch them. You can see them. They're like nodding, you know. And you're like, I'm sorry. Sorry. But this is one of those topics. And I feel like the natural extension to this is going to be you describe, I need a part for my classic Mustang, and you 3D print it. Or it's going to extend to physical things. It will be controlling smart vacuums and, you know, smart robots, or whatever they are that go and do things around your house. Like, it's a – like, right now we're talking about software, you know, services, whatever. It's kind of hard to see or whatever. But this is going to bleed out into the world, you know, which is the matrix, I guess. Yeah. It's astonishing. I mean, it's really – it blows my mind. It's very exciting, actually. It is. It is. It's rough this time. And this is the thing, you know, remember a month ago, whatever it was, I was talking about, you know, those things we don't have anymore in the industry, that sense of excitement and the whole world was wide open. You could do anything. You know, when the personal or back then the home computer phenomenon started happening and it was, you know, as me as a kid seeing a Commodore 64 probably or maybe a Big 20, was like, oh, my God, oh, my God, like I can make, I'm going to make things. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make games or whatever. And it was really exciting. And I feel like we kind of lost that along the way. You know, I made the point, the argument anyway, that, you know, Visual Basic in some ways was the last great thing like that. But I feel like this is it. Like, this is the answer. You know, this stuff is, you know, it starts with technical things, of course. It starts with software development. It will go to productivity, whatever. But it will be fun things, too, you know. And it will be something that mainstream, normal, non-technical people can do. There's no doubt about it. Think about my granddaughter growing up in a world where she'll simply have custom software for whatever she wants to do on it. Exactly. I know. It's so different. The games that she's going to play are games that she's effectively made. They may be working from a template or anything like that, but this is her own creativity will be cast into that tool to make things that she wants to do. I probably shouldn't say this out loud because I should just do it myself. But someone's going to make what is essentially a Dr. Seuss book, which is, oh, the things you'll make. Yeah. Right? Well, there was other things you'll do. Anyhow, I probably really screwed up my whole back of the book thing because that's a big part of it. You just burned up your back of the book. Don't worry. That's all right. I often feel like by the time we get to your stuff, we don't have enough time. So you'll have enough time today. And then I'm going to breakfast because, you know, things are waking up around you. And you have a talk today too, right? Yeah. I'm doing a refresh on my space talk. So I incorporated the new Artemis plans. Oh, people will be very interested in that, I'm sure. Yeah, it was a special request. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, nice. Everybody was so excited about Artemis. Yeah, and I think that's why they – because that dock had really died away for the past couple of years. Right. It's been released since – Radio Sinalize. It's basically been private companies testing rockets that explode on takeoff. So there's been some exciting things like when SpaceX lands like a rocket on a platform in the ocean. That's awesome. Well, they just did that for the 600th time. Amazing. Well, yeah, I mean, the space shuttle got boring. We stopped even watching it on TV, right? I just saw a video, well, not randomly, but, you know, on YouTube, that was later, like a late 80s space shuttle just landing like a plane on a runway. And I still get chills just thinking about it. It's amazing that they did that. It really is. It's awesome. This is Richard Lisa and I saw, was it Columbia? The Atlantis. That's right. The Atlantis at the Cape Canaveral. And it was incredible to see, Kennedy Space Center, it was incredible to see this beautiful, giant vehicle. Really, really wonderful stuff. Yeah, it got me excited. How does this spacecraft look like? Yeah. And then, you know, what the sad thing is that NASA is being basically defunded. They saw the science research. They're going to allow the not true. There's just noise from an administration saying they want that. They want to defund it. Your Congress controls the purpose. Yes. Right. Your Congress critter and say we. Who controls the Congress? One of the midterms. That's a really good question. Who does? Who's driving this ship? Let's take a break because we do have the Xbox. The much. And there's a lot of stuff. Much this week for Xbox. Requested. The always enjoyed Xbox segment. Just around the corner. You're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Therott at therott.com. His books are at leanpub.com. Richard Campbell at .net rocks and run as radio. Run as radio.com. Now in Australia. So your talk and then I see a nap. and then I see after the nap. I was going to say, there would definitely be a nap for me. Yes. You know what? I'm really getting into napping. Well, Thursday night is the attendee party night, so we will be up late, so I'm going to need a nap. Aha. He's planning. Oh, you're already in Thursday. I forgot. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And then I do the opening second day keynote on Friday, and it's the AI hype talk. Holy cow. I'm going to start for that one, too. You are working hard. I don't know. I've said this many times, but being roughly the same age, I don't know how you do this. I couldn't travel like you travel. I just can't. And I travel a lot compared to most people. I think Richard enjoys it. That's the thing that blows me all the way. Yeah. He gets into it. We're all broken in some way, Richard. I think we found out what your brokenness is. Well, it's 5.30 a.m. in Sydney, so the sun should be emerging soon. Let's continue our way. Our way. Yeah. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. But listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's continue on with the Xbox segment, Mr. Throt. Yeah. So here's some really good news. Well, combined with some sort of bad news, which is that Microsoft just announced it's dropping the price of Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, right? Which is something that never, ever happens to subscription services ever. Granted, they raised those dramatically. I think it was late last year, where especially Ultimate is $29.99 a month. So that's gone down to $22.99 a month. PC Game Pass is going from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. But future Call of Duty titles will no longer be included as day one titles. So before Microsoft announced they intended to buy Activision Blizzard, they gave Game Pass subscribers a huge perk. I think everything but the lowest tier. You'll always get the Microsoft Studio games on day one. So if they announced some new Gears of War games, Halo game, whatever it is, you'll get that through Game Pass. Nice. Now, when they announced that they were going to buy Activision Blizzard, there were two things I did in the period of time during which they were trying to buy it and then finally did buy it. The first one was I looked at Activision Blizzard's financials from the last couple of years prior to this and plugged it into Microsoft's financials to see what the impact would be on the company. Interestingly, on the broader company, not dramatic. I mean, single-digit revenue increase, whatever. But on more personal computing, the part of the business that they are now part of which is basically Windows, some Bing stuff and ads and things, and then Surface and then Xbox. Big, big, big improvement, right? So I was like, okay, that's interesting. But the other one, and this one I never really satisfied my kind of desire to figure it out, but in what world does it make sense to offer Call of Duty games through any Game Pass subscription, right? Now, at the time, Game Pass Ultimate was probably $15 a month, and then PC and Xbox Game Pass were $9.99 a month. And it was like, I don't see there being enough new subscribers that are going to stay with it, right, to justify not earning a billion dollars in revenues just by releasing a new Call of Duty game, which you would have to buy. You know, there's a reason Activision Blizzard never entertained the idea of any subscription services. They were like, no, we sell games. And Call of Duty is the best example because it's the biggest one. and I just never figured it out. Like, you could go in two directions. You could say, all right, the current levels, what would be the price per month, or how many subscribers would we have to get at $9.99 slash $14.99 for it to make sense. And those numbers, it's impossible. Like, my basic determination was I don't see how this could happen. And then, sure enough, right, you know, they bought Activision Blizzard. They raised prices. then they raised prices dramatically, especially for Ultimate. And at the time, what we would have said was, this is where you can see the cost of taking Call of Duty away from, you know, having all those sales. Because the problem, of course, is that you might have people that you can sign up for a month. So a new Call of Duty game comes out. You're like, I'm going to play this for November and December, and then I'm not going to ever play it again, and I'm not going to subscribe again. I'm just going to drop the subscription. I mean, they lose money on that, right, essentially. So I think this makes sense. It's hard because they made that promise. They changed the subscriptions and took it away from some of them. They raised prices dramatically, especially in Ultimate. And now what they're saying is, well, we're going to lower prices, cool, but we're not going to have Call of Duty in there. And I honestly think it makes sense. I think it's the right thing to do. Also, I just want to point out Asha Sharma, this woman everyone was so critical of, pretty decisively moved to do this. I mean, pretty quick, right? Like, this is, you don't see subscription prices coming down ever. Like, that's amazing to me. But this is all, I mean, she hasn't said this out loud, but the essential statement is the tier one game idea doesn't work. we're going to have to get it out of the pass and you just buy them, but everything else fine. I think a lot of people could be happier. You know, the previous people, I just want to say, you know, just remember when this promise was made they didn't have Activision Blizzard. When Activision Blizzard was in the process of being acquired, there were questions about it. You know these guys looked at this and they were like, alright, how can we make sense of this? And I think what they came up with was for this to make sense we have to see some huge amount of growth in Game Pass and or raise prices dramatically. And I don't think they just met the targets. I think Game Pass subscriber base has basically stagnated. You'll notice they don't talk about this anymore. I think they found the size of this market basically. And to some degree, this sort of brings it back to where I sort of feel like it was originally, well, maybe not originally, but had been for a long time, which was, you know, for a reasonable amount of money per month, this is actually kind of, it's a nice thing to have. If you open the Xbox app on your computer and you look at all the games that are available just on your computer, it's actually pretty astonishing. And the cost of that subscription is $14 a month now. If you go to Ultimate, you get that for the console and for PC, and you get the additional rights for cloud streaming, et cetera. Like it's a little bit, you get better priority access, et cetera. Like it's okay. Like it's, you know, in a world in which Netflix suddenly costs me 28 bucks a month, this is starting to make sense. So good for them. I mean, you know, she inherited kind of a mess. And I feel like, yeah, this is a good decision. It seems to me. Okay. But I know some people are like, you know, going to freak out because that's what people do. Um, speaking of Asha Sharma, um, she tweeted something today that, uh, is not official yet, but basically, uh, is teasing that Xbox and Discord have a partnership. They've been working together for a long time. Um, this came out of Microsoft. Remember they had Mixer, um, as their sort of form of Discord and they dropped that. And now on an Xbox, you can use Discord or whatever. And of course on a PC you can as well. Anyway, they are partnering or teaming up again for something related to Game Pass, which she has not said what it is. So we'll see what that means. So Game Pass prices just came down. I think we're going to see something related to – well, I mean, we are. According to her, we're going to see something related to Discord as well. So Discord charges for subscriptions as well, right? Like I use – I just use the free version, but you can pay for Discord. I think it's Discord Pro probably, what do they call these things? Nitro Basic and Nitro whatever, you know, they have different plans but I bet there's going to be a you know, you're a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and maybe you get like Nitro with HD streaming or something as part of your subscription and you know, Microsoft kind of pays them on the back end so we'll see what comes out of that that's just the tease for now we are yep, decidedly in the second half of the month. That means Microsoft has announced more games coming to Game Pass, which we can't stop talking about. Kiln is kind of the big one. This is kind of a cartoony game that looks really interesting, actually. Vampire Crawlers, which I... Okay. It's a sledding game. Love it. Final Fantasy V, which I think we already knew was coming. And I guess this is later. I'll hold off on my other thing about this. But, yeah, anyway, a bunch of new games coming across all the platforms. We also got an Xbox monthly update. So the April update is out. The biggest one here by far, this is the thing everyone's wanted since they announced this feature, is if you have a console, there's a feature called Quick Resume, and the idea there is that you've played the game, it's kind of sitting in spaces, this, you power on the console and you just get right back into it. You don't have to load it from scratch. It's an awesome feature when it works. It's like hibernation. Yeah, for the game. It's like a freeze-dry thing just for that particular game. It doesn't work with some games, especially games that have multiplayer happening. Call of Duty is actually one of the examples of a game that works really poorly on it all. They're doing what they should have done from the beginning, which is not just give you a quick resume which you can toggle on and off, but let you do it on a per-game basis, right? Because honestly, it's an awesome feature. Like, you want it for a lot of games, but when it doesn't work, it fails badly. Like, it's really bad. So that's cool. And then the things that they kind of, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, like, they were testing in the Insider program for Xbox, you know, more groups at home, custom colors. You can have the custom action colors, et cetera, and some other things. But the big one to me is the quick resume update, which is big. It's actually really big. We are treading water until the end of 2027 when we will finally get a look at the next Xbox console. So we're doing that kind of frog dancing, singing dance routine, you know, from that Warner Brothers cartoon. You know, hello, mama. And that takes different forms. But one of those forms is like live streaming events. Like we know there's something the week of E3 or what used to be E3. Yeah. But on the 23rd, which as we record this is tomorrow, so Thursday the 23rd, there's going to be a 23rd year. I'm watching it now. You already know what they announced. I love how time works. That's amazing. So this one, they did the teaser, remember, for the Metro, I think 2039, I think is the name of the game, recently. We know about the E3 timed one. But tomorrow they're going to do one for ID at Xbox. So ID of Xbox is the indie game program they have. So you'll see a bunch of new indie games as part of this. And I think IGN, the gaming publication, is going to stream that. But, you know, we'll get the announcements and all that. So that's fun. And I don't want this. I know what it is, but I do not want it. But Microsoft now has Forza Horizon 6 limited edition controllers and headsets. The color scheme to me is the Siri pink, purple, neon thing, which I hate. Oh, it's ugly. But you may like it. It's for kids. I don't know. Yeah. It's for people. They're either colorblind or you have terrible taste. The controller is $90, which is super expensive, by the way. Wow. I know. Would you like to overpay for a really ugly controller? We can hook you up. Well, the good news is you'd never lose it. That's true. But it's an Xbox peripheral, so you will break it. So I don't recommend spending a lot of money on something like this. Is this what Forza Horizon looks like? No. I think this is the colors game, yeah. It used to be a racing game. Well, Forza Horizon is the arcade version of Forza. Oh, okay. It's the unicorn. These things are like Pikachu threw up on them. We had to kill a unicorn to get the color. Or it's the My Little Pony edition. Yeah, exactly. I get it. It's a little bizarre to me, but... Okay. And then Starfield, right? Wow. Came to PlayStation 5. That's gone great. They have to release the gigantic bug fix thing for that, I guess. But the game was recently rated for the Nintendo Switch 2, which indicates it's going to come to the Switch 2. So this is... Wow. You know, even before there was a Switch 2, I mean, Phil Spencer used to talk about this. He wanted to get Xbox games, Microsoft Studio games, more of them on the Switch. I kind of expected when the Switch 2 was announced that there would be a Microsoft slash Xbox something something in there, and there wasn't, you know? So I don't know why, but he talked explicitly, by the way, about Call of Duty, right? And that never happened, so we'll see what happens. But it looks like Starfield will be coming. So that, I mean, there's definitely going to be other games, right? I mean, this is what they're doing. So you can get No Man's Sky on the Switch. This is kind of the Bethesda version sort of No Man's Sky. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. Apparently it's not the full thing. Do these interoperate? I don't know what interoperate is, but apparently it's the full. It's all procedural. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's not like the local AI version of the game. It's like, you know, you have two planets. Four fingers. or eight. It depends. It might be kind of fun. I'm always looking for Switch 2 games. I'll wait for this to come out. Yeah. Call of Duty movie has been rumored for a long time. I think at one time Steven Spielberg was just talking about maybe taking part in that because he hasn't made enough World War II movies. Right. Is there a plot in Call of Duty? Well, see this is the question we don't know like we know it so now we know the movie's coming it's going to be 2028 so it's literally two years away we know like who's directing it blah blah blah what we don't know is if you think of Call of Duty the game series there are I would say three main kind of story arcs right the classic World War II ones the Modern Warfare which are now two series and then Black Ops and then some standalone games that didn't go anywhere and we don't know So I can't imagine they're going to make another game where people are assaulting Iwo Jima or whatever. But maybe. I mean, we'll see. It sounds like they're focusing on special ops for this. I feel like it should be, yeah, I feel like Modern Warfare slash Black Ops is the place to be. But we'll see. Or maybe it's just the one that had the controversy around the airport scene. Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. which is one of the best multiplayer levels of all time for Call of Duty, but this is the one where you, as the player character, were part of, I guess you were in the Soviet Union, the Russian Special Forces, but you had infiltrated a terrorist gang. And they went into an airport and they killed everybody. And you could, in the game, walk through the airport and just shoot civilians, or you could just walk through the airport and not shoot civilians, right? I mean, that was your choice, but this was part of the game. and it was pretty graphic. It's a video game, but that's kind of an intense thing. It generated a lot of controversy. Yeah. I don't know that you want to make that into a movie, right? Then again, they did the last of us. I can't think that's going to be the movie. We've got to go right to Modern Warfare 2 and do the Russian thing. I hope that's not it. I can't imagine that's it. Well, I mean, I felt the same way when they got to the end of the first series, of The Last of Us and had to do the whole hospital scene, which when I played that, upset me too, right? That was a big deal. Yes, yes, yes. You could not proceed on the game without killing all the doctors. Right. Right. Right. To rescue the girl. Yeah. And then if you thought that was upsetting, play season two or the second game. Or watch season two and then wonder what the hell you're doing with your life, which is just whatever, but that's the story. We literally stopped watching after episode one. We were like, yep, we're done with this. So I don't know. Yeah. Whatever. It's gritty. Speaking of gritty, I saw, you know, like everyone else, you read like news feeds, you get whatever. It's all, you know, stuff I like. So I saw a headline, and I apologize. I don't remember where this was, but someone said they were revisiting what they thought was the last great Call of Duty game. And I'm like, all right, I've got to figure it, like find out what he means by this. And in his opinion, the last great Call of Duty game was the Modern Warfare 1 remake, right? So several years ago, they did three of those. They've done Black Ops since then. They're going to do another Modern Warfare this year. If you play Call of Duty, you may know that when you install Call of Duty today, you have the option to install Black Ops 7, Black Ops 6, Modern Warfare 2, and Modern Warfare 3. And they all have their own, all the different play modes. There's also the stuff on, like, the Warzone, you know, Battle Royale mode. There's the zombie stuff. And I probably don't know all the games. I don't play that. But I assume that those things are in there. You can play those games online, like multiplayer, if you want. But Modern Warfare 1 is not part of that. And I was like, that's kind of weird. The other thing tied to this is, this is several years ago now, But they remade, or remastered maybe is the term, the original Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. The original Modern Warfare, this was many years ago now, multiplayer was intact. You could do that. The Modern Warfare 2 remake, as I recall, did not have multiplayer. And at one point they were talking about maybe releasing it separately. I don't think they ever did. And I don't believe they ever redid or remastered the original Modern Warfare 3. I don't recall that. I don't believe so. When I played those games, I was struck by how old-fashioned they were. They had that kind of – they looked like the World War II games that preceded them, like the one and two, the early ones, and three, I guess, to some degree. The multiplayer was super simplistic compared to what we have today because Call of Duty is as complex as an aircraft cockpit now for some reason. and the photos this guy was showing of the remake of, you know, the more recent version of Modern Warfare had that kind of gritty look and he was comparing screenshots to like the modern version of the game. Like if you play Black Ops 7 like I do, it's not really Modern Warfare. It's like futuristic warfare. It's the future. It's science fiction. Like it's all glossy and clean and it kind of doesn't have that visceral kind of gritty thing going on. So I was like, all right, I'm going to play this. I'm going to try this. And to my shock, what I discovered was I never bought that game. I must have played it on Game Pass or something. Right. Well, I guess I had it somehow. I did play it. Well, I didn't have it in my library. It was not available to me. And I was like, huh, this game is not in Game Pass. That's weird. But it is in Game Pass now. So remember last time we talked about the new Game Pass titles for April for the first half of the month, that Modern Warfare game was in there. So now you can go and install it. So if you play these games at all, I kind of recommend this. It is so old-fashioned. It is not like these new games. It is gritty looking. The graphics are not as good, but it's all boots on the ground. It's not World War II, obviously, but it's more like probably like Eastern Europe type locations or like overgrown cities with moss and ivy and stuff. It's actually kind of awesome. Like, I wish it was like that now, you know? I wish they could redo the graphics, frankly. But it's not, it is of a different era, even though it's, you know, and then they went to two and they changed the engine and they changed everything, and now they're all tied together, but not one. And that one, the Modern Warfare remake, is actually pretty incredible. That's kind of interesting. Is it just a passion for retro visualization, or just a better show? No, you know, what's happened, I'm not going to be able to name all the games, but if you go through the Call of Duty cycle, so to speak, they went back into World War II a couple of times, partially successful, but then they did these offshoots. They did like Ghost, which went nowhere, which I actually thought was pretty great. And then they did things like Infinite Warfare and Advanced Warfare. They didn't go anywhere, so they didn't get a series going. Brought back Black Ops. But Infinite, Advanced, and the more recent Black Ops games are really what I would call like future warfare. It's those little robot things flying around the sky and shooting people. It's like you can run on the walls. It's all shiny and clean and, you know, futuristic looking. And what these games are, well, what this one game is, I guess, is gritty, actual, like man with a gun running around in a, like kind of a blown-out urban, you know, area, like from World War II, but literally modern. But it's just, it's what Call of Duty, yeah, exactly. It's what I feel like Call of Duty should be, frankly. You know, it's really refreshing. It's kind of weird because I didn't like it at the time. The play mechanics were so different than its predecessor, which its predecessor might have been Black Ops 4 or something. I don't remember the time frame. But it was just, I don't know, it's very, if you have been playing these from the beginning and liked the World War II ones, especially liked the original Modern Warfare trilogy, it's like this is, like it's right in that same wheelhouse. It's nice. Cool. It's a little old-fashioned, but that is part of the appeal. It's all about the nostalgia. Yeah. And then I guess Sony today, after raising the price of the PlayStation 5 at least twice over the past couple of years, has announced a temporary return to the original price of the digital edition of the PS5, which is $399. That's what makes it a digital edition? digital it did, yes. There's no drive. What is it? Oh, right. There's no disk. There's no optical drive. Which would be the one I would get anyway. I'm not going to buy disks for anything. But that's $200. That's the big cut. That's a big cut. Speaking of retro, you know, I think I'm not sure how long this lasts. It's not too... I guess it's going to last while stocks last. They're just trying to get some inventory. They're going to get rid... Yeah. They dropped the price by $200. So we have a Game Pass thing. The price got reduced in PlayStation 5 Digital Edition. They're going to sell a lot of those. I mean, everybody's going to sell all of them. That's what they're going to do. They're going to sell out. Sell them all. Yep. So that's great if you want one of those things. That's good. It's even tempting me. I know. I'm an Xbox guy. I know. It's like, maybe. No, that Call of Duty doesn't care about Xbox anymore, I guess. I know. Shocking. Hey, folks, that concludes the Xbox segment, which means we're just one moment away from the back of the book. Before we get there, though, I want to beg. I want to do a little begging. I'm on my hands and knees right now, if you can't tell. Begging. Begging you to join Club Twit, because without your support, all of this could go bye-bye. I don't know what to ascribe it to We're suffering a bit of a downturn in ad revenue A huge downturn in ad revenue And part of it I think is, you know, Lisa stopped selling We outsourced the sales to a company that doesn't have the same But I don't blame them, the same drive that Lisa had And so sales are down It may also be the economy, I don't know I mean, I think other podcasts are doing well. And maybe you hate us. It's possible you just hate us. And if that's the case, I can understand it and I don't blame you. But if you do like what you hear here, I'd like to encourage you to support it. Your support becomes more and more important. Right now, ads are only covering about 50% to 60% of our operating expenses. That's a huge gap. Fortunately, the club is there. and you can make the difference by going to twit.tv slash club twit. Now, I'm not asking you for money for nothing. Ten bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear me begging like this. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, a great place to hang out with some really smart and interesting people. I think it's kind of the right kind of social. No algorithms, just interesting conversations about all the things we geeks are interested in. It's all there in our Club Twit Discord. We also give you special programming that we don't do anywhere else. A bunch of things coming up in the next few weeks. Mike does his crafting corner. We do Stacy's book club. We haven't scheduled that yet. We will. We've got the photo show, the travel show with Johnny Jett. Chris Markworth does the photo show. We've got our AI user group, which increasingly is my favorite show of all. I mean, it's people who are doing really interesting stuff with AI, talking about how they do it, just like an old-fashioned user group. And there's more, lots more. Twit.tv slash club. You can see the whole kit and caboodle there, the various plans, their free trial and all of that. But I just want to encourage you to consider it. There's a QR code on the screen if you're watching the video, or go to twit.tv slash club. to it. We really appreciate it and we really need it. So if you've been thinking about it, don't hesitate. Come on in. The water is fine. Now, we continue on with the back of the book, the tips and picks of the week. We'll start with Paul Theriot and his tip of the week. So this one I already kind of blew away unfortunately because I'm so excited about it, but it's the idea of using AI to build things, you know, to make things for yourself, which could include custom or what Richard calls bespoke apps, which I think is a great term. I randomly, I had already written half of this story, and I saw that Harry McCracken, who's a great guy, a journalist, had previously, I didn't know he did this, but a year ago you did a vibe-coded note-taking app, which kind of looks like Google Keep a little bit, like kind of those little notepad things. And then he just created a word processing app using Vibe coding, right? And like me, he's like, Word is this battleship of three million features. I need three of them. He created this thing that's more focused and is what he needs, right? He also, if I'm not mistaken, I think he talked about this on a Twit episode, took a game that he wrote when he was a kid and revived it using AI. Okay, I didn't see that. Because he didn't have the original source code. And I think it's on our website. I'll have to find it. But, yeah, he's really into it. Look, we talk about, and he's not a programmer, right? Well, yeah, sort of. He's like you and I. You're more of a programmer probably than either of us. But, yeah, he's the hobby. No, actually, I think you're probably more of a programmer than any of us. No, no, you're more of a programmer. No, it's just that. So it's interesting to me because I had started writing this. Like I'd been thinking about this a lot. And you see these examples of things out in the world where this is changing. For example, you know, Adobe last week, I think it was, announced something called Firefly AI Assistant, which will allow anyone to use natural language to discuss what it is they're looking for, whether it's editing video or photos or creating content, whatever it is, and using all of the power across those various creative cloud tools. You're like, wow, okay, that's pretty impressive. You know, after I had started writing this, Harry McCracken announced or wrote about the word processing app. But just that week, I just went back from that. So this would have been, I guess, last week, essentially. You know, OpenAI announced a major update to Codex that brings those productivity capabilities to it, similar to how cloud code turned into cloud code work, right? Perplexity announced something called Personal Computer for Mac, which is, I think they had something called, they do have something called Perplexity Computer in the cloud, and this brings that local so you can work local apps and files. You can access it remotely via phone like you can with cloud and dispatch, right? Anthropoc announced Cloud Opus 4.7, which we talked about. Then they did the cloud update, which I think we talked about last week, which was designed for parallel agent usage, which I kind of described as an Outlook-style UI where maybe this becomes the UI, you know, that we start interacting with, our interaction point, right? Google announced the Android CLI thing I just talked about. They announced a way for Gemini to turn workflows into skills that you can share with others, right? There was the Firefly AI assistant thing. We talked about Scott Hanselman and how he and others have all these apps on that website. They're all Vibe-coded, 50 of which are Windows apps. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, this was in one week. And I probably missed things. I don't cover every single thing that happens, right? And to kind of bring this back to something which we haven't talked about recently, which is too bad because we used to talk about it all the time, which is Stevie Bateesh and his notion of how Microsoft is going to bring AI to the world. I saw him just the other day. Oh, nice. Okay. So AI beside, which is that co-pilot model, existing app, AI over here, they interact. AI inside, where you bring the AI into the app, which Microsoft is doing right now, obviously. But then there's the AI outside thing. And this is where the way we do things is fundamentally transformed. and there's an AI orchestrator, which I love that word, that takes our intent, in other words, the thing we describe, and then uses whatever apps and services and whatever features to just do it. That's exactly what this is. That's what we call it. Vibe coding is not a good term, but it's really a creator-maker kind of a thing where anybody soon, but technical people today very easily, can basically create any software, game, whatever it might be. This is like we're entering a golden era, I think, of creation capabilities. It's astonishing. Yeah, it's really cool. That explosion of software. Yep. So I guess the tip is understand this is happening, see what's out there, and go create something. You know? If there's something you use that isn't quite right, see if you can fix it. You know? Make a new version of it. You know, it's funny, when I first started playing with this stuff, I was kind of challenged to think of, well, what do I need? And there are a couple of things I thought of right away. Now, every single day, I sit down and write something. No, I listen to you every week. It seems you have, like, stories about these things you're talking about interacting with Sonos, which, by the way, is an example. Well, it's software and services, but you have these physical hardware devices in your home that you can now do things with. I can talk to it. I mean, this is incredible. I can say to my Apple Watch, play a book or music or a podcast on my Sonos in the ceiling. It just happens, right? And I have to tell you, you know, Sonos is getting a lot of heat for its crappy app. Software, yeah, of course. And it is. It's truly awful. But having now worked with Claude to write software to control it, I understand why. The interface is all over the place. Well, the back end is probably pretty bad. It's terrible. It's awful. And it's unpredictable. It's undocumented. It's very weird. And Claude struggled with it. We really went back. Well, because that has changed the architecture of how this stuff works. It's sort of like when Skype went from like a peer-to-peer model to a more centralized thing. Like the entire way the thing worked just changed completely. It just screwed everything up. You know, it's not it. But eventually, by the way, eventually we got it, and it's reliable now. And I can ask for an audio book. The only problem is sometimes I have, there's a collision between the names of a song and the name of an audio book I have. And I can't remember what the song was. You get the wrong one. And it played the audio book. I said, no, no, no, no. I mean even within songs that would be a problem Like there so many identically named songs or different versions of the same song even Well Sonos had no way of playing just a single song So when I play the single song, what did it want me to do afterwards? And we decided, well, if there's an album, finish the album. I mean, because Sonos doesn't actually have mechanisms for this. It's really wild. That's so fun. By the way, the other thing that's come up to me now is everything needs an API or an interface or an SDK. Everything needs to be controlled. 100%. So we've talked about this. I believe the term for this is actually like semantic capabilities, meaning this yield object model. You have public interfaces that can be consumed by AI services or other apps, whatever. Right. And that's how those things get controlled. That's how the Firefly thing uses an individual feature in Photoshop to deliver you the thing you're asking for or whatever. Or, you know, all the Microsoft Office apps will do this and are doing this. You can right-click on things in Windows today and see AI actions, and it's... But I understand companies often consider this proprietary, and they don't want to share it. But I can tell you that, speaking to these companies, people are going to demand it. And if your software doesn't have an excessive public interface... You will disappear. Yeah, you can stick to your stupid model. You'll be gone. You're just going to be gone. Well, more importantly, because you're asking an agent to go get something for you, if the agent can't get to your software because you don't have the interface, it's just never going to appear. Right. Well, yeah, so in the short term, we have these kind of workarounds, right? This is the computer using. We're like, oh, the little cursor, click. Yeah, that's a lousy interface. This does not scale. Like, you need to have API access to all these things. Public interfaces. That's well-documented public interfaces. Yes. Yep. It is that we live in a time of wonder. And, you know, we live in a terrible time in many ways, too. But this stuff should give anyone who cares about technology great hope for the future. It's astonishing. And it's hugely powerful because if you can then combine tools, if you can combine data, your data, you know, as a business, you have all this data. If you can combine tools to apply to this data and generate insights. Listen, Dr. Frankenstein, we hear you. It is Frankenstein. I have made a Frankenstein where I am talking to my watch to talk to other hardware to do things. It's amazing. I have a DJI drone thing, and we were using it out in Mexico somewhere. And as we were using it, I got a notification that said, oh, you can control it from your Apple Watch now. And I'm like, I can't see it on my screen. Why would I want to go to like a black dot in the middle of a blue sky? I want to do everything with voice. That's my goal. Everything with voice. Yep. Anyway, I agree. Just make it. That's very exciting. That's a good tip. I think it's going to be. Don't be thwarted. Just do it because you will get better. Well, so you raised an issue, which I think any programmer, every program has run into of any skill level, which is, you know, you want to maybe you're learning a new API, a new framework, a new language, whatever it is. And you're like, all right, I've got to write a program. What am I going to write? And, you know, you kind of finding that starter project is often difficult. But I think, you know, also people, especially mainstream users of, you know, phones, tablets, computers, whatever, don't think like this. You know, they're not like, you know, we all curse some computer thing. We hate it for some reason. It's terrible. And it never occurs to us like, we'll do something about it, you know. And we're entering an era where that's going to be very possible for everybody, you know. You don't like that thing. Whatever it is. I'm a creator. No taking favor. Yeah. Take control. Yeah. Yep. But App Pick of the Week. Yeah, so I've got two. They're both web browsers. Leo, you're going to want to install this one. Oh, please. If you've never heard of it. So it's a new lightweight Chromium-based browser, but it's completely open source, 100% open source. It's all secure and private by default. It's got U-Block Origin integrated into it, so it blocks everything. It's called Helium. Yeah. It's kind of like a slightly lighter weight version of Brave, but completely open source. By the way, Brave now offers for sale a lighter weight version of Brave. That's fascinating. Okay. They call it Brave Origin. You can buy it. It's one time fee. Brave Origin. Yeah. Okay. I didn't even know about that. But both of these are chromium based on chromium. Yes. Right. Which, you know, look, for some people it's like, yeah, no, I'm not interested in that. And I actually have a solution. Helium is nice. It comes with U-block Origin built in. Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, so there's the EFF as the site called Cover Your Tracks, and you can go there with Microsoft Edge with no extensions and discover this thing is not protecting you in the slightest. No, no. This is the only browser I've ever used. Granted, it has uBlock Origin integrated into it, where not only does it block all the trackers, all the hidden trackers, but it also anonymizes your fingerprint, which is actually a big deal because a lot of the tracking that occurs, like when you think about, like, you have meta apps on your phone and you've opted to block them from, you know, tracking around the internet, they use fingerprinting to figure out who you are and your behavior. And they still have different rights to things like location and whatever it might be that you might grant them that they, they build a profile of you. They can figure out who you are. That's fingerprinting. This is the only browser like out of the box I've ever seen that actually has an anonymous fingerprint. Like, so to me that was very interesting. And, uh, Obviously, the lightweight is just interesting. So I've started using it across my different computers. It's worth looking at. It's so fast. I mean, you know, after using Firefox for a long time, I realized, oh, my gosh, Chrome is fast. Yes. So speaking of Firefox, I had given up on Firefox years ago. I was, like, remember the poster they did in the New York Times where all the people who had contributed, you know, spread the web, or whatever the phrase was. My name is in there. It's like in .5, you know, that point type. You'd have to magnify it to see it, but it's in there. I'm next to the O in Firefox, I think. But, you know, I used to be a big Mozilla supporter. I feel like I'm becoming one again. I like their direction. I like what they're doing. But they had that announcement, which I think a lot of companies maybe wouldn't have promoted so heavily, where Anthropics Frontier Red Team helped to find 22 security-sensitive bugs and then 90 other bugs in Firefox. And that was just in part of Firefox. I think it might have been, I don't know if it was the rendering engine or the JavaScript engine or whatever it was. And now, you know, they're going to partner together. It's good for Anthropic because it's a big open source code base, et cetera. Plus, they want to talk about it. Like, you know, I feel like Microsoft would have been like, let's keep that under the download. Well, a month has gone by, and we learned two things. One, this is, in fact, that mythos thing, right? The super secretive, anthropic cloud-based AI model, that's what they're using for this. And it's a month later, and they've announced the next version of Firefox, which, remember, last month it was 90 bugs altogether and then 22 security sensitive. Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities. Yikes. Thanks to Mythos. Yep. That's incredible. Isn't that amazing? And they're promoting this and what they're basically saying, which is what I'm basically saying, which is everyone as a company that creates software needs to do this and promote the fact that they're doing this. You know, I think a lot of people want to be secretive about it. But it's a good threshold to say I'm taking my security secretly. I've gone through this process. Because I've got to tell you, on the black hat side, these guys are using these tools and they move fast. Yep. And look, AI could be used for terrible things, of course. AI sometimes doesn't work great. This is a great use case for AI. This is, you know, I know this is too simplistic, but when I say Microsoft should take AI and Rust and remake the NT kernel and Rust. They could do that. People are like, oh, this is stupid. No, they could do that like two seconds away from this. They could do that. Yep. By the way, they will do that. They have to. This is going to be used to harden things like the Linux kernel, you know, whatever the Azure OS is under the cover of Azure, whatever, you know, Windows, of course. Like, this is, Apple would be crazy not to do this. Google would be crazy not to do this with their platforms. Like, this is going to, this is going to dramatically raise the baseline for security. Well, Microsoft has access to Mythos. I hope they're using it. You know, they've been talking. Look, they've been very open about Rust and, you know, their desire to use that to, you know, for new parts of these kernels. I think they should rewrite it in Python. The whole thing is Python. It should be. Look, if this thing was architected correctly, everything would be API and CLI based, and then there would be a GUI on top of it that anyone could change. Steve was talking about this yesterday. he did a whole show basically about how Mythos is not marketing hype. It really is. Yeah, right. Well, that's not what OpenAI says, Leo. No, it really is. And this 271 bugs in Firefox are part of the proof. But he quoted a paper by a bunch of CISOs, some very well-known names in security, saying it's the Mythos area, but we've got to get ready. And it had this graph. This is a graph of how long it's taken between the disclosure of a CVE and the confirmed exploit. And, you know, eight years ago, it took two and a half years to get to an exploit from the CVE. But notice that. Two and a half seconds. It's 10 hours. 10 hours. So it's truly a zero day. Last year, it was 23 days. Right. This year, it's 10 hours. So when that CVE comes out, you will be exploited by it within 10 hours. Look, we've already experienced just in the past two months, you know, Apple at least twice has released emergency patches to their software platforms. Microsoft has had to reissue, well, that's just incompetence, but, you know, fixes for their Windows updates, et cetera. I mean, but this is how we get ahead of that, right? This is where that hopefully, I mean, obviously the attackers are also getting more sophisticated, but. I asked Steve, I said, what's the end game? Because it's going to get better and better and better. And eventually are all bugs gone? He said, yes, it's completely possible. Well, so this is my dream. I've been since I was a child. Software is ones and zeros. It should be perfect. It should be. It's deterministic. You should be able to write perfect software. Yeah. I know. I know. Everything that comes out of my mouth is overly simplistic. But I'm very excited for that to actually be somewhere close to being true. You know, it'll be an iterator. Always Gates' position. Yeah. Okay. And actually, Steve's always said, I don't release my software with bugs. But he's hand coding this, right, in assembly. He's an artisanal software developer. He's picking up each electron with a pair of chromium. Putting it in place. One electron at a time. Okay. All right. works. I think it's time for Mr. Richard Gamble and Rene's Radio. It's a fun show and kind of a sad show too. Michael Niehaus, who's a regular listener to Windows Weekly, I might point out. Yeah, I was going to say, and we know him. I mean, you know him. Yeah, we know him. We've been fine with him. Former Microsoft employee and one of the guys who led the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit some 13, 14 years. Are you going to say something bad about him? Like something bad happening? No, I'm not going to say anything bad about Michael. No, I mean like is something wrong? Is there something sad? What's sad is that Microsoft deployment toolkit as of this year has gone, Microsoft just abruptly dropped all support for it. So MDT is really for sysadmins and it's for preparing images for setting up machines for your company. Right? So you have sort of standard templates of the versions of things you want to use and software and so forth. So it just speeds the process deploying onto a machine. And it's been around for more than a decade. I think it's been around for 20 years, actually. I think the first version is from like 2013. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I confused it with an adopter. Sorry. Yeah, there were products before that. It never had an officially supported version for Windows 11. And then there was some vulnerability detected in it. Actually, no, we talk about it on the show, right, that there is this vulnerability issue with it, and Microsoft's response is just to drop all support for it, take it offline, take download down. We're not going to fix this. We're not dealing with it. Now, Michael himself, now working for Tanium, has fixed it, or rather shows you how to work around that vulnerability so you don't have to deal with it if you don't want to. And then we also discussed all the other ways to do MDT-like things so you don't have to deal with it. But when I saw the announcement back in January, my response was just to reach out to Michael and say, can we talk about this? because I feel like this is sort of a piece of history that we should finish on. And he was happy to come and chat with me for a while. And we just talked through the life and the death of MDT. Wow. So sad. It's a software that a lot of people depended on, man. It did a lot of work for us. What's the modern replacement for this? at Microsoft. Yeah, if you ask Microsoft, they're going to tell you to do it with Autopilot and Intune. And then you're paying per month, per seat. The idea of just doing it yourself, you've got to go talk about it. Why can't you just pay a subscription fee and not be a jerk about it? Well, because the reality is most system insiders are just not willing to go to the CFO to get budget for this thing if they could make the case for it, which there's an argument that they should. But if you want to stay with free software, you can. There are open source solutions out there. You just have to put them together. Great. All right. You ready? Ready. I'm going to reach over my little glass. And I got Ned. Hi, Ned. Ned's a hero in Australia. Oh, yeah. We're going to have to talk about who Ned Kelly actually is. Is this like a breakfast whiskey that you're having? Is that what you're seeing? Apparently, I drink whiskey at all hours now these days. I'm just trying to understand. Let me take you on this ride. It's a little nutty. And I didn't know going in how nutty it was going to be. So there's a company called Top Shelf International. There's two founders, Jason Redfern and Drew Fairchild. and they very much had a vision around the idea of making local alcohol products in Australia for Australia, that they don't export net at all. So they, right off the bat, both these guys have a background in the booze industry, mostly in marketing, so they knew how to brand and all of that sort of stuff. So they did the normal thing that non-alcohol manufacturers do. They made a contract with a company called Ittle Wine, which is, I know you're going to call it IDL, which has been around since the 1960s and does a lot of these custom beverage solutions and so forth. And the original project from TSI, from Top Shelf International, was what they call ready-to-drink. So they were actually prefab cans of whiskey cola, right? Just like your Jack and Cokes if they're already in a can. So by 2015, they're cranking out the ready-to-drink cans. They released their original versions on Australia Day and sell just in New South Wales, where I am right now in Victoria, which is where Melbourne is. And their main facility now is in Campbell Field, which is in Victoria. In fact, they get that site in 2017 to build a distillery. And actually, they want to go complete vertical. So malt processing, so brewery, the distillery, canning, and bottling operations, they do the whole nine yards. By 2018, they're actually producing. And then in 2019, they put out the first version of NET. And, yeah, as Leo caught on right away, this is the story of Ned Kelly, who is an absolute legend to Australians. And the challenge here was to summarize this in a reasonable length of time. And I have to tell you, there have been eight movies made about Ned Kelly. Most recently, Heath Ledger. But before Heath Ledger, Mick Jagger played Heath Ledger. Mick Jagger played Ned. Like, Ned's a big deal, right? so we got to go back to the origins of australia right uh edward kelly which is his name they called him ned was born to uh a fan his parents his father specifically john kelly was a transported convict that was the term for that he was an irishman convicted of stealing pigs whose punishment was to be sent to van diemen's land and we've talked about this before that's tasmania now for a seven-year sentence. And he was let out a year or so early, and now you're in the colonies, right? It's the 1830s, and so he goes to work for a farmer in the Port Phillip district that's now known as Victoria province. And within a couple of years, he marries the farmer's daughter, a lady named Ellen, and has a bunch of children, as you do in the day, and Ned was actually the third child and the first boy. That part of the world in the 1850s experiences the gold rush, and so there's a fair amount of money flying around, and so even these former transported criminals do pretty well, enough that they end up being able to buy a farm, except they don't buy a good farm, because that whole process is pretty obsolete, so it doesn't grow particularly well. And this is also the criminal part of Australia's winding down, But you do have this schism between the former conflicts and family and the traditional colonists, the military and so forth. In fact, one of the things that was going on, this idea that was called squatting, is that the squatting was being done by the wealthy people. Like traditionally we think of squatting as that's what the poor people do is they squat on land. This was actually the wealthy farmers using crown land mostly for livestock that they didn't actually own. and then defending it. But because they were closely tied to the law, generally the law always fell on their favor. So you get this real schism between the sort of poor farmers trying to follow the rules and these wealthy folks. At one point, just before Confederation, they started calling it the squatocracy. Like it was that nuts. And, of course, largely this ends in the early 1900s with Confederation and so forth. John Kelly, this is Ned's father, gets in trouble with the law as he's struggling to support his family. he's a heavy drinker and eventually alcoholism kills him when Ned is 12 years old. Ned also gets into trouble as a teenager. He starts following in with the Bushrangers. And again, very classic name for a group of robbers that live in the bush and then rob banks and trains and things like that. But they call them Bushrangers. So somehow they're appealing. So fast forward to his early 20s. They call the Fitzpatrick incident. This is in 1878 when Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick comes to the Kelly house to arrest Ned's younger brother, Dan, for theft of a horse. We don't really talk about whether he actually did or not, that's secondary to the point, but there ended up being a confrontation, and the constable gets shot in the arm, like it's not fatal or anything, but he does get shot. And Ned and Dan flee to the bush to go hang with the bushrangers, and so the police's response is to arrest the mother. Ellen and put her in jail for aiding and abetting which really makes people angry like you don't go around putting mothers in in jail like that and this begins this sense of persecution I mean the Kellys always felt like they were hard done by with the failure of the farm and and those sorts of things but that after Ellen is arrested they form the Kelly gang which is these two Kelly brothers and several of their friends operating as bush rangers and so they pay their bills or They make their living essentially by robbing banks. And they're a little bit famous for that in the sense that they don't hurt anyone. They do their very best to almost be entertaining. They hold hostage while they get the money out, that sort of thing, and they do this fairly well. But, of course, they keep going around robbing people, and folks get annoyed, and so a larger police force shows up. The next major incident in Ned's life is the thing they call the Stringy Bark Creek Incidents, And this is where a group of serious police looking for criminals confront them, and it ends up in a shootout, and three of the police officers are killed. One of them escapes. Now, at the time, the Kellys argued that these police were not there to arrest them. They were there to kill them, and they were really fighting in self-defense. But this is when the colonial government declares them outlaws, which is a meaningful thing. When you're declared an outlaw, it means that anyone can kill you and they will not be punished for it. In fact, they will be paid. They put out a bounty or reward on their heads. And anybody who is seen as assisting these outlaws is guilty of a crime as well. So, you know, this is not that unusual this time. I mean, this is the 1850s. Like, it sounds very Wild West and it was very Dutch, that sort of thing. So why has Ned Kelly become so famous? Well, he keeps dictating letters that they get sent to the press and sent to the government and so forth. The most famous of this one is called the Gerald Derry letter, which is like 7,000 words. Like, this is an treatise. It's kind of analogous to Bonnie and Clyde, though, right? Yeah, it's a little of that. You know, we could throw a little Unabomber in here. I don't know. It's kind of nuts. Now, the police kind of botched this because after these things are going on, they do this big crackdown in the area, including arresting 30 people they think are sympathetic to the Kelly gang and never charge them with anything. They release quite a few after just a few weeks, but nine of them are held for months without ever having a trial, without ever having edits. So the whole local population, if they weren't on board with the Kelly gang, they kind of are now. Like, he's Robin Hood-like, although he's not certainly giving to the poor. He's just, like, he's manifesting the frustration of the poor farmers of the area at the time. The reward thing gets out of hand. At one point, it's 8,000 pounds for the kill or capture of the Kelly gang, which is an astronomical amount of money, the largest ever. And finally, we get to the Glenn Rowan incident. And this is, again, you want to talk about legend and what they put into the movies. The Kellys get aware that there's now a train coming up from Melbourne with a lot of police officers, like professional hunter types, to come and get them. And so their goal was to derail the train. And they thought there was an informant, a guy named Aaron Sherp, who they kill. And then they finally, as a confrontation, the scheme ultimately fails, and the police arrive in Glenrowan. And this is when you discover that the Kelly gang, the four, the two brothers and the two others, have made armor out of old plowshares of the mold boards of the plows. Helmet, chest police, shoulder poltrons, you know, down to their waist. And then there's this massive shootout. The other three are all killed in the shootout, ultimately. The armor only works so well. Ned is hit 18 times in his armor. And we know this because that armor is on display at the State Library of Victoria. But his legs aren't well protected, so he gets pretty chewed up in the legs. But he survives and is captured and treated for his wounds and then arrested and put on trial for murder. He pleads on guilty, talks about being a victim of the police and being persecuted, and he only ever acted as self-defense, but ultimately sentenced to death by hanging. And he's 25. There's a huge petition that comes in the area, 32,000 signatures pleading for clemency. They hang him anyway. And afterward, do an extensive investigation into the accusations of corruption and find a bunch of it that results in reprimands and demotions and suspensions and so forth. But also that investigation says that the police behaved appropriately to the Kellys' crimes. So there was nothing changed there. But they do release Ned's mother. And arguably part of that was to say, because the big concern here when Ned was killed was there's going to be a revolution. Like it's going to get way worse. That's not actually what happens. They release Ned's mother and, you know, they clean up the police, so to speak. And so the things calm down. So, I mean, by any definition, Ned is a criminal, but he's also this folk hero. And he's saying things like the armor and stuff just make him a legend. So this whiskey, and the funny thing about this whiskey is that it's very much an American-style bourbon. It is corn, wheat, barley, but it was all about sort of tapping into this. And what was interesting about TSI, because most of the Australian whiskeys that we've ever talked about are very batiki, very batch. That is not what TSI went for. When they built their distillery in Campbellfield, they built the bourbon process, column still, rectifier, large scale. This is quite inexpensive. We usually talk about 500 ml bottles for 200 Australian dollars. This is like 40 bucks. They've never published any specifications for how they make this stuff, just that it was a combination of Australian grains, being corn, wheat, barley, likely in that order. It is labeled as a sour mash, and just a reminder that that means they take the spent mash from a previous distillation and put it into the fermentation batch, which lowers the acidity or increases the acidity, lowers the pH. That's the sour part, which is good for the yeast, bad for lack of bacillus and other things. So it sort of stabilizes the flavor and gives it a particular taste. And that should be the end of the story. I mean, shouldn't it? Ned whiskey, right? And it's, by the way, it's just basic bourbon. They say it's Australian for bourbon. Totally. And this is, it's super drinkable, right? Like, there's nothing offensive about this. It's nothing amazing. It's a very young whiskey, right? They haven't been around that long. But that first came out in 2019. So 2020 is when they decided to go public, right, during the pandemic and so forth. And they also add a vodka to the line. They've really scaled up and done a good job. And then, I don't know, they go nuts. They decide they're going to make tequila. Of course, they're not allowed to call it tequila because that's a Mexico thing. So agave spirit. So back in 2019, Drew Fairchild, which is the other co-founder at that time as the CEO, he has some relationship with this old experimental agave plantation in the northern Queensland, in Ayr. But it was Belgium defunct. There was like 2,000 plants on it that were overgrown and unmaintained and so forth. But it was sort of proof. Blue agave, Weber agave, the stuff they make tequila from, will grow in Queensland. Although it's very different conditions. It's much more tropical, right? Like traditionally, Mexican tequila plants, the blue agave, is grown at altitude. It's kind of desert-y, dry things. When I was in Queensland in November, we did those shows. It was hot and humid. It's an intense environment. So in 2021, they announced this thing they call the Australian Agave Project, and they hire in a guy named Trent Fraser, who comes from Louis Vuitton Moat Hennessy. He had actually built the tequila business for LVMH. The tequila we know is Vulcan de Tierra, which is good tequila. No two ways about it, but made totally traditionally. No big deal. They acquire a massive plantation, 438 hectares. It's about 1,000 acres. They call it the Eden Lassi Plantation. Plant 50,000 agave plants with plants to go to a million. In fact, by 22, they have 500,000 agave plants growing. And again, traditionally in tequila biz, agave takes five to seven years to mature. But one of the things they learned from the old air plantation was that because it's so warm and so humid, the gavi grows really quickly and sugars up quickly. Although I suspect they're doing a little cheating, too, that they do an additional process to extract more sugars and things like that, so that they're able to get to a spirit fairly short order. So by 23, the old founder Drew Fairchild, who started this madness, steps down. So the Trent Fraser, the guy who made a tequila project before, is now running as CEO. It was presented as a planned succession, but okay. And in December, they actually opened the distillery. And again, they're going full vertical from plant to bottle. They're doing the whole thing, which is not the way traditionally tequila is done. The growers are very different from the process. It's very different from the bottlers. They do the whole thing together. So by 2024, they released their first Blanco tequila. So two years. Crazy fast. And they call it act of treason, which is hilarious, because they're trying to make tequila. They're all to say tequila, right? Except when they're quoted or interviewed or anything, they go, you know, agave, they use that for making tequila. We make an agave spirit. I don't know why they're so smitten with this idea. Climates lets it grow faster. They've gotten more sugar from it. They win awards for this Blanco, this fast-made Blanco, both San Francisco World Spirits Competition, which is no fooling, and the World Drink Awards, the sort of best new spirit and so forth. That's in 24. By September of 24, that publicly traded company known as TSI suspends trading for a restatement of finances. And apparently they had spent so much money getting all this started. They had not been paying their excise taxes. And so the Australian tax office basically orders them into receivership, although they battle back. So they owed millions of dollars in excise tax, which the excise tax is what you pay every time you sell a bottle of booze. Right. That's what it is. They're fairly steep taxes. And so last year, by 2025, they actually sell off that Campbell Field facility, the thing that was making Ned Whiskey and this whole operation. The deal was actually completed in May of 25. for $8 million, which is absurdly cheap. Now, again, this was all done in receivership, so $3.2 million of that is just straight the excise tax because the ATO gets paid off. The other $4.8 is to other debts. But remember that IDL, who is the acquirer in this, had been making a bunch of product for them. So I wonder how much that money was already owed to IDL anyway, that they are able to buy the distillation operation in Campbellfield, which is very helpful for IDL. It allows them to expand their product lines. And part of that deal is they do continue to produce the TSI products. So the whiskey, the canned products, the tequila, and the vodka. But they don't buy everything. They just buy the production. Another company pops up called Blue Sky Drinks, and they buy the brands, again, working with IDL. What's never been sold and is still forced in receivership is the agave plantation. So that's just sort of hanging there while they sell this other product. But I did not pay. I saw Ned, thought, fun, I'll tell the story of Ned Kelly. Let's go talk about an inexpensive Australian whiskey. And then stumbled into this crazy, just crazy plan. Like this is going to be a case study in overreach. This was a very successful company, done extremely well. and then they just tried to go for something so difficult that they burned every bit of their money up. Now, like I said, this is an inexpensive whiskey for Australia, right? It's $64 Australian, about $45 US. But I went and priced a bunch of booze in that price range. So you can go cheaper, like $50 Australian, and you'll get Bally's, Jim Beam, Canadian Club, Bell's. Even Maker's Mark is only $50 Australian down here. for the 700 mil bottle. For the same price, for what you would pay for a bottle of Ned, you can get a bottle of Monkey Shoulder or Johnny Walker or even Glenn Livet. And if you want to spend a little bit more, now you're in the range of Woodford Reserve, Famous Grouse, or even Lafroy is like $72 Australian dollars. So there's a reason they're not trying to export this in any way. This is an Aussie whiskey for people who want to drink an Aussie whiskey. And so it's priced roughly in that range. If you don't care about where your whiskey comes from, you just want the best stuff, I don't know that you're going to pick this. It definitely bats at the same level as the monkey shoulder, without a doubt. I would argue that Maker's Mark is better than them all by a non-trivial amount and costs less. I don't know what's going to happen to TSI. This is kind of a sad story because of tequila. And it just, because, admittedly, if they pulled it off and basically made a new class of agave spirit made in Australia, okay, that would have probably, could be huge. And it might still be. I think somebody's going to pick this up at some point and just see the value in it and the opportunity there. But it's just a nutty boo story. Like, such a strange industry to jeopardize everything to do this agave. Lose your shirt. Yeah. Well, and more importantly, lose other people's shirts, right? Yeah. It's a publicly traded company on the ASX. So, yeah. And it's been in receivership ever since. If you own stock in TSI, you've not been able to sell it since 2024. It's been locked up. Now, I think Paul, given his appreciation of peanut butter whiskey, might enjoy their Golden Bickey-flavored Aussie whiskey. Yeah, this is a liqueur, actually. Oh, yeah, it's a liqueur. So it's more like cook-offable. It's more like cook-offable. And it tastes like cookies. and again that's almost the same price as the whiskey you know that's for a liqueur that's very pricey yeah cookie flavored liqueur yeah you know bicky is a very Aussie word for biscuit yeah so I mean I always enjoy telling craft stories of a group of guys that used to make whiskey for other people who said we should make our own and they do that little crafting. That is not the story. This is a story of business people trying to make the business of whiskey. They find a niche without a doubt, and then they go off the rails. So what was it that caused them to lose their shirt? Was it the farm? Just the sheer amount of money it takes to start an agave operation from beginning to end. They had to build another processing facility because the processing of peanuts is totally different. And they had to set up that entire farm. And they overscaled it. What are you doing planting half a million agave plants? Another victim of Mexico's booming economy. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess it's also because they can't charge enough in Australia. It sounds like Australians don't like to pay for their liquor. Well, you know, this stuff gets expensive. Like, we were talking about, like, Harmony and, like, those very fancy craft spirits. that are $200 Aussie dollars for a 500 mil. Yeah. What I loved about that is the contrast. Traditional size bottle, very reasonable price, relatively speaking, for an Aussie-made product. Like, they had a winner here. I hope it survives. It's just going to have to be under a different ownership. It's the moment where, you know, they're sort of in flux. But, you know, brands have been locked up. Like, it's legit. It's fine. Nothing wrong with it. If you've got an urge to drink whiskey at 6 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday, You lost me at the 6 o'clock in the morning. Excellent choice. Really. I was like, I do have an... Oh, wait, what? I have an urge to be asleep at 6 o'clock in the morning. No, that's not how my day is going to go. No, it is not. Well, there you go. Thank you, Richard, for getting up early in the morning. It's getting a little bit more unreasonable. Sun will be up soon. Richard Campbell is in. It's brightening up out there. Yeah, I can see the lights coming out. Just in time for a little bit of Ned. Glad to hear tomorrow's going to be sunny. Richard's got to go make some armor. Protect your legs. I've got to go to Victoria and see that armor now. I know. I want to see it. Count the holes. Oh, great. In all holes, dense. 18 rounds stopped by that. It worked. Ned. Yeah. Ned. We're going to have some weather here. It's thunder and lightning now. Oh, fancy. Very frightening. Mr. Richard Campbell is at RunIsRadio.com. That's where you'll find his Run Is Radio show and .NET Rocks. He does with Carl Franklin. And the geek outs are in there, too, Space Geek Out and others. I guess you'll have to update that now with Artemis. Doing a Space Geek Out on 10 o'clock this morning. Yeah. Have fun doing that. That'll be fun. Yeah. Paul Therat is at Therat.com. Become a premium member and get all the goodness in there. It's a wonderful site. And, of course, his books are at LeanPub.com. Although, if you become a premium member, the books come along with it. They come along for the ride. The Field Guide to Windows 11, featuring Windows 10, Inside Windows Everywhere, and his latest, The Insignify Windows, could be yours for a song. Paul and Richard get together every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC to do this little thing we call Windows Weekly, a.k.a. the Redmond Gazette. Yes. We have a pencil behind our ears, a hat on, and a piece of paper in there that says press. If you want to watch it live, you can. We stream it in our club, of course, in the Club Twitter Discord, but also on YouTube, TwitchX.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. but you don't have to watch live because after the fact we package it all up put it on a reel-to-reel tape and mail it to your house or for convenience sake you can always go to the website twit.tv slash www download the audio or there's even video no need for that super 8 projector you can actually just get it from the website there's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly great place to share clips with friends and of course you can always subscribe to your favorite podcast player the best way to get all of our shows. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thank you. Thanks to our club members for making this possible, and thanks to all of you Windows winners and dozers. We'll see you right here next week on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.