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

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therod and Richard Campbell are here. We celebrate this week. wow the 50th anniversary of microsoft and you won't believe the gift bill gates has for us all we'll also uh talk about uh let's see new versions of windows that's usually Pretty popular. Oh, and Paul's thoughts on the new Nintendo Switch 2. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therot and Richard Campbell. Episode 926. Recorded Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025. You're ugly when you cry. Hey, winners and dozers, it's time. Gather around the podcast. What? Gather around the podcast appliance. It's time for Windows Weekly. Windows. Windows Weekly. With Paul Thorat, there he is to my right. He is the man in charge of Thorat.com, publisher of many fine tomes.

At leanpub.com. Hello, Paul. In Mexico City. Hello, as we say here. Hello. Also to his right is the wonderful Richard Campbell, who is joining us today. From Lost Wages, Nevada. Yes, indeed. You are in LV? Nobody calls it LV. Why do they call it LA but not LV? I don't know. No, no, no. Somebody calls it that. You're in Vegas, man. As a resident of the Lehigh Valley, I find preposterous. Yeah. You're the real LV. The OG LV. I'm at the Fabric Community Conference with 6,500 of my closest friends.

What's Fabric? Fabric is the data analytics stack for Microsoft. cloud-centric, you know, Power BI on the front end, plus the one lake in the back end and all the goodies in between. Dear God, what's happening? And is this your conference? It's a really successful product. They've had a great year. We did this show last year in April, and we had about 4,000 attendees, and this is the second time around.

6,500 showed up and we couldn't fit in the MGM Grand, so we rented the T-Mobile arena for the keynote. Holy moly. Yeah, it's been really great. I saw Lady Gaga there. Wow. Well, now you can see Naroon Gulag. Wow. That's one of the biggest events, Microsoft events of the year, isn't it? I think we're going to be right up there. We'll see how they do. But boy, oh boy, the analytics audience is excited and the tech is great. So they've been all hanging out and having fun.

So it's business intelligence primarily, is that? Yeah, you know, along those lines, a lot of real-time stuff these days. So, you know, all the instrumentation, they've really brought that stack together. where the analytics tools and the warehousing, and they're super cross-platform. I'm one data lake away from retiring. I just can't. This is the bridge I can't cross. Well, that's the first time I came to the old studios.

You know, in Panteluna, it was a build event and I had to talk about data lakes because nobody else wanted to. Right. Yeah, we were like, no. That was the new term of the hour. Give it to Campbell. He can explain it. We were just slowly sliding away on the seats. But I brought whiskey, so everything was okay. That made me fine. I didn't hear a word you said.

Show us the view from the beautiful sky. Right. We're up on the 29th floor here. So I got to look out to, I think it's to the West. Then that's the, uh, the New York. Wow. That's the strip you're seeing out there. That's it. Holy moly. Those are all. What's funny is those are all. Everything's fake, right? All of that is fake. There's nothing behind those windows after the fifth floor. It's just like... Something like that, yeah. I don't even know.

But it looks like it could thunderstorm at any moment in here. It's looking really gray. That's how big his suite is, ladies and gentlemen. It has its own climate. Well, I wish I could turn the air off because it's freezing in here. My apartment has its own nuisance. It's my downstairs neighbor. Oh, dear. At least they're not your upstairs. Doing construction work. Well, we were embargoed. We could not start this show one minute earlier than we did.

Because of a big story, right? Am I wrong? Yeah, that was an hour earlier. I had the time wrong. Well, you got me all excited. I thought we were like breaking news, but this is already an hour old. I did the thing in the notes and then I looked at it again. I was like, I actually asked me, I'm so, this is the simplest of math. I'm not taught, this is not octal. It's not.

Hacks or anything. Well, it is base 24. What the hell is that? So I said, I'm going to read this to you and you tell me what time. and then i think there's a website called what time is it there's also this thing that's in your head it's called a brain and i guess mine doesn't work properly because this is the simplest actually but you know yeah world time buddy that's a good one great i just When I went to Israel in 2000,

I emailed Charles Petzold, the author of Programming Windows, the amazing Windows programming series, right? Yep. To ask him if he would send me a copy of his time zone app that he wrote in one of the books and all, you know, in the book. because it was supposed to be available through some FTP site, but it wasn't there anymore. And he emailed it to me. He was very nice about that.

And that's how I kept track of the time zone change there. But this is two hours off. It's not hard. You know, it's the same day. It's I don't know. Base 24, never been my favorite. Time zones are a political construct, right? Wow. as our borders that's fine but we still honor them they're still easy to I don't know I just this is just a personal embarrassment Mike Elgin really wants us to go to UTC everywhere yeah

I don't. What time would it be UTC? Look, I would just take no more daylight savings. Let's take baby steps. Let's do that first. can we get over daylight savings time first then we can worry about it and actually that's that's that's my problem well one of my problems is mexico did stop observing it so like it's one hour for half the other year it's two hours it's just Yeah, this is why I drink right here. I can't.

And the fact that there's a bottle of tequila in you. Yeah, that and the readily available. This may look like juice, Leo. Margarita! All right, let's talk about Microsoft's... So it's funny because Apple is 49 years ago as of yesterday, 49 years old as of yesterday. Right. Interesting. Microsoft is one year older. Yeah. And it's officially as of the fourth, which is in two days from this recording. So this Friday, although I believe today is that they're having an event.

I think it's today or maybe it's tomorrow. I don't remember, but they're having an event in Redmond, which I was invited to. I'm sorry, Bill Gates just stopped by. I didn't mean to scare you. Windows 8 is a... Anyway, so... I'm Bill Gates. It all started with my first computer during my eighth grade year at Lakeside. Do you want me to stop this?

Yeah, what is this? What are we watching? Bill Gates today published the source code for the original version of Altair Basic. What? In Intel 8080 assembly language. With Paul Allen, I mean, he wrote most of the source code for the actual basic language, although Paul Allen wrote the bootstrapper on the plane, by the way, to Albuquerque to show it to the owner of Met.

very famous in fact they were writing code in the plane weren't they that's what he yeah he wrote the boot the bootstrapper oh yeah you just said yeah yes he did he wrote but as i remember he they didn't have Oh God, I have to change the channel real quick here. They didn't have a, oh boy, I can't get rid of them. They didn't have a Altair.

to run, right? Right. So they had access to a PDP 10 at Harvard. And by they, I mean, Bill Gates, and he gave it access to it to all his friends. Got in a lot of trouble for that. But they Paul Allen had earlier written a. I forget which the, I forget what it was, maybe an eight, what was before the 8080? There's Paul Allen, the here suit. Yeah, 8,8008 probably emulator on the PDP 10. So they had some history doing that. And he got the manual from Intel and wrote the emulator, Gates.

wrote it to the emulator. Alan wrote the bootstrapper so it could actually come up on this device when he got there. But he was writing it on a plane without the emulator. He was writing it from memory. He just wrote it off the top. Yeah, because he was so good at it then. And by the way, this thing worked the first time.

Although I think they were holding their breath, weren't they? Of course. I mean, why on earth would you think this would work? You know, it's astonishing. It's an incredible story. I have one right here. This is the replica Mitz Altair 8800. that they wrote it for. It's running a little program right now.

Yeah. What's it? Okay. I can't remember what it was. I think it's just like, yeah, they hooked it up to some kind of a teletype so they could type in a, you know, a question like question mark print 10 or something. And it would print 10 and then they do math and then they could write short code. Actually, that's interesting. It had basic in it.

He wrote the basic for it. That was their first basic. Was there an operating system or was that also the operating system? No, that was it. There was no operating system. You would boot that. And you'd be running basic and that's that. You couldn't do anything with this thing, right? So people bought it because they were so excited to own a computer. Yeah, no, I know. It was amazing. But it wasn't, you know, you needed to buy a lot of extra things, you know, RAM.

different peripherals. In the end, you would spend thousands of dollars, but it still couldn't do anything, right? So it needed a basic. Operating systems weren't really a thing. It wasn't until... CPM came out that people could see, like, actually, we need something like this. We need something to interact between whatever the programs you run are and the hardware. Right. And that's. CPM was the first kind of microcomputer. operating system, I guess.

Book programmers at work had a little snippet of code that Bill wrote. He was super proud of, you know, because he was code golfing or something. He didn't have a lot of memory. So the other thing about this, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt is. He had a problem to overcome with this. And this is something I think we've all kind of done, but to a much lesser degree.

He couldn't solve a particular problem. I don't remember what it was, but he went out on a hike, which he didn't like to do, but he had a girlfriend and she wanted to go on a hike and he's like, screw it. So he spent the whole time thinking and talking about this instead, right? Needless to say, they didn't make it. I wonder if I should do a move or a dupe here. Should I wrote it? Okay, that was my replay. Anyway, he solved this incredible problem in his head.

Went home and wrote it on a piece of paper. And then went to the lab and typed it in. And that also worked. Look at this. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Paul Allen wrote the non-runtime stuff. Monty Davidoff wrote the math package. Right. And here's the things to do. I'm sorry. I'm turning off my microphone right now. Go ahead. No, it's okay. This is the first time the original version of BASIC, the source code has ever come out in full.

So there are leaked versions of 1.2, whatever they are. This is the first one. Bill Gates, you know, a month ago published the first edition, first volume of his autobiography, and it covers this part of his history right up until he drives to.

redmond to move the company there well to seattle area wasn't redmond originally but um And yeah, they tell the story, the thing you just read as part of the story, like they were really short on time and the math, the floating point math or whatever the math library was, is difficult. It was difficult. He was like, we're not going to have enough time. We're going to have to do a version without it.

Someone at the table next to him at Harvard in the whatever lunchroom heard them. He's like, I could write that. And he was like some math expert. And they were like, all right. And he did. And yeah, he wrote the math package. The world famous Monty Davidoff. And how much did Bill pay him for that? I wonder. I don't know. Remember off the top of my head, I can, uh, he's not, he didn't, he didn't pay for it, but he didn't, uh, that guy did not retire on that. I can tell you. Wow.

Well, it was the middle 70s too, right? Yeah. Well, this is brand new. The notion that you could write software and then make money for it, well, it just writes software. It was almost unheard of completely in the mainstream world. You could turn this into a business that didn't, you know, this was not obvious. Anyway, I think I might've mentioned this story, you know, whenever it was about a month ago when the Gates book came out and, uh,

It stands as a singular achievement. I mean, whatever you think of Bill Gates or the basic language or Microsoft, whatever, this is an astonishing feat that they accomplished. for this era it's incredible well you're also playing in what 4k of ram so i mean it's literally not that many bytes yeah you know what processor is this for what is 8,800 or it admits out to 8,800, but it's running in 80, 80, 80. Yes. Yeah.

Paul Allen had wanted to do this for microcomputers. He wanted to go after this market early, and Gates kept saying, no, these chips are not powerful enough. And like the 80, you know, whatever, 80-08 or whatever the predecessor was, was almost there, you know. And he saw this, you know, the famous story with the magazine cover. He came running back. This is it. This is the thing you said to wait for. And here it is. Let's do it.

And they did. I'm impressed by the comments. There's a lot of explanations of what's going on here. Yeah. high-quality code. This is almost literate coding. I'm sad, though, that he published it as a picture of the tractor feed printout. Fortunately, Leo, we have a tool in Windows today called Snipping Tool that does OCR. Can you? Is it good enough quality? Yep.

I did part of it earlier today, actually. Not because I wanted the code, but just I saw that and thought that myself. I'm like, huh. Interesting. I would love to see... Maybe Steve Gibson, somebody who really knows 8080 code. Yeah, kind of look at this. Look at this and say, hey, you know, this was pretty clever or this was boneheaded or. Yeah. I'm guessing it's all fairly clever. 4K memory is not a lot. For the day, it was actually. Write a program in, so you don't get to use 4K for basic.

I'm going to go off the top of my head here, but the base RAM on this thing was 4K. The base, they fit the original. I think it was 6K. But of course you wanted 8K, you know, for $4,000 more. Yeah, it was expensive. And then, but that, but. you know, whatever. And the thing is, you know, they liberally took from all of the basics that were out in the world. This was actually at the time, one of the most advanced basics.

There was, and it ran on a micro computer, not on a. a mini computer like this was astonishing to people they you know they're like obviously given the constraints of this thing it's going to have you know the integer math only or whatever like a lot of basics did including basics that came after this But this is, again, we look at it today like we have AI. We're like, yeah, cute. But I mean, in that era, this is astonishing.

It's really cool to see this, I have to say. And I'm super impressed with the commenting. I know. It's also like 150 pages of code. Yeah, but most of that's comments. I mean, there are pages. There's some pages just comments. This is quite neat. Yeah. I think that's the word Bill would use. That's neat. It is neat. Super neat. Yeah.

You want to go on a hike? Well, he would never say that. Oh, you want to go on a hike? That's how he would say it. Oh, you want to go on a hike? Okay, but I might be thinking about something. Wow. No, I shouldn't mock him. This is very cool. That's incredible. And is the sense that he was a great coder or of?

He was for that era. Conflicting reports. Yeah. Well, of course, those would have come from his competitors who were critics because they couldn't stand how successful he was. Right. So. You know, one of the many ways that people even of that era looked down on him was because he was so... caught up in BASIC. You know, everyone else was like, well, there were more sophisticated languages. And

You know, he, he was onto something with basic, not because it's a great language, but because it's approachable by people. And that's what was needed at that time. You needed, if this was too complicated, if it was assembly language or. C or C would have been probably impossible on this thing, but whatever, whatever other. you know, a more structured language, a more technical language, whatever. You know, this stuff would have happened a lot more slowly.

But this made computing accessible, right? So the people are super excited to buy these computers and upgrade them, get all the stuff and actually do it. They wanted to do something with it. And this is what enabled that. And also, by the way, started an industry, you know. Very impressive.

Nice that he released this. You know, they'll never release the Windows code because there's too much proprietary stuff in this. That's okay. Other people have released the Windows code. So at various times, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of go-to tens. But, you know, it's okay.

Do we know? I mean, it does say at the front what Bill wrote and what Paul wrote. I'm not sure. Most of the actual basic was written by Bill Gates, except for that math package. And then Alan was responsible for the emulator. had to write the bell gates with the runtime stuff paul wrote the non-run time stuff which is i guess the loader later yeah yeah and the bootstrap well he didn't know that when he wrote that code i mean right

You know, he didn't know. They both forgot about the bootstrapper. They forgot there was no way to bring this thing up. You had to be able to load this thing into memory for this to work, right? Was the bootstrapper switches? I mean... Yeah. It's literally...

I think in the Paul Allen book, there's a picture from those notes. You can see it's like up, down, down, down, down, up, down, down. And like eight of them at a time, right? And then it's like up, down, down, down, up, you know, whatever it is. Yeah, there's switches on the front. And that's exactly how you load code in.

the Altair here. I have a note to myself how to run uh the kill the bit game okay and this is and this is i wrote you can see how long ago i wrote that it's on my newton notepad nice switch stop up reset up sw1 up hold up your left foot all the others down toward the moon and then to start it's a chicken switch aux one down and then the game kill the bit starts right Yeah, the basic blue motor was like, 30 bytes so you had to set the switches load

set the switches, load, and you got them all correct. I believe it took them 18 minutes to do this, something like that. It was some crazy amount of time. Physically on the front of it. Yeah, and you had to get it right. If you screwed up one, you had to start over. One mistake. Steve Gibson tells that story on a PDP, early PDP. You can see I have a replica PDP-10 that has switches in front of it as well. But static code storage just wasn't a thing then, right? Like the ROM comes later.

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

To raise money, including Bill's mother, to raise money to buy this terminal, which was a timeshare terminal in the Lakeside School. I went to a similar time frame in 67, 68, 69. a school in Rhode Island that had a similar room. I've never even heard of anything like this.

Well, I'm kicking myself now if I had just spent a little more time in that room. We didn't get computers in my high school. Well, in junior high school, there was one commoner pet in a small room somewhere by itself. So I was aware of that. But when I went to high school and I graduated in 85, it wasn't until my sophomore year.

that we got computers and they were at that time completely out of date they were vt 100 terminals from digital but they were called vt 180s because they had like a double Five and a quarter inch, I think it was floppy on the top. There was some storage. I don't remember how they did storage, but there were these giant things, right? And by this point, I had a Commodore 64. My dad had gotten an IBM PC.

This thing, we got these things. And I was like, what is this? The seventies again? You know, like it was just, but it was probably some fire sale and, you know, school districts didn't have any money then either. So. That's what we got. We got the bargain basement hand-me-downs from five years earlier or whatever.

it's amazing isn't it yeah the history it took what 50 years to see this code though so yep yeah well this is why i like i mean we've seen there have been parts of it and we've seen other versions of it yeah i've seen a chunk of it the chunk that bill is the most proud of has been passed

Yeah, no, as I said, it was in the appendix of the... you're right at the gates book microsoft published book about the pro about programs oh i see i'm sorry yeah i don't know i think between the gates book and then the allen book which probably came out i don't know 10 15 years ago I think we have the definitive account now between the two of this time. Like, you know, these are the two guys, like they did it, you know?

It's kind of that's really interesting to me. When did they turn mean and rapacious? At what point did that happen? So after about 10 seconds after you got basic working, it was right there. No, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, they were trying to make a business. You know, it was controversial that he didn't want people giving away this program for free.

Bill very famously went to... users group meeting maybe it was in albuquerque and uh yelled at them for sharing paper tape yeah right famous letter to the computer computer hobbyist club I think it's from 1976. This is the book which is out of print, but boy, it is a great book from Microsoft Press.

And it has that code in the back. That's interesting. Yeah. So the, yeah, I mean, MITS tried to prevent them from selling basic to others, but they were required by their contract to help them with that. And they saw everyone as a competitor, which is accurate. So they had to go to arbitration and Microsoft won. Otherwise, Microsoft probably wouldn't exist today.

Interesting. Let me see if I can get my overhead. Okay. Just move on. I don't know. You don't want to move on. You want to move on. You can move on. I don't have to do this. No, I mean, what are you trying to find? i just was going to show you something oh go ahead we'll find it it's just this is the book so this so this is very this is actually related what's kind of cool about this though and i'm sure bill gave the author of this is there's handwritten notes as well.

Yeah, I think some of the stuff I've seen. Storage layout for basic. Stuff like that. But we only got this little chunk of code. So this is a good book. I recommend it if you can find a copy. In the old days of the MVP Summit, when Bill would talk to the MVPs, Somebody, one of the MVPs had found an original manual from that Altair Basic. And on the back of it, like the last page, it said, if you have any problems with this basic, call Bill Gates and add the phone number. I love it.

And he got to get up on the stage and he wanted Bill to sign it for him. And Bill got really emotional about it. I bet. I remember the phone number. I mean, things were so simple then. It was an Albuquerque phone number too. Oh yeah, of course. Before any of that. Yep. Yeah. They were actually in Albuquerque for several years. You kind of, this part of the story gets lost over a little bit, but yeah, they had a, I mean, and they were originally all languages, obviously.

They didn't want to get into operating systems. I think a lot of people out there are probably like, I kind of wish they didn't. But I don't like CPM would have been any better. What would you be doing, Paul? Goodness knows. I would be writing about wind CPM or something. I don't know. Actually, in the back of this book, Gary Kildall's notes for it. CPM are also here. So if you want to, or is that DRDAS he did? It was DRDAS. Well, it was eventually DRDAS, but it was CPM originally. Yeah.

Susan Lammers, if you can find it, I think it's been out of print for a long time. Now I'm going to reread this now that I... This is the type of book that... Won't be digital for some reason, but should be. And I find there's a lot of stuff like that. Actually, we're going to get into this a little later, oddly, through some piracy and AI story that's coming up. But yeah, there's a lot of books from our industry that just never made it to electronic form, which is crazy to me. Yeah.

At least not officially. There's got to be some rights issues out there somewhere. Well, it's the same reason Source Code doesn't get shared because it's got proprietary stuff. We're going to get to this. It's crazy. I don't understand any of this. I bet OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever would be really good for learning or for writing Intel 8080 code right now. I bet. There's so much information out there. I bet they could.

Just ask to help you write basic for the 8080. That's right, right. Like, find out what feature was missing from this and then say, here's the source code from basic. Add that feature to it, right? I bet it could do it. I bet I could. I'd like async and away in my 4K. Yes. 8080 might be a little tough because, of course, it's dependent on how much code there is. out there that it's red and yeah well all you need is the the instruction manual and no i mean like literally

That whole cloth. Well, that's how Paul Allen wrote it. I mean, wrote the emulator. I think Paul Allen's maybe a little smarter. Man, I might accept that challenge. I don't know. Well, he's not now. He was a smart guy. I'm not discounting Paul Allen's intelligence at all. He's a genius. I've met him a couple of times. A little underwhelming, to be honest. Good, though. That's what he wanted. He never wanted to be famous or anything.

No. And of course, that's why he went on to buy all the sports teams and, you know, but whatever. But, you know, he just wasn't there a book written about him called The Accidental Billionaire? I believe that was that him. wasn't his his book is called the idea man and so

Well, it's fair, though, because we all know about the Microsoft thing, and then we know about some of the other stuff. But honestly, he was involved with a lot of different things over time. And in his story, Microsoft is just like an early part of it. Oh, I'm sorry. The accidental billionaires. It was about the founding of Facebook. Oh, great. They really were accidental. So you've read this book, right? This new book. Which Facebook book? I have it. Yeah. Yeah. Have you read it?

I read a little bit of it. It's a little, it's just tawdry. Yeah. So I finished it and I, you got to go to the back. I remember, right? Well, it's a good book. I mean, it's well-written. It's not my kind of a book, I guess. It's not showstopper. No, because it's about the people, politics, whatever. But go read the end of it because... It explains why Meta is doing open source AI. And it is the evilest reason imaginable. And it is the worst. And it's the one technical thing that's in this book.

I think it's the only technical thing in the entire book. I read that and I was like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. It's awful. It's way worse than you think it is. Actually, later today, we're going to interview a woman from Wall Street Journal, a reporter from Wall Street Journal who just has written a book. The biography of Sam Altman. And that's also. Interesting. Right. She's got the scoop. Morally questionable subhumans that are have incredible power and wealth. Yeah.

The Microsoft connection, of course, is she has the story of Satya Nadella's phone call saying, what the hell are you guys doing? Right. She got the very good reporting. The first appearance of Dark Sacha. Dark Sacha. All right, let's take a little break. Then we have lots of Windows news as well. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell, and our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly.

Sorry. You're good. Are you okay? Yeah. I'm going to cut out. Did you have a bad morning? No. Okay. I'm just going to get rid of some stuff. Me being the top of that list, probably. Well, let's just, I'll tell you what, let me just do the ad and then you can get rid of me. How about that? No, that's not what I meant.

I'm sorry. Maybe I'm the one who's having a bad morning. I'm a little sensitive. Maybe that's what it is. It could be. Don't be sensitive, Leo. I hate it. You're so ugly when you're sensitive. As everybody knows, completely insensitive. A riff on my favorite joke of all time. Don't cry, honey. You're so ugly when you cry.

Anyway, go on. I'm sorry. I shall not say that to anyone. I definitely don't say that to an actual human being like out loud, but you could think it though. It's okay to think it, I believe. our show today brought to you by us cloud love these guys spend a nice morning with them talking about what they do they are the number one Microsoft Unified Support. We've been talking about them for a few months.

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Those VMs were, I don't know, $10,000 a month, not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. But once you get to $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up yes sam it does doesn't it Maybe that sounds familiar. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com. Just one more reason to go there and book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. uscloud.com.

And if they say, how did you hear about this? Don't forget to say, oh, it was on Windows Weekly because that helps us a lot. uscloud.com. Book a call today. Get better, faster Microsoft support for less. U.S. Cloud. So last week, you may recall, I had a lengthy discussion, but a much lengthier write up about.

this build of you know from the dev channel that signals to me the next version of windows even though they're not calling it that yet and i went back and looked only at the dev channel at all of the features they've announced well most of the features they've announced It was an enormous list and then listed out which have not yet shipped. And that was a pretty long list, right? Starting with the most obvious things like recall and click to do, et cetera.

Microsoft publishes something they call the Windows 11 feature roadmap, which I have to say is a pretty good description of the thing I wrote a couple of days earlier. Interesting. They've never published such a thing. I found that to be very bizarre. So I saw this and I thought, well. Okay, maybe this is complimentary. I don't know.

But then I forgot it was Microsoft. So, of course, their version of this is terrible. It's really short. They missed a lot of stuff. It's nowhere close to as good as the thing I wrote. And the thing I wrote was incomplete to begin with, you know, by design. I just didn't have enough time. So that was cute. And then I want to say two days after that or one day after that.

when some of the features they've been testing in the Insider Preview Program for Copilot plus PCs will actually come to stable. And specifically or mostly for these Intel and AMD based co-pilot plus PCs, right? Snapdragon has gotten those features earlier, but still, by the way, in the Insider program mostly, aside from the stuff that came back in the beginning. And that too is incredibly incomplete because they list things like the live caption with live translation.

co-creator and paint, restyle image and image creator and photos and some other things. But they don't mention recall a click to do, which are still. You know, like, what are you doing? But only on the inside. They haven't done a release version of Recall yet. Nope. But even when they do, I mean, certainly, they will still be called previews, right? There's no way they're going to drop a preview set.

Not immediately. So we still don't know exactly when that stuff's going to come. The other thing that happened that's tied to this last week, and I don't remember the timing anymore, but. Last Tuesday was the week D preview update day. They released a 23H2 and a Windows 10 preview build, preview update, I guess we'll call it.

But I went for 24H2. And then that one did come out a day or two later, like I predicted. And it has all of the stuff you would expect, the stuff we saw in 23H2, but also has. I'm going to call it semantic search. I'm not sure. I don't know that there's an official name, but it's the AI powered search, Windows search. No, not like semantic. I'm sorry. I'm going to shut up again. No, no, you're good. So that was interesting to me because I specifically enrolled my Snapdragon X base.

Surface laptop in the dev program so I could test this stuff. I don't remember the timing of this off the top of my head, but some weeks ago, They started testing us and they phased it in over time. I think I talked about this last week. At the beginning, it was local files only and it was documents only. Then it was images. Then it was like images only off of Cloud Storage 2, but only OneDrive. And then it became everything.

It would only work from the search box in start, but then it was also in file. It kind of happened over time. So I never got this feature, right? So I was actually really surprised to see that. This thing was heading out to stable in a preview update and then would be going at stable period in two weeks later. And I wrote, well, I wrote whatever I wrote about it at the time.

Let's do it now. Cause I, yeah, when I bring up start and when I bring up file explorer now, guess what? I have it. So it just came on. I, I, I guess it's ready. So. Someday this will be extensible. So if you use a third-party storage service, whatever it might be, they can plug into this as well. But now you can do those searches.

i don't remember the search i did but if i search for like just green or something like uh green um it will bring up file names you know you know windows search works it has like the the item is highlighted and you can see it's in the file name like you can see it's stupid But now interspersed throughout that are results that do not contain the word green, but it might be an image.

that has something green in it, or it might be a document or other file that has the word. Which is cool, really. Which is, yeah, exactly what I've been waiting for for about, I don't know, six, eight months. I don't know. So, yeah, that's finally happening. 20 years, but okay.

Well, yeah, that too, actually. It wasn't really a big deal for me in the past, but now that I have so much data, I could actually really use it. I can't do time zone math. How could I find something I wrote? I mean, think about it. I'm fairly functional as it is. And then beyond that, there were other...

Windows Insider builds. There were new dev and beta builds this past Friday. The beta build, and these are both 24H2 builds, the beta version only got quick machine recovery, which is a feature Microsoft announced. back in November at Ignite for commercial PCs, but it's going to consumers as well. So I can't actually see that I'm in the dev channel, right? You think I would, you know, dev channel would get this first, but we already explained nothing logical exists in my world.

There was, among the other controversies of last year, I guess one of the weirder ones was Back in January, February, Microsoft announced this co-pilot key on PC keyboards. Since then, this thing has appeared on like every new keyboard of a PC ever seen. Like it's not. On some of them, it's like just out there. When they did that, they got rid of the original shortcut for Copilot, which was Windows Key plus C.

And then they didn't give it to anything. They just took it away. And it was like, guys, not everyone has a copilot key. Like, why wouldn't you just keep that? So in this new dev build and beta build, that has made a comeback. You can type Windows key plus C again. It's like, okay, this is progress, I guess, in our world. um so there's other stuff there that there's nothing like it's de-regeneration I don't know it's like yeah it's like yeah you know the new movie about the guy who keep like

has agreed to be cloned and he keeps getting killed and get cloned, killed, cloned. This is Windows Key Plus. It used to be... I think before that it was. When you run out of good ideas, the great thing about bad ideas, you get two versions because you get to do it and then undo it. Yeah. Usually in a Microsoft space, though, they'll reuse something for something different. Like they reuse a brand like Surface is a good example. What else? Fabric. C-sharp. C-sharp. Fabric. There you go.

This is the reusing it for the same thing. So this is this. I'm not saying it's unique or whatever, but it is weird. And it's interesting to point out that you can't search on a search bar now. in a browser and not have AI involved. It doesn't matter whether you're using Bing or Google or whatever, there's going to be an AI window. So yeah, I guess you have to do it in Windows now too.

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

We'll see. My only problem with the window search thing is all of the indexing that's constantly hammering away your machine. And now that you're going to be hammering away at colors too, like what does that even look like? So for the best results, you should go into the settings and turn indexing on for the entire disk, right? Right.

And then you should walk away from your computer for 72 hours. I recommend just going on a long weekend away. I'm almost looking at that option. It's like, you know, I don't like my SSD anymore. Let's use it up in one sitting. Yeah. Like my neighbor downstairs would be like, was there an earthquake while you were gone? I'm like, no, my computer was indexing. You're lucky you don't have like a hard drive. It was an SSD. It wasn't as bad. At least it's quiet, but it does wear out.

Yeah. So Windows quick recovery looks kind of interesting. By my count, it's the 27th way you can recover a Windows computer now. But this is designed for those instances in which you can't actually boot into Windows successfully. It's something you access from the Windows Recovery environment.

And, you know, to me, what this looks like is a 2025 version of system restore, you know, or remember in Windows Me, actually people forget this. They associate this with Windows XP, but Windows Me was the first Windows 2. have a driver rollback feature where if the system wouldn't boot, it would just automatically go back. They had to, I believe. Yes. Well, it was, no, that version had a bunch of innovative features that, you know, got lost and everyone hating it so much. Oh, okay.

but do they they stop system restore right they don't do that anymore it's in there but it's not on but this is what quick recovery has really become it's it's system restore yeah it's quick yeah it's system restore Well, yeah, system restore is a good term, actually. I'm surprised they didn't reuse it. It's a good term. Because system restore would fail so often. Yeah. Oh, system. Yeah. I mean, to me, I don't mind having it as a failback for certain things.

It just sounds so confident when you call it system restore. If you call it emergency, maybe this will work. That's a better name. Yeah. I also like it because. It wouldn't impact your documents or your files, like your non-system file, like your non-application files. And of course, but this was created by adults in a different era. And so it didn't say something like, oh, don't worry, your documents will be right where you left them. You know, like, you know.

It was just like, we're going to pretend you're an adult. We'll treat you like a human being. Is there anything better than booting up windows and you get that high and you're like, oh, no. We're just putting some more wonderfulness in your PC. Remember when this was your computer? Not anymore. Treat me like you will wait. Don't talk to me like I'm a dog. You're not sure I know the language. She just all upbeat all the time. So I think everything's okay. I don't like that.

They're changing the color of the blue screen, right? They're not sure yet what color. I thought they did that before. Wasn't it green? No, they tested green, and then I think they left it. I think you might still see green screens in the Insider program. But they... What color? Well, they don't know. It's going to be green or black. It's going to look. Look, this stuff's important. It is. It's so important.

So that's most of that. So there's a pretty good blog post explaining how Windows Quick Recovery works. It's something that came up out of the Secure Future Initiative stuff. Friends don't let friends. use CrowdStrike kind of thing. And then there was a beta build, which basically just brings all the same features from 24H2. They're still doing that. And then a couple of unique features for some reason, because everything has to be terrible.

So this morning, Proton announced that Proton Drive is now native on Windows 11 on ARM, which is very cool. There's some new features on the Mac as well. They rewrote that client. But in the post about the Mac, there's a little throwaway line at the end. They're going to bring this product to Linux.

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

So that's well, if you knew how to use S3, you wouldn't have to worry about that. Yes. Well, I do know how to use. Git, and I still hate it, but fair enough. Actually, Git's an excellent choice as well. You could actually use Git. I'm out of focus. That's a bad sign. That's a good move on by Proton's part because, you know, they.

The diversity of the desktop is getting better. Yeah. And it's open source. It's a privacy focus. Oh, that's cool. It ticks all the right boxes for that. Now I'm going to have to take a look at it. I've had a Proton account for a long time. Yeah, I just installed it this morning. That's interesting. A command line version? Is there a command line?

I don't know. I didn't look at that. I mean, you could access the file system from the command line. No, I just write the code to do the API. That's fine. I'll be fine. Well, actually, so there is an API that they're creating, and that's the thing. Even better. That's better. Yeah. So that means there'll be third party tools. Yeah. Yep. That's right. And then this is, I just threw this in here because it's semi-related, but.

Proton VPN is now integrated into the Vivaldi browser, right? So there's a free tier of it. And obviously that's what you get there. And if you are a customer, you get the full blown version, whatever. That's kind of interesting. I don't think we had started the show yet, but I said,

I see this need for what I think of as per app Bluetooth. I see the same need for a VPN, right? Most VPNs, I mean, there are VPNs in browsers, but I think a lot of people have a VPN app. They turn it on, your whole system's on their VPN, and then they turn it off and you're not. Like the Bray browser is like a Tor tab you can open.

that is just for that thing. And I see a need for that. It's kind of an interesting idea. I don't really need my whole world to be on the VPN, but maybe I'm doing it like I'm in Mexico now. I want to shop on Amazon US or whatever. That's a good way to do that. And then I don't know if you guys got this, but Intel has had their first in-person event. It's in Vegas, by the way. You can go see it, Richard.

called intel vision the first one in a while they remember last fall they canceled whatever their big thing was actually i think they canceled intel vision i think this is the thing from last fall right and uh their new ceo has appeared in public for the first time a little hard to understand um but He said all the right things. In a throwaway line, if he was on stage day one for an hour,

In three seconds, he just mentioned that they're going to get rid of our spinoff non-core businesses and then never discuss it again or said what those things were. Haven't even been doing that for years. Pat Gelsinger was doing some of that for sure. Yeah, but I think it needs to be said explicitly. And he did say later to me, I believe he used the word core.

that their core businesses are the chip design, which I'll describe as the x86 chip design bit. And they've got Panther Lake coming on their 18A process this year. And then the Foundry, which is how they're doing the 18A process, right? And he expressed a desire to work with partners, customers on custom designs that will be new to them and blah, blah, blah, whatever, all the right things you would expect. But does this read to me like business as usual because it's been going so well?

Yeah. I don't know if you used AI to generate that summary, Richard, but that's accurate. Yeah. I mean, that is what it is. I don't know. Intel's weird, right? Intel was dominant forever. They invented this business for the most part, right? Yep. They were horrible and behaved illegally to their competitors, to partners, to customers. They were horrible. Giant company, super successful.

were horrible. And now I, you know, do I want them to fail because of this? No, I'm not. You know, come on. No, this is like people like I'll never use a Microsoft product because they used to hate Linux. It's like, that was 30 years ago. I don't know how to get over it. I always use the example, that's like saying, I'm not going to Germany because of World War II.

You got to get over it. Like it's gone. You know, we're past this. So I'm trying not to be that way. But I see people like, oh, my God, I really I want them to survive so bad. It's so important. I'm like, is it? You know, so I don't.

I don't hate them and I don't love them. I don't mean it like that. I recognize the role that they played forever. I mean, they're super important. We just talked about the first computer was based on an Intel chip. I mean, they're a big deal. They always have been, but they also ignored a lot of.

things that were going on in the industry, Microsoft begged them again and again and again, you got to make these things more efficient. You know, one of the things he talked about on stage was Panther Lake, the way he described it is going to combine the best of. Arrow Lake, which is the performance and scalability stuff with the efficiency and power savings.

of lunar lake. Yeah. That's what they were asking for 15 years ago. I appreciated Ben Thompson's analysis and all of this. He said when they missed mobile, when they missed arm, you know, the writing was on the wall from then on. Yeah. They don't make enough chips. When you're only making hundreds of millions of chips, you really can't justify the top-end stuff. You need to make billions.

of chips you can you can all yeah and microsoft had the same problem basically it's just high level missed mobile right if you want just to put it simply but microsoft had this fallback right they went to the cloud intel Also missed the cloud, by the way. I mean, not that they don't have cloud stuff, but they... The fact that NVIDIA was able to happen on their watch is rather a sign. And they did make GPUs. They just never took it all that seriously. It wasn't a core business.

That's right. If you go back to Windows Vista, one of the big problems was that all of the existing computers out in the world, which had these crappy Intel integrated graphics, could not run Aero Glass. It's a huge problem for people. Intel did not see... This is a huge priority. You know, some of their newer chips at the time did have it. Core business, the CPUs. I don't know why you're bothering us with this. You were literally holding the industry back.

So that's the problem. Imagine if Microsoft had looked at the cloud and go, well, that's not our core business. Yeah, exactly. Windows in the cloud, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And arguably it doesn't, but it also turned out to be a pretty good business. So it worked out pretty good. Sometimes these adjacent businesses end up being the business.

Yeah. And that's right. I mean, Microsoft saw that with, you know, work groups and then servers and all this. And then the servers, you know, all the SQL server, exchange server, et cetera, et cetera. and then was able to make this kind of semi-natural transition to the cloud. It worked out well for them, and Intel just didn't... But don't worry, they're sticking to their Corbis. That's a very nerdy joke.

yes they are hey before we go to a break um they're asking in the youtube chat in the youtubes in the youtubes If you care about or if you want to talk about the fact that Microsoft has killed the NRO, you know, the bypass NRO. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So that's. This is overblown.

This was the thing that allowed you to bypass a Microsoft account when you install it. Yeah. I believe the script is literally named bypassnro.cmd. That's the name of it. So if you actually look at the script, you can see the...

how they do it, and you can still run those commands. Those are not going away. They're just taking away the script. It's nothing. The important thing to remember here is that there are other workarounds. When you use Rufus to create an install media, then you check the right options. They're enabling those things that this script would have done. Yeah, Chris Titus is an idiot. Wow. This is a guy that gets hundreds of thousands of views about nothing. He was the recall.

is they're secretly putting recall on your computer even though they said they take it away. This is the unfortunate thing about YouTube is this incentive. I can't stand this stuff. Yes. So this is nothing. My reaction to this is this is nothing.

When I update the book each year for each version of Windows 11, I don't put every work around. I just pick the best one or two. So right now, this still works. It's not going away. You're not going to download Windows tomorrow or in three months and not be able to use it. They're testing it in one build of one channel of the insider program.

I wrote a 6,000-word article last week about how so many of those things have never appeared. So it will or will not occur in the next version of Windows. If it does, there will be other workarounds. There always are. So you don't have to worry about it. This is kind of a ham-handed whatever, but the ultimate workaround or the one that anyone could do is Signing with a Microsoft account the first time, create a local account.

delete the Microsoft account and then use your local account. There are actually really good reasons to do that right now because one of the advantages, and it's not the only one, but one of the advantages of using a Microsoft account is that it enables automatic full disk encryption on the computer. Whereas if you sign up with a local account, you don't get that. You have to sign in with a Microsoft account to get that once. That's right. I think Microsoft gets a little.

heat for how it described this in the build. Well, even in the throwaway line at the end. No. Okay. But why though? Because what percentage of Windows users actually have used this switch ever one time? It's less than 1%, right? It's probably 1% of 1%. This is not used by anybody. Yeah. Like statistically it exists. And for the look, my stance on this is like, I, here's my list of why you should use a Microsoft account actually, but.

If you want to be smart about it, here's the list of things you should do. Just like you could use Microsoft Edge, but you got to do these things or you're being stupid because it's tracking you and whatever. You can do it. The best thing you do with Edge is download Chrome. Right. Right. Yes. I mean, based on telemetry, that is the number one use. It is scary when they say this change ensures that all users exit set up with a Microsoft account.

I mean, it's clear what the intent is. But you're looking at that like it's a bad thing. A bad thing. Because. There's good and bad to everything, but for most mainstream users, well, no, for every mainstream user of Windows. Yeah, that's true. This is the right thing to do. For so many reasons. I mean, it's not just the full disk encryption. That's part of it. This is an account that's backed up with 2FA.

and passkey security so you can recover it. This is an account that gives you automatic pass through to your Microsoft services through the browser, through OneDrive, through the store, through whatever, through Xbox. I use it to go into the Xbox app, download Call of Duty, and play Call of Duty, and I never sign into anything because it's passed through. It's all part of the account.

And if you're sophisticated enough or you have the need for it, you can figure out how to do it. This is nothing to be outraged over. You already know how to do it. Don't worry about it. Nothing's changing. It's fine. That's why I didn't mention it. It's not. Yes. Okay. Yep. But you know, it's my duty as the, you know what? So this is something, no, this is, this is no, you're right. This is something I struggle with because

I look at that and I say what I just said. I think this is nothing. But it's not how they wrote it. Not even close. Well, and I don't know. It's not, it's not nothing until I hear your explanation. And then I say, oh yeah, you're right. It's nothing. No, but people like they conflate things, you know? And so like a guy who was really active in my, on my site and my forums did wrote a forum post about it.

And I'm just going to read the way he wrote this, because this is very typical, not because he's a bad guy or not. He's super smart. But it's just... you know, new method to install Windows 11 with a local account. It's not actually a new method. It's the command that's inside of that command line script, right? With this method, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like the way he describes this is like, this just changed.

We have to use this now. And it's like, nothing has changed. And by the way, even if, like I said, even if it does, you're fine. This is why we, but this is exactly why we turn to you guys. So you give us the perspective. Yeah, but the thing I get wrong, and this is a great example, is I should still bring it up. Just so I can say, hey, by the way, you might have seen something like this. Don't worry about it.

Yeah. I don't do that. Like that's my own, that's me not communicating effectively. Like it's, it's, it's stupid that I beat yourself up. No, it's, this comes up a lot when you cry. Thank you. I do look ugly. I don't know. Self-loving looks so good on him. Look, I think it's in my wheelhouse. You got to play to your strengths. No. In all honesty. Yeah.

I might even think in the back of my mind, yeah, that seems like a tempest. Yeah, here they go again. Microsoft taking away our rights. Right. Well, especially when they put in a line like. Well, this is make sure you have Microsoft account. Everybody has a Microsoft account. And I think there's a thing to be concerned about, which is now that they're paying attention enough that they would even attempt to remove that script, what's next?

Now, Richard, now let's not stir up trouble where there's no trouble. I'll try to remember where I read this. So not the Microsoft account, but it applies 100%. It was something about, I'm going to forget, but. Google probably. So somewhere, some blog post somewhere this past week, someone said something like, we require you to have a Google account, whatever it was, for this reason. The thing about a Google account, just like a Microsoft account, is that you can come to it.

from you don't have to use a dot. or an outlook.com account, right? So you could say like, I have richardacampbell.com or whatever. Yeah, same with Apple. I can use a Gmail account to have my Apple account. So the point was, you can use this account. You don't have to use our email. We're not trying to get you on our email. It doesn't matter. But the beauty of using an account that's already an online account is that you now have a way to recover that account without you doing anything.

Like when you set up a, like if you set up Paul at outlook.com, if that was available, which it isn't, and you were like, okay. This is a brand new account. It's not associated with anything else. You have to go through a series of steps where you're like, all right, well, here's my phone number. Here's another email address, which might be a Gmail account or whatever it is.

Not during the setup process, but afterwards you're expected to then go in and create 2FA, maybe through an authenticator app or through a passkey or whatever it might be. And secure that thing. And you can do that. But the nice thing about going into an online account like a Microsoft account with your own account is automatic recovery. Right. Because you can email at that address somewhere else.

It's got that redundancy kind of effect, right? No, you should still do the other stuff. You should still add your phone number to it. You should maybe, or use an authenticator app, definitely, or get pass keys going on your devices. Absolutely. The nice thing about going into it without using their address scheme is you get automatic system recovery.

So look, there are actually about a dozen reasons why this makes sense. And I think those are amplified when you're going to say normal. I know people don't like that word, but like a mainstream non-technical user. They should be using a Microsoft account to sign into Windows. They really should.

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

the most appropriate choice for the average user. I don't do it enough to remember exactly the steps, but when you sign into a Mac for the first time and you create an Apple account or don't, I guess, you're creating what in the Microsoft space we would call a local account. You're associating, if you have one, an Apple ID with that thing. But you're not signing in with Paul at Apple.com or whatever. You're signing in with Paul or whatever. You created a local account.

We have not done that in Windows since Windows 7. That was the last system. And people miss it. I think that's the reason. Maybe, but you know who doesn't miss it? All those people that you're not thinking. Not you, Leo. Normal users. Which is 99.9999. The fact that you get BitLocker. If you're a normal user, if you just sign on your Microsoft account, that's a good thing. And the reason you have to have that is because you need some way to recover that thing. You have to be able to recover it.

So that's why they do it. It's not an evil scheme, guys. I mean, there is evilness at Microsoft. Evil exists. Evil exists. I'm not denying it. Make no mistake. You know, you can put a crucifix on your computer, wallpaper, whatever, do whatever you want. The holy water is a problem. I always think, you know, Apple has a setting, which by default is on the highest security setting, that you can't install applications from weird places. But there's a way to turn that off.

So by the way, Microsoft in Windows, sorry to interrupt, but has a switch just like it, but it's the other way around. It's off by default. You can go in and make it more secure. Right. It would be nice if we're on by default and then people who are sophisticated could turn it off. I think in their defense that I hate.

I think it's because they understand that most people would be confused by this and have a bad experience. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm trying to get Chrome. What are you doing? Oh, you stopped me from doing Chrome now? Oh. Microsoft. Yeah. No, we know what you're all about. You know, it's a hundred YouTube videos right there. That's right. So Chris Titus, if you're out there, please make that video. Yeah. Go for it.

That's a very good point. I just, I don't, I just look, I absolutely get outraged about things. I try to make sure those things are real. But that's how Google handles sideloading, and I think it's the right way to do it, on Android. You can't sideload unless you know you go into the settings and you turn that off and it warns you.

That's appropriate. Now I, as a geek, can do the things I want to do, but normal people will be protected. I think that's a great way to do it. I really do. It's optimized for the most frequent use case. And by the way, it's not 7525. 99.9999 something to 0.000 something. It's not even close. We're a tiny fraction of them. We are. We're tiny. Well, we're big, but we're tiny. And we, you know, age is tough. Anyway, the point is we tend to be larger, but we also tend to have strong opinions.

Look, you're smart enough to get around. What are you worried about? Relax. If you were really outraged about this, you'd already be using Linux. Just relax. It's okay. Where I was thinking, you know, one of the options is just use Linux on the desktop. Use the Mac. Keith512, I appreciate him in our Discord, has informed me that NRO stands for Network Readiness Operations. Okay. Didn't know that. Not National Reconnaissance Office? No. Yeah. Well, it may also stand for that.

Anyway, let's take a break. You are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly. This is why you watch it, to get this kind of information. Paul Thorat. In Roma Norte, Richard Campbell in Las Vegas. I'm in Petaluma. None of these town names are in English. Isn't that interesting? That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah.

When I first moved to Petaluma, they said... Wait till we talk about whiskey and all the names are Norwegian. Oh, we're doing Norwegian today. When I first moved to Petaluma, they said, no one knows what it means. And then later, people said, actually, it's from the original Pomo Indians who lived here, and it means hill by the river. And what do you mean no one knows what it means? You've just, so like Mukunji is bear swamp, which is beautiful. Ooh, I like it.

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

In Mexico, avocado is aguacate. It's actually pre-Aztec, but the Aztecs used it. We'll call it an Aztec term that means testicle. So, which, you know, you hear it and you're like, yep. Okay. I get it. Yeah. So it's like an avocado and a bottle of whiskey walking a bar. It's everything you need in life.

You know, avocados now have to be propagated by humans because there are no large mammals to eat them and defecate the seeds. Well, we're the large animals that do that, but I see what you're saying. If you ate the seed, you would be. Yeah. You'd be passing that one would be like. Don't. I need a moment here. Do what a normal person does. Put toothpicks in them. Put them in a glass of water by the window and grow your own tree. So next time you see someone who really knows what they're doing.

rotating through an avocado really quickly, you'll be like, Ooh, it's like, they just kind of like, they like jab the knife. It's impressive. Yeah. It's pretty good. The guacamole masters. Yeah. I'll send it. I'm sorry. I forgot it. Absolutely. I love the linguistic games, right? You've heard about Torpenhow Hill? which has the word tor, which is the old English for hill, and pen, which is the old...

The Celtic word for hill and ho, which is an English word for hill. So it's actually hill, hill, hill, hill, hill. So the only reason I know the word tour means hill in old English is that there was a map inside of a Yes album in the 70s that had whatever tour, whatever tour, whatever tour. And I did the 1979 version of... Googling it, by which I mean I opened a dictionary or I guess an encyclopedia and looked it up.

I feel like it's Lord of the Rings also uses it. I feel like. See, that's that. I had read the Lord of the Rings by this point. And you would think. Nobody reads the math. I'm not saying I'm a Tolkien scholar, Leo, but I mean. Okay, maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. Kind of. No, I don't. Yeah, I know. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this ad-free interlude. Now back to the show. Oh, we're coming back already? That's it. We're back. Oh, that was the whole thing. Wow. That was it right there.

We will replace all of that chatter with an ad. Oh, boy. And all the good stuff. Yep. 25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington, D.C. They envisioned the creation of an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to help people. businesses, and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks.

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On we go, Microsoft 365er. Yeah, so we mentioned that Windows feature that Microsoft announced as part of SFI back at Ignite. They also announced what looked like a wonderful little knock. which everyone was real excited about until they realized it was basically like a, what do you call it? Like a headless, not headless. Yeah, headless, like a remote. Access, device, thin client, I guess.

called Windows 365 Link. So it is now available. You can pay $350 to get an empty box that connects to a Microsoft service that costs at least $20 a month. Or you could just use the PC you already have. I don't know who this is for. This is for businesses, obviously, but I don't feel like this is going to go great. I don't really see the point of it.

That's available. Microsoft announced, I think it was last week, that They're going to enable something in Windows that will allow Office apps on Windows to start up faster, starting with Word. I did what I think everyone did when they read that line in a story or whatever, and they launched Word and it came right up and they were like, I don't understand. It already comes up instantly. Right. But they're literally putting a startup boost.

app inside of start. So it starts every time your computer starts. I think it's basically just a copy of Word running. It's going to start with Word, but then they're going to go to Excel and PowerPoint and probably Outlook too, because Outlook actually is the one that probably could use this. I don't understand what the point of this is. I have also wondered related to this for years, why Microsoft doesn't block by default.

anything that tries to put itself in automatic startup at boot time. But then, of course, if you've ever run Copilot, by mistake in most cases, you will have noticed. You close it, it's still sitting in the tray. And if you look, it's in startup tasks because Microsoft, evil, bad. So Microsoft does this a lot, actually. And I don't like this behavior. And I wish there was something that would prevent it.

You should get a pop-up. It should be like that Apple thing where it says, hey, this app's trying to track you or whatever. In this case, it should say, hey, this Microsoft app is trying to put itself in start. startup or whatever. And most third-party apps, when you install them, say, hey, should I be part of your startup? And you can check it or uncheck it. Yeah. Microsoft knows better than you.

Yeah. And, uh, this is somewhere else in somewhere, somewhere in summer. I don't know. It's somewhere in this show. I was thinking about writing about all the things I do with the Windows PC when I first install it, you know, put it together, whatever. And then... how different my life would be if I was, you know, like a normal user, like if I didn't have to do all the stuff that I do and there's all this stuff I would turn off.

for sure. But one of the things everyone should do, and yet, unfortunately, you have to do it from time to time, is go look at the startup tasks. Yeah, just did this. Yeah, it's so if you, you know, maybe you bulk install a bunch of stuff on your computer, you finally get it where you want it. That's the time to go look. But then every month or two weeks or something, you got to go look at this because if you ever reboot. You see like Discord. Discord puts two tasks.

In startup, one is discord and the other one is update discord. It's like, guys, she's Louise. I don't know. So there's a lot of apps like that. And a lot of them, unfortunately, are Microsoft apps. You know, it's forcing onto the home screen of your phone. It's gross. It's so annoying. This is, you know, Apple used to do this thing when you had a notification in the dock, the little.

icon would sit there and go up and down yeah but it wouldn't it wouldn't stop bounce and i i i was saying to a friend of mine at the time it's like 20 years ago you know i said it's the stupidest thing i've ever seen so what do you mean this is good like and i'm like all right And I put my hand in front of his face. I said, just tell me when this is annoying. Let me know. You trying to watch TV? Is this annoying? I don't know. Tell me. You don't think that's annoying? This is a service.

Hey, I'm over here. Hey, can you help me just real quickly? I went over to Proton Drive. I thought I'd check it out. It's asking me to identify that I'm a human. So how can I, I don't, it's just a blank screen. What are you using? What's the browser? Zen. So you're probably using some kind of an ad block or something. Oh, yeah. So it's blocking the human verification. No, I bet it is, right? This is like a mini version of the Tech Guy Show. Thank you so much, Paul Thorat.

Yeah, no, I run into this a lot. So annoying. I downloaded an app. Let me see if I can find out what it was. I'm just because I never did install it. I can't find it. Oh, that's bugging me now. Anyway, I downloaded some app. I went to install it.

It did one of those web things where you sign in on the web and it does, you go through your password manager, like, cool. Like, that's fine. And then it came up with the screen. It said, we want to make sure you're a human, just like you said. I'm like, all right. I mean, okay. It seems like an unnecessary additional step. I just did all the other stuff.

So it's like, which parts of this little grid of things are like a fire hydrant? You're like, boop, boop, boop, you do it. And then it does it the second time. You're like, all right, boop, boop, boop, boop. You're like, this time you're like, I'm going to get this one right. Nope. Did it again. It did it four times. And I was like, yeah.

I'm not doing it. You know, an AI could do it. That's the sad thing is human can't. I just like, guys, I passed your test. Yeah. Your webpage is not that important to me. No, whatever it was. It was some app. I don't remember. I was like, yeah, no, I'm done. I'm just not doing it. So long. Okay. And then this is a small thing. This is kind of cool. So I'm not an Excel guy. I think I've made that very clear. I'm barely a guy, but I'm barely a human being.

But Microsoft Excel supports what Microsoft calls rich data. So that means things that are not just words or numbers, right? So obviously when you have numbers, it can be different formats like currency or... whatever else you might have for numbers, but they have other forms of data. So there are things like I think map locations and whatever else is rich data. And you can use these things in formulas and you can use them in charts and whatever else.

but they're not called out in any way. So they're adding a feature to Excel called value tokens. And so basically they're going to colorize and add an icon in the fields where those things exist. And then also up in the formula bar. So it's the type of thing, like I said, don't use Excel, but. I look at that and I'm like, yeah, no, it's a good idea.

Sure. And it makes it just a little bit closer to becoming publisher, right? Like now I can. Right. Exactly. Which, by the way, every Microsoft tool that is not publisher will become by the time publisher goes away. Yeah. Yep. A hundred percent. So I think that's, you know, it's fine. Do you sense that all applications are converging on a single app? That app will be a messaging app.

They say that. No software is done until it can get email. Right. Maybe I'll do that to my app. I'll just make it an email app. See if anyone notices. So protons, very secure. It is now made me prove I'm a human. I've given it my second factor. Now it wants my other password. It's very secure. Yeah. So in my case, yeah, it's like you can use your email address, but you can also use just your.

Username. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Your example. Yeah. Yes. Password. And then I have to faith through like a authenticator app. Yeah, I did that. Now it wants my second. I don't know what my second. I'm just trying to try to check out proton drive. And now what's another password? Thank you. Failed a very.

simple test that proves to me that maybe OneDrive is more your speed? Yeah, maybe. Can I use my Microsoft account for that, please? Is there some reason you're not doing this with Edge? I mean, it would... I don't know. I'm sorry. I switched to Safari. It did give me the human test, which was a puzzle piece.

Then I did my 2FA. Just try a, what do you call it? Incognito window or whatever. Oh, my God. It's just. I know. It's hopeless. I know. Hopeless. It's very secure, though. You can't deny that. I know. I'm feeling good. I mean, I feel like I'm safe from you right now. So let's get anywhere. Are you sure you're doing anything with your computer? I'm all set. Second password.

Your second password? I don't know what it is. You sure it's not the authenticator code? No, it says second. I did the authenticator. Second password? This is another. This is like a hobbit has a second. Oh, wait a minute. There it is. I see it. There is. I see in my notes a second password. Oh, wow. Holy cow. That's amazing. It's the only thing better than one password. It's got to be better, right? It's got to be better. Password 1.5. Let's see if it works.

Yes, it seems to be doing something. After second password comes 11 Zs. How secure can that be? I had to do a puzzle piece. Thank you for following that up intelligently, by the way. Two passwords. I hate to even say this, but you understand you're going to go through this again when you actually install this product, right? I know. I know. I'm sorry. Okay. Uh, some AI dev stuff, I guess, mostly AI, a U S district.

Court judge has ruled that the New York Times copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft can continue forward. Why is this not settled? Well, because of this next news item, because today, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, the guy that prints the books with all the funny pictures on the covers, did a study on OpenAI's...

content. And I think using like math determined to something like an 80, something for 88% possible, you know, probability, they're stealing his content. They're just stealing it. He probably just asked chat GBT. Yep. Yeah, what's the possibility? And they were like, oh, it's pretty high, man. Did you steal my stuff? It's higher than the percentage of people that should be using a Microsoft account. Yeah.

So because of this story, I wrote about it. I read his thing. I looked at the report they published. He linked at the end of the report, there's a paragraph where they talk about the times that AI has been caught stealing. One of them was Meta was found to have stolen. content from books from a free pirated book service or whatever.

And I'm like, what is this magical service I need to become a member of? No. So I went and looked at this thing, which I actually forget the name of it. Maybe I don't want to broadcast what it is. But I prioritized a book today because I wanted to see how easy it was. And it's pretty damn easy. Remarkably easy. Yeah. Now, to be fair, I pirated a book that is 30 years old and is a tech book. That's easier, for sure. It was a Windows CE book that Microsoft Press put out. Just to kind of see. Yep.

Super easy, like super easy. And yeah, so I'm not surprised to discover that Meta was able to do that. And it's, I mean, as an author, it's like, so yeah. Great. But good news, OpenAI is now worth over $300 billion. They just raised $40 billion, which is the most a private company has ever raised at one time. They're the third largest private.

company in the world by, uh, value after space X. And I want to see a bite dance, the owner of a tick talk. Um, The interesting thing about this, though, is that of the 40, which is not all guaranteed, but will happen this year, if they go private, they'll get the full 40. 30 of it is coming from software. bank, right? Which is the, I think they're still Japan-based. Previous owner of ARM, right? Which means, unless my math is wrong, and I think I proved early, it often is, that

By the end of this year, if not already, they will actually be the biggest single investor in OpenAI, not Microsoft, right? Microsoft is part of a group of investors that constitute the other 10 billion. But even if Microsoft was 9 billion of that, which they're not, right? But even if they were, 30 is still more than 13 plus nine, right? Please verify that, Richard. But I think it is. I don't know about your time zone math, but this is pretty good.

Okay, good. Thank you. Okay. I did that one a couple of times to make sure, but I thought that was true. And then just because it's open AI. It's funny that all the tech companies are the ones you're talking about that are most privately. Like I would think the... Group is up there. Cargill's up there. But nobody knows because they're privately held.

Right. This is based on, like, because these companies typically go through, like, a VC. Yeah, but they do these private placements, so they advertise their presumed worth. But, you know, that worth is supposed to be determined by certain accounting practices verified by the SEC. How do you determine worth when you're privately held? I mean, that's what would happen if they acquired OpenAI, but it's not what happens when they invest, I guess. Yeah, it's unblockable.

I'm sure everyone saw this. ChatGPT put out this new image generation feature or OpenAI did in ChatGPT and everyone's making these images that look like that Japanese artists. you know, what do you call it? Like a woodcut. Well, no, it's like a cartoon style, like a anime kind of something. Studio Ghibli. Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised there hasn't been more pushback on this. Sam Allman changed his avatar and X and everywhere else to one of those characters.

why do you just make it a middle like what are you doing like like that's crazy well you know this has been a story for a while we talked about on sunday and it turns out there probably isn't any trademark protection for a style of art

Is there anything like, is there like a human decency or a ethical something? And meanwhile, I'm going to steal all your books by the way. No, you should. Well, actually we'll get, I'm going to let everyone steal my books. That's at the end of the show. Oh, good. So. or almost we'll get there. The other thing, you know, you guys definitely have heard of this thing called vibe coding, right?

So this term bothered me the second I heard it. Oh, yeah. It's almost there to annoy you. Yeah. But I also realized. It's not what I thought it was, and it's clearly not what anyone else thinks it is either. The guy who coined this was a co-founder of OpenAI, and I also have the wrong link for the story in the notes. That's hilarious. So I will fix that now.

What he was talking about was not a non-developer describing the app or game they want and then having AI create it and have it just be perfect the first time somehow magically. That's not what he's describing. What he's saying is that if you are an experienced developer, and know what you're doing, you could...

talk to AI and have it do most of the work for you, but you will still need to go back and fix things because it's never going to be right. I misunderstood. I thought you didn't have to know how to code. Everyone misunderstood this. So using his own term. He says, specifically a developer,

speaks to it. Like the developer knows that, for example, like he's talking, I think in this case about JavaScript or HTML, but he says, decrease the padding on the sidebar by half. Is that a language a non-programmer would ever use, right? They don't understand what that means. But he also says, you just accept all every time.

Review the changes. It's not perfect. It's going to produce bad code. Keep copying, pasting error messages to it. And it usually fixes it. Right. He says it gets into a corner sometimes and it's done. Yeah. Then he says, if it keeps doing that, ask it to keep making random changes until the problem goes away. There's a fun point you've switched over to the infinite number of monkeys mode. It's just ridiculous. He was goofing, right? It just became a meme.

Yeah. He says vibe coding is not coding, but it's not too bad for a throwaway weekend project. It's amusing. That's true. It is true, but who does throwaway weekend projects? Developers. It's for developers. Also, I think I mentioned this at some point, but Mark Brzezinovich and Scott Hanselman do that podcast. And in one of them, there was an amazing conversation where Scott said, well, it's not like you're going to.

tell it to make Python code, you're never going to learn Python. He says, actually, Mark said, that is what I do. I don't know Python. But I just keep telling it, improve it, improve it, improve it. And I know what the inputs are. I know what the outputs are supposed to be. I know when it's working correctly. I don't actually have to know what the code does.

So that's for, but it's not like create a Mario game, you know, done, you know, or whatever. It's not that simple. So I. Look, I'm not a real developer, but I think I know how developers actually think and work. AI is a wonderful tool for developers. I described it as the Reese's peanut butter cup of tech industry, like AI plus coding. It's perfect. They go together.

And it's great for getting over humps and whatnot. And by the way, it's obviously it keeps improving. It's going to be great a lot of times. I'm sure now and then in the future, AI can do the bulk of some work of a project, but you still have to go in as the guy who knows what's happening and fix things like the little padding thing he talked about or whatever. It would be more tedious trying to describe to AI what you wanted in many cases than to just do it yourself, depending on what it is.

Anyway, yeah, Vibe Coding. I think everyone's gotten Vibe Coding wrong. If you go and read what he wrote, he was not talking about regular people. Very much talking about developers. And I really had the sense, it's like, this will be funny for other developers. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Right. It was, it was aimed at that audience. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. He, I'm actually, he coded it in a tweet or a, what do you call ever call an X.

We're going to call it a tweet because no one else knows what the hell it is. Exactly. It was stupid enough as it was. We got used to it. Now you're going to change it. Come on. It's a social media message into a questionable matrix. Yeah. Here's Andre Karpathy's sheet. Yeah, there's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget the code even exists.

dude he also he he was a founder at open ai he worked at tesla for a long time in ai and he has by the way one of the best videos on how llms work yeah yeah if you've got three and a half Yeah. This one really took off, but a month or so earlier, he tweeted again, kind of tongue in cheek, but he said the hottest new programming language is English.

Right. Well, that's what it's kind of saying in this too, right? That's what I mean. That didn't catch on. So we kept going, you know, I guess vibe coding is kind of a. well it's funnier it's caught on yeah for sure it well yeah it touched a nerve or something yeah whatever it is that it did yeah it touched something Was it not a good touch either? No, I don't know. So sorry. No follow on to that. No. Please show on the doll where the tweet touched you.

That was the following I chose not to do, but I like it. I like it. Did you know that one in four men suffer from low testosterone, but 90% of men in the UK suffering from low testosterone remain undiagnosed? It's time to change that with Manual. Manual puts top doctors and a world-class testosterone service at your fingertip.

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thrott.com richard campbell from rennesradio.com richard has very kindly agreed to stick around he's going to do the six-hour day oh man You're a very kind guy. We had an opening. Paris Martineau is in Paris, weirdly enough, on Intelligent Machines. So we invited Richard to join us. We're going to have a good show. We're going to talk about the Sam Altman bio. And then the latest AI news. And so I'm glad. Thank you for volunteering. Well, I've got my catheter here, so I should be fine.

You got the Cory Booker commemorative catheter. Oh, my goodness. What an incredible department. If he could do 25 hours, I could do six. Incredible. Yeah. Truly. I think we're doing three. Well, I do three plus three most of the time. Yeah, there you go. You're right here. You've been planning. You've been sort of practicing for this for a long time. You should. I have been building up to it slowly.

This is how you do it. I am in Vegas, right? So there's poker tournaments going downstairs. And when someone does the full block, they call them a leather bus. Oh, yeah. Walter Cronkite, when he used to anchor the space launches, and they'd sometimes go and hold for hours, they called him Old Iron Butt. so there is something there just stay in the chair did you watch it's time for the xbox segment paul did you watch the nintendo

Switch announcement? No, Switch 2 announcement. I didn't watch it. $450. I know. I thought it was going to be $350, and at $350, that would have been a no-brainer. At $4.50, I'm waiting for Black Friday, you know, or whatever. Yeah, how soon before it's discounted? Yeah, I don't know. It seems too much. Yeah, but the Steam Deck's, what, $800?

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, if you're comparing it to the Steam Deck. But what was the OLED Switch when it launched? Was it 350 at launch or was it more? I don't remember. I don't remember. I didn't buy that. I still have the original Switch. I'm thinking about buying this because you can't hook it up to your TV and get 4K, I guess, on some games. It looks great. Actually, it looks great.

to me the disappoint well aside from the price um the the system it looks excellent a lot of the games look great I really expected Microsoft or Xbox to be part of this. Oh, really? And that at the very least, we would have seen Call of Duty. I'm a little confused by that. There were some third-party games in there. I think, I don't know, Laurent or Brad or someone told me that...

Those Tony Hawk games we were ragging on the other day are going to be on there. They're big, man. We love skating. Yep. Yep. Hey, kids. Yeah, so I don't know. Look, Nintendo has their own way of doing things. They do have a kind of a weird track record when they follow up like a big hit. And I think the way they might get around this is that they're not really doing anything different. They've made what essentially is a new.

Switch, right? Like it's, you know, like they went from OLED to 4K or whatever. So I think, you know, we'll see. But then again, I mean, is there some limit to the number of years that we can basically have the same exact system from these guys? I don't know. Yeah, because most of the games, I mean, on their compatibility games, there's only one game that doesn't work with it from the previous Switch, and that's the Nintendo Labo Toy-Con 04 VR kit.

geez louise and then there are the games that don't work on the original that are new like the new mario kart that's part of a whole bunch of new bundle yeah the eldon ring gang has put together this um kind of stands in sharp contrast to that Microsoft backward compatibility. promise of sorts, right? I mean, it's 100% obviously, but there's a real focus in Xbox on your library and bringing it forward as much as possible all the time to all the different endpoints and all that kind of stuff.

You know, we'll see. This is an interesting test of this audience. They obviously have like an Apple slash Disney style, very loyal audience. And you can't, I mean, the switch by. mid-year or a couple of months later will be the best-selling console in history. And I guess you could throw this into the...

This is the same. You know, it's just more of the same, right? It's still a Switch. You know what Nintendo's really got going for it? Exclusive games. Yeah, right. Mario. Right? Mario. Mario, Zelda. Yeah. Metroid. Pokemon. They have stuck to the fundamentals. There's subscription services, multiple subscription services this time.

There's chat, group chat. There's even a camera. You can see the people you're chatting with. Kevin, you're going to buy one? You're going to buy one? Kevin King, our producer and editor. Not yet. I'm probably going to wait till Black Friday like Paul. Kevin, you're kind of a childish geek. You're probably going to get one, huh? But it looks cool, right? I mean, if it was $350, I think I would just get it.

Yeah, it's tough. I don't know why that $100 is tough on me, but there's something about the number. It's like, hmm. If you're a Mario fan, I guess, because you want the new Mario Kart and stuff, but I can wait. i can wait no i know my buddy who immediately ordered the ps5 pro is probably ordered two of these bloody things but you can't tell uh next week you gotta wait till the night yeah plus did you see the pre well you have to have owned a switch and have used it

scalpers from stealing them all away right and so the initial pre-order is going to be to people who can prove that they have been they haven't they have a switch with the current mao on it yeah yeah oh yeah so i can i order it from the switch maybe that's how they'll i don't know how it works but like

Like, yeah, the initial pre-orders are going to be for their most loyal customers, which, by the way, you know, sure. That's actually really smart. What a great way to talk about. Yeah, I respect that. Do you think Microsoft would do an event between now and then saying, here's the Xbox games on Switch?

Yeah, I don't know that it would be Switch specific, but they'll announce, you know, they've been announcing games for both. Have they done Switch yet? I know they said they're going to Switch, but I feel like most of the games that they've ported have been PS5. i think at least some of them we don't have a free to go to anymore so yeah no you'll definitely see stuff on this but i I don't know. Maybe they wanted to keep it in house mostly for this initial thing. I don't know.

I just thought there was going to be something, and there wasn't. Oh, I could watch Nintendo Direct on the Switch. This event was apparently kind of a disaster, too. I guess it glitched up a bunch. Ah, oops. Boy. Yeah, they must have had Microsoft do it for them. No, I don't know. You sure it wasn't Twitter? Okay. No, I'm actually not. I could have been Twitter. Yeah, sure. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I don't care about Mario, but I don't know. Some of this stuff.

But you care about Zelda, don't you? You have to care about. I don't care about Zelda. But what I do care about is a screen with the controller stuff on the sides that I can actually see. You know, it's not like a phone. So a Steam Deck. I don't know. I feel like this is better than the Steam Deck. I feel like it's more...

Well, this is that mainstream versus, it depends on the gamer. Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised. I didn't say anything bad about Nintendo. I think they have played the, they played the video game industry smarter than any. Yep. Yeah, I agree with that. They stick to their knitting. They care about the kids. And they always go off their Apple-like in that way. They do this kind of their take on something, and it's always...

They never get sucked into the arms. Before I can buy it, I have to register my interest. You pre-ordered the pre-order. Congratulations. Can you identify these fire hydrants? I had to scan the QR code and I, oh my gosh. Well, that's when you're powerful, right? I got to say this. I have some friends whose kids actually are into Nintendo hacking. Oh, jeez.

they're hacking old resistance is non-trivial like it's what does it mean nintendo like what does that well you know that there's piratable games and that there's a account changes like there's a bunch of things you can do in there but they'll simply block your device. You know, if you get caught, it's like, boom, you can't log in. So all the copy protection, DRM, blah, blah, blah, whatever, can all be traced back to the original NES.

And the reason they did that was because the video game market had collapsed. And they didn't want all this low-quality crap to appear on the console like it happened with the Atari 2600 especially. And it was a quality thing, but what they really did was turn it into, well, the App Store model. Everything's going to go through us if you want to publish on the system.

And they did that in 1986 or whatever year that was. Well, that was in response to Atari, which allowed so much crap. No, this is not just related to tech, but I mean... There are a million examples of we didn't do this to hurt the world. We did it for a good reason. And yep. And you also hurt the world, you know, like McDonald's was a response to everyone's in cars and we, and there's a need for this kind of a new kind of a restaurant.

that also killed us as a country. So they did both. Congratulations. I guess it's like the unintended consequences thing or whatever. I don't know. you're saying when he got his device locked out told his father his father passed it over to me and i chatted with him a bit i'm like there's really only one workaround you have to get another one and and then the father's like and i am not buying it I was my kids both came home over the holidays and they both have a switch.

which I was like, what? My 30-somethings both have switches. If you're a student, You don't have room for a big game layout. I think that makes a lot of sense. I have a switch in this apartment now in the corner. Also Animal Crossing. Yeah, they were always on the Switch. By the way, I have the Animal Crossing Switch. That's the one I have. It's a cult, man. It's a thing.

That saved me during COVID. I played a lot of Animal Crossing. Just so nice and happy in there, too. That's right. This was a happy country. Nobody was wearing masks. It was great. I'm pretty sure I was all Call of Duty during COVID. I came out of it angrier than I was going in. We need to deal with our pandemics the own way. Maybe some of us are gardening, some of us are teabagging. It's the same.

Yep. That's right. Richard, you're on fire today. Some people hug, some people team. I'm warming up for intelligent machines. I think you're going to fit right in there. Yeah. It's a different way of doing things. That's all. Yep. Now I have to find my two-factor authentication. I knew it. Here we go. If I were to ask you if you knew what a fire heart it looked like, would you be able to pick it out of a photo? I can't see one in my head. Alright, what else is new? Oh, yes.

Where are we? Oh, yes. Other things have happened. You'll be delighted to know that Amazon Luna still exists and. They have signed a multi-year agreement with EA to bring many of their best games to that platform, and three of them are available now, more are on the way. You need that, you know, it's $10 a month, subscription plus, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I haven't looked at Luna in a while. I should probably take a look at this again. This reminds me that if you're not doing this every month, like once or twice a month, you should do this, which is go to the...

Amazon prime gaming website and just grab the free games you want from there. Cause some of them are really good every month. You know, it's kind of a crazy thing that they do, which is really nice. But yeah, Luna, I, I looked at this is probably a couple of years ago now. It's been a while, but.

If you use their controller, and again, this is out of data information now, but it was a little bit like Stadia in that you had that kind of direct connection kind of effect where it was a little bit better than using an Xbox controller or whatever. because it would connect to the service. I'm really appreciating their partnering with Electronic Arts because those guys have done so well with online games.

I don't play any of these games, but when you see the titles, you're like, yeah, like you've heard of every one of these things. I'm going to be very sarcastic because I think the record shows canceled online games. Oh, I see. But they do all the sports games. And to me, I don't know if that's online or if you just play in person with people.

I think those are huge. They have the star Wars games, dead space, uh, death stranding, which I think is a sequel coming soon. Um, yeah, the Metro games, those are kind of, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I have a very limited view of the online gaming space, so I'm not really sure.

Anyway, so that's happening. And then Microsoft announced Backbone is this company that makes these controllers for phones. And so there's a new version of their controller for the Xbox that looks like an Xbox controller. These new controllers they're making, the mobility controls, they're gorgeous and smart and 3D printable. I'm just blown away by what they're making there. I wish to God that this thing worked with an iPad mini.

You know, I need like just like one size up would be great, but it works with Androids and iPhones. So it's, you know, whatever, 110 bucks, USB-C based, obviously. It looks good. I don't know. I mean, I've heard of the company. I've seen these kind of things. I've always kind of wanted one. This is the thing that will turn, well, I guess a phone. Better yet, a tablet into a Switch or Steam Deck type thing, right? With the two halves of the controller on either side.

And finally, today, because it is the beginning of April, we got a new list of Game Pass games across cloud console and PC. And this time... I actually recognize some of these games all the time. Yeah, well, this time actually pretty good, right? So Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition is in there. That's a good game. Still Wakes the Deep, Diablo 3 Ultimate Evil Edition.

Still wasted deep, but Diablo, for sure. And of course, Borderlands is just a phenomenal game. Borderlands is excellent, yeah. It's one of those few games where it doesn't matter which version you play. They're all a riot. Yeah. They did something like, Cross Strike was like this for a while. I'm not sure if it's still a thing or whatever. I know it's still a thing, but I'm not sure. It's not big like it used to be, but where they just adopted this kind of neat art style that was also...

technically easier to draw than actual complex graphics like you would get with a Counter-Strike, right? Counter-Strike. I'm sorry. What did I say? Counter-Strike. Sorry. I'm stuck on it. Sorry. Yes, the style of Counter-Strike. And then they played it in with the whole cartoon sequence and the music. It was just a fun way to kill people. Yeah. Or kill, you know, electrons. It's software. It's all software. I like it. And Yeah, I think that's it. That's all you got to say about that.

Yep, yipper, yipper, yipper. He's still trying to figure out what a hydrant is, isn't he? Yes. He's like, is it the plant? Oh, damn it. Oh, man. Which water they painted? I guess I can't buy a Switch 2. Well, there you go. Not this week. If not you, who? You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell. The back of the book is just around the corner. That's the place where we...

Get the tips, the apps, and the whiskey of the week. I know you want that. But before we get there, yeah, I'm going to beg. I'm going to beg for money for Club Twitch. But I have to say, it's a very affordable club. Seven bucks a month. is all you have to pay to join the club. Now, you do it, I think I would encourage you to do it because you think this programming, the stuff we do like Windows Weekly and Twit and all the other shows we do are worth it.

Because that's really the reason. It's to help support our programming. It's not to enrich anybody. It's not enough to enrich anybody. It doesn't go into my pocket at all. It goes into paying our hosts, paying our lighting bill and all of that. Yeah, we have advertisers, advertisers do cover. the bulk of it, but there's still a shortfall. And without the club, we would have to cut a little bit more.

Your seven bucks is very much appreciated. We do give you some benefits. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You're paying us. We don't need to show ads to you, including this pitch. You wouldn't be seeing this. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a really fun hang. There are great people in there talking about...

Not just our shows, but all kinds of stuff. It's really my social network now. I just really like hanging out in Club Twitter. Let's jump to the present and see what the Club Twitters are saying about all this. They also, we do special events inside the club. We've got some events coming up Thursday. We're going to have our photo show with Chris Marquardt. We do that every month.

We'll review your assignment, which was the word brilliant, and then we'll get some photography news. Paul does hands-on windows. We have hands-on Mac with Micah, hands-on tech with Micah. Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson. We all record in there. Micah does his crafting corner. He's building some little Lego succulents, I believe. But you can do any kind of craft, knitting, crochet, painting.

Whatever you're building, a rocket ship, a monster, it's a great place to hang out and be cozy while you're doing it. Our coffee show is back this month, April 18th. Liz Happy Beans joins us. Anthony's doing the AI user group. Please show up for that. If you want to talk about using AI, I'm sorry I missed the last couple of them, but I will be in the next one, I promise. And we've decided to do something new in the club. And you'll see this is brand new in our events.

I don't know if you know this, but Apple has been taking us down on YouTube and now Twitch every time we talk about. or rebroadcast the apple streams it's their right it's it's their what am i doing i'm pressing the wrong but there we go it's their copyright stream so i you know they can say you're not allowed to cover it But we still would like to cover it. And so what we're going to do is we're going to not stream it publicly, but we're going to stream it in the club. So Mike and I.

This will be the first time we've done this June 9th for the WWDC keynote. And because it's in the club, we want you to come in, talk with us. You can share the broadcast with us.

Give us your thoughts. And we're going to spend the whole day. It's all day Monday, June 9th. We're not only going to do the keynote, we're going to do something we don't usually cover, which is the State of the Union speech that follows immediately after this. I think maybe... even more interesting, certainly more technical.

So Mike and I will be back together again covering the WWDC keynote. I think we'll start doing that with all of our keynotes. We'll just do them inside the club. So if you want to watch those rebroadcasts or live broadcasts with breaking news.

another reason to join the club for more information twit.tv slash club twit and uh thanks in advance we really appreciate it it makes a big difference to us as oh boy says in our discord i love being part of the club i wish i would have joined sooner so there you go don't be uh don't don't delay join the club all right Did you know that one in four men suffer from low testosterone, but 90% of men in the UK suffering from low testosterone remain undiagnosed?

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Now, back we go to the show and Paul Thorat with his tip of the week. Paul. Yeah, so Bill Gates is giving away the source code to the PD, no, sorry, to the Altair Basic to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft. But I'm not a billionaire, so I can't give away stuff. But actually, I tried. I was going to give away. my books, but LeanPub wouldn't let me do it. For the day, I guess, for the next 24 hours anyway, the Windows 10, Windows 11 field guide, and Windows Everywhere are all.

99 cents what you're insane paul you're insane i tried to make them crazy it's crazy you can pay more if you want Yep. And I'd encourage you to do so, but the minimum price is now 99 cents. Well, I got, there is a service out there that will find these books for you for free, as I mentioned earlier, but you know,

Plus you get the free updates, at least on the two of those. Or you could pay more. If you pay $20, the authors earn 16. That's a nice thing about lean pub. You got a little slider there. Yeah, I'm just trying to get rich like 30 cents at a time. So that's the way to do it.

Yep. That's the way to do it. Let me look for the entire Thorat catalog. Yeah. All the books, Windows 11 field guide. I don't know why I was showing the Windows 10 field guide that's now included in the Windows 11 field guide. And Windows everywhere, which I think is really cool. The rise and fall of the most important software platform of all time. Now just 99 cents. Love it. It's bargain basement now, just like Windows.

That's very generous. That's only for today, though. Yeah, just for... I'll... Probably go through the end of tomorrow just to give people time. Yeah, because it takes them a while. I mean, some people hear the episode. I mean, I'll put something on my site about it. Yeah. Good. Eternal Spring is there also, your guide. Yeah, this is our Mexico City guidebook. Before I go to Mexico City, I have to have this. In progress, yeah.

Yeah, just hit. Well, these are smaller pages because it's like guidebook size, but it's like it's just about 500 pages long now. So it's getting. Wow. That's awesome. It's a big, big city. Oh, you're still, it's still a work in progress. Nice. Well, when I move there, I'm going to get a little place off the Zocalo and just hang out with it. Yeah, we'd go a little further out than that. Yeah, it's a little too busy in there. I can't afford Roma Norte. No, you can. But you should go down to...

one of the further out areas and just like escape all the noise. But I want the junk man. I want the guava picker. No, you're not going to escape that. That's part of the fabric. Who needs gas? All right. Anyway, that's nice. It's all at leanpub.com. Just search for the Therat library. You can't do a humble bundle kind of thing, I guess.

god knows what i can do on this thing i don't know i tried to it there's a switch and it tells me i can make it zero and then i do it it's like you can't make this thing zero crazy It was like you trying to do the capture. I tried. I tried, but I'm not a human. Yeah, I just didn't work. Anyway, yeah, I tried. So if you watch Hands on Windows...

We go back and forth between tweak apps that can help Windows 11 work the way you want it to work, and then AI plus new features in Windows 11. It's kind of become the... the normal theme. Like this is one I'll be doing soon. This is a really good one. I'm not sure why I haven't ever covered this before, but it's called wind toys. It's free.

You get it in the store. When you run it, you'll see it's kind of a modern app that's got that sidebar with a bunch of stuff on it. You just go down to the last one. The last one's called Tweaks. That's where everything is. It's all the great stuff. Using this, it reminded me of the personal hell that I'm stuck in, which is that I write about Windows as it is.

for the book, right, which I'm now giving away for 99 cents and also for my site. And so I can't really do to Windows what I want to do with it, which no, it's not. what you think, but rather disable some of the horrible behaviors. I have to kind of see... what they're doing. And what regular people would see. Yeah. And then a week or two ago, I think, I discussed a File Explorer alternative. File Explorer is a big problem in Windows 11. Last year or so, they've been bulking it up with...

When UI, it's slow and buggy and like the default home screen loads really slow. It's garbage, you know? But the files app that I talked about is pretty, but it also has that same problem. So one of the things that's available in this win toys app, which you can also do other ways. I actually have a registry script for this.

is you get to switch to what they call the classic File Explorer. And what they mean by that is the pre-Win UI version of File Explorer. It looks like the Windows 10 File Explorer. Let me tell you something, that one's really fast. I mean, I don't mean that it copies files faster. I mean, it loads fast, does things fast, UI changes fast, like there's no...

garbage or it does what you ask. It's a file explorer. Yeah. And so I'm like, you know what? I think I'm just going to do this now. Like this is what I'm going to do. I just can't take it anymore. I can't like I load the thing and it sits there drawing in real time. And it's like, guys, it's 2025. Come on. So like that's been one for me. I will say there's a bunch of stuff I recommend in the.

My little tip article, like the stuff you should look at. All of the start menu settings, like recommendations, suggestions, I'll turn all this stuff off that, you know, classic interface, file export server. You can disable telemetry with this thing. Turn off all the ads everywhere in the system. And you can do this otherwise, but there's a feature in Windows that is fairly recent where you right-click.

an icon in the task bar. And one of the choices there will be end task, which is the equivalent of bringing up task manager and actually killing that thing. Like it actually ends the task. Like, you know, sometimes, yeah, it actually works. So you should enable that too. Like that actually is sadly.

I haven't looked at this last one too much. This is a single switch. It just says digital markets act, right? DMA. Yeah. Yeah. So if you look this up, I wrote a story about this when it happened, but Microsoft has a website. where they explain all of the changes they're making to Windows, but only in the European economic area to meet the legal requirements of the DMA. So if you flip this switch...

You can have those anywhere in the world. Oh, that's great. It just tells Windows that you're in the EU, probably. Yeah, you can uninstall Edge, for example. You can uninstall Bing. You can do all kinds of things you can't do here. Like I said, I haven't looked at that one too much. I did enable it. I am going to screw around with this soon. This is pretty sweet. It looks like these are all little registry.

Yeah, that's right. And I know that is what it is because that's how I enable most of these things. And I've been thinking about writing an app like this. But the one thing I would add, like if I ever do the app that I'm thinking of, it would be a little bit like the tweak section of this app.

And the one thing I would add is that it would, ironically, because I just complained about this, I would, you know, I would ask, you wouldn't just do this, but you could run something at every time the computer boots. that would compare what was running and what certain settings were. Like if you changed any settings in the app,

it would look for those settings and see if they were still the same as you set them. And if they're not, you could tell it to either show you like a notification or just change it back, right? Because one of my strong suspicions, which is based on the fact that this really happens, is that you install like a feature update, which is annual, and it resets some settings, right?

And then you have to go in and figure out what those are and change them back. I think, and this one I'm not sure, but I believe now because Microsoft is just updating Windows all the time. that there are cumulative updates that could arrive that might do that as well. So I'm really interested in something that would monitor Windows. and then report back, right? This is something I'm probably going to do unless somebody...

I keep mentioning, I'm kind of hoping someone else just does it. But someday either I or someone else will do this. I think this is a good idea because I feel like Windows does things behind your back. um shameful shameful yeah yeah bogdan patrosian who wrote this win toys it's not a microsoft tool despite the

Kind of the name might imply that. And it looks like a modern Windows app. It's nicely done. It's got a nice design. Just a bunch of switches. But yeah, you're thinking of Power Toys, which is a Microsoft. Yeah, right.

So that's why it's low. Yeah. Someone was like, so this is just like power toys. Like, actually, this is nothing like power toys. Like power toys are standalone utilities that improve windows in whatever way. And sometimes they actually make their way into windows, which granted is very cool. Windows used to always have these hidden APIs that developers at Microsoft would use or hidden features or whatever. This goes after these things that are built into the system.

Microsoft either doesn't have a UI for or does have UI and it's all over the place. A lot of the privacy settings, for example, are in privacy settings in the settings app, but they're here, here, here, you know, they're in a million different places. And this thing is like, click, and it just does them all at one time. Nice. Yeah, it's a good one. You know what I wish I had? I wish I could get GitCub co-pilot to write my DevOps scripts for me. I just feel like...

That would be so handy. I wish there were somewhere I could learn about. But Leo, AI can't write code. I want to vibe. I want to do some vibe coding. I just want to vibe code a setting, like an admin script. Yes. And guess what? Richard Campbell might just have an answer to my conundrum. Uh-oh. I should have called this show Vibe Coding and Power Show. Oh, I love it. But now you can use it for later. I love it. Yes, you still can. Well, it's been...

It had been five years since I had Jessica Dean on. Last time was like the fall of 2020. And back then she worked for Microsoft as a cloud advocate. But now she works for GitHub as a developer advocate. So we ended up talking about GitHub Copilot and she really went down her workflow for how she does automation as an administrator using GitHub Copilot.

Rather than, you know, going to the search bar, it's like first go to the LLM and talk about what automation you want to do, what script you want to write, even debate, should you do some PowerShell? Are there other ways? That sort of thing. and then iterate through until you get to a place. It really isn't that far off the whole VibeCode thing, except let's be clear, we're talking sysadmins, and sysadmins are many things.

And Vibe's not one of them. No. You know, we're really concerned about consistency and reliability. What is the opposite? You know, that's why we wanted automation in the first place. Dreary, hard coding. Yeah. No, we want stuff to be correct.

because there are consequences when it's incorrect yes We went through some of the settings you can play with on GitHub Copilot and the chat modes using Visual Studio Code and the various extensions to really get advantages of making all that stuff work well. And we had a great conversation. Really, we talked about GitHub Copilot and the system in context before, but it's 2025 and things have moved on. And so it was good to get to the latest bits. And that's what Jess was all in on.

Run his radio episode 978 at run his radio.com. Staring 1000 in the face. What are you going to do for your thousandth? I think I'm just going to throw a party. Yeah. For 6,500 people at the T-Mobile Arena in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. That was this week. Oh, okay. That's been done. It's been done.

Well, I think it's time to talk about the water of life, if you don't want. Better than testicles, anyway. I may have mentioned last week, as much as I was having glitchy problems in Microsoft Studios, that because it was during the MVP summit, I had been brought a lot of bottles of whiskey. which I did not bring with me to Vegas. I took them home, but I had been meaning to talk about Highland Park for a while. So I've prepared that conversation for this.

It's another very popular whiskey without a doubt. And it's one of the island whiskeys. You know, we talked about the different regions of Scottish whiskey, but the islands is kind of a misnomer because generally when I say island whiskeys, you mean Isla or Jura. maybe sky which is in a very different location but this is the orkneys and the orkneys are the old good old orkneys yes

So the Shetland Islands, of course, are even farther and the Faroe Islands even farther than that. But the Orkneys are the ones relatively up close. They're actually a group of about 70 islands, of which only three are really big. The largest one's called Mainland, which is hilarious. Maybe 20,000 people live total on the islands. Three quarters of them live on mainland, which is about 500 square kilometers.

And there's only three towns across the whole set of islands that have more than 500 people in them. So it is very distributed there. The big town is Kirkwall. There's an overnight ferry from Aberdeen you can take. Although there are other ferries, mostly just passenger ferries, they come from great places like Scrabster and Gills. And John O'Groats, which is all on Caithness, which is the northern part of the mainland of Scotland.

Why are people there? Well, very fertile soils, also an incredibly mild climate. The temperatures in the wintertime are about 4 degrees centigrade, maybe 39 Fahrenheit. And the highs in the summertime average is about 12 degrees, only like 55. so it's never that cold and it's never that hot yeah they dip below freezing sometimes but the gulf stream keeps it pretty steady there

But the wind is constant. There are virtually no trees of any kind. But there's been people there for a really long time. They make more than their total power consumption electricity. Even though they're connected to the mainland, they're actually dumping electricity into Scotland for the most part. And they're far enough north that at the summer solstice, it doesn't get dark at night. They call it the simmer dim when it gets that bright.

So it's an island. The islands are about farming, mostly sheep and cattle. There's still some grain growing there. Of course, there's lots of fishing. And then tourism is huge. Obviously took a blow during the pandemic, but it's already back in the swing. And that's Highland Park is located up there. It's not the only distillery up there. There's also Scapa. And a couple of years ago, the Dearness Distillery opened as well.

Their big tourism attraction is Neolithic structures. So there's evidence that humans have been living on the Orkneys. from as soon as the ice retreated back from there. So there's been artifacts found that are from 9000 BC. And there are standing buildings from 5000 BC. So this is Mesolithic, not even Neolithic, like the Middle Stone Age.

And then, of course, the Meolithic peoples, which were part of the Daggerlands and all of that area when the water was much lower because the ice was still retreating. And they were the megaliths, the folks who built standing stone structures. And there's a ton of them on the Orkneys for as small as they are. um the must see is like the ring of brogdar which is 90 or 60 standing stones in a ring

There's also the Stones of Stennis, which includes the Odin Stone, just in case you weren't sure, the Norse connects to Enmeshau. And of course, I mentioned the Neolithic village. That's in Skarabre. And there are literally still standing. They were buried under sands and things. 5,000-year-old Neolithic home.

Absolutely worth a look. The Romans knew about the Orkney Islands. They called them the Arcades or the Latin, which was actually derived from the earlier Celtic names before the Norwegians showed up. The name itself is kind of funny, the word or. There's actually a Celtic word, orc, which means pig. So there's a theory that the old name was the Island of the Young Pigs. But then when the picks take control of it for the most part after that, although occasionally the galls come through.

And then ultimately the Norse are in control by about 900 AD. And the Orkneys were really the base of operations for the Nordic attacks throughout the UK islands for several hundred years. And, of course, the Norse word orc means seal. So suddenly it was the island of seals, which the Orkneys have plenty of. And then finally, as the Norse movements fade off, by 1472, it's declared part of Scotland, like most of the rest of Scotland, and it's the Kingdom of Scotland thereafter.

so highland park as i mentioned was near kirkwall it's just off the a961 if you want to drive there it's in the southern part of the town uh highland park is not named for the highlands of scotland which is on the mainland it's actually named for high park which is where it's located so

the grounds of orkney are pretty low everywhere there's a few sandstone hills and things but this one raised area south of kirkland is called high park and that's why it's called highland park The actual origins of the place are kind of fun. because it goes far enough back into the 1700s that the historical records are not great. My personal favorite version of it, many other people like it, is a character named Magnus Unstan, which again, very Norwegian name.

who was both a priest and possibly a butcher by day, but was also an illegal distiller and smuggler by night. And the record of him existing comes from a criminal charge in 1798 of a legal distillery up in Hyde Park. We really don't really hear about it much again, but that same location gets an official license as a distillery in 1826 by one Robert Borowitz.

don't know if he was related or not it's all getting a bit fuzzy it was one it was the one of the very first legal uh distillery license issued uh certainly in the orkneys but in most of scotland 1826 was pretty early on and for about 70 years it stays in the barwick family through a couple of generations until it's eventually sold to in 1895 to james grant and that's glenn livet so back in the space side and they continue to operate it

Things get shuffled around for a few years. Towards the end of Prohibition in 1937, it's acquired by Highland Distillers. Highland Distillers has been operating since the late 1880s, 1887. And they operated the Bonhaban and the Glenrothes distillery, which we talked about a few weeks ago. And the Highland Distillers also acquired Glen Glassow, Tam Du, Famous Grouse, Parkmore, Glen Turret, and the Macallan.

And then in 1999, uh, we're quote unquote bought by the Edrington group, which is not really what happened. What happened is. After so many generations of the family that owned Highland Distillers, moving on, they decided to create a trust. to protect these distilleries.

You know, in the 90s was when Diageo was emerging and trying to take everything. And so they built this legal structure to keep the group together and then transferred over shipping into the edging group. So still the same family is just a new entity and a different structure to keep the distilleries together. Highland Park is best known for getting the first perfect 100-point score. in the Ultimate Whiskey Challenge in 2013 for their Highland Park 25.

I have never tasted it. You probably never will. The 2013 edition of a Highland Park, if you can find one, last sold at auction for about $1,200. Now, if you're going to make whiskey in a windy farming area north of Scotland, you are not going to use wood and you're not going to use coal. You're going to use peat because that's what you got. Not all peat is made equal.

So most of the peat that we think about is from Isla, which is down in the southwest, which has a very strong sort of seaweed component to it. It seems to be more tarry and resinous. Even the mainland peats that have more lignin in them because they're just decayed plants, so they have more trees in them, have stronger flavors. There are no trees on the Orkneys, and so their peat is primarily sphagnum moth.

And heather, that's what grows there. That's what decays there. That's what becomes peat bog there. And so it actually has a different scent and a different flavor. Now, that being said, only 20% of the barley that's used in an island park is actually the peated malt from the island. Highland still does their own maltings, unlike almost any other distillery, although the majority of the barley in a Highland part comes from the commercial processor.

Highland Park talks about five keystones in the way they make their whiskey, that they do hand-turned floor montlings, like I just described with their peated barley, that they use what they call Hobster Moor Peat, which is from the Hobster Moor, which is his heather peat. and that they use sherry casks cool maturation and cast carbonization those are the five key stuff

So 20% of the barley is this still hand-turned, peated barley that they do themselves because none of the rest of them do this anymore. And then they use commercial pre-prepared grist for the rest. That means their PPM level is lower than most. You know, your typical Lagavulin is running about 50, 60 PPM. This is more like 12. So it's an intro to Pete. Like it's really quite gentle and it's a sweeter Pete anyway.

So they do their big batch in the mash ton. They do their warts into Oregon pine washbacks. They get a dozen of those. it's a 60 hour fermentation which is not particularly long it's not warm there so they don't have the time battles They've only got four stills, two wash stills at 18,000 liters, two spirit stills at 12,000 liters, relatively short with flat lie arms, nothing fancy about the still.

It's this mixed peat and the mild peat that's sort of the claim to fame for Highland Park. But there's one other thing that Highland Park does that's fairly unique. And that is that they do not use... third-party barrels they don't use any bourbon barrels they don't even really use sherry barrels but they do age in sherry but here's how they do it Highland Distillers for many years has owned forests. in both Missouri and in Spain. And so they cut their own oak for their own barrels.

And then they age them with sherry. So they buy sherry for the purpose and they soak these new make barrels in sherry for two years before they put their own fill in it. They fill at a fairly high level at 69.5. But that's because the wood is new, and so there's more ability to extract on that. They're not dealing with the fact that there's been previous spirit in the barrel.

So they have more options on how they do that. They do very traditional storage. So concrete floors, but only three high horizontal racking. Because the climate is so mild there, they don't have all those same problems. It's just wooden rack houses. And then they combine their barrels into that cask combination to get to their flavor point.

In a 12-year, they don't do any barrel mixing per se. It's all the same kinds of barrels across the board, except for they're both sherry barrels, just some Spanish oak and some American oak. And you can buy this. The BevMo's have got them. They're about 43% alcohol, $50. So not extreme for a 12-year-old. It's kind of a bargain. You know, you'll spend more on a 12-year-old Macallan for sure. And you're going to get a nice intro to Pete.

It's pretty light and sweet. It's very drinkable. And it's one of the components that goes into making famous grass alongside the Macaulay. So it's a special kind of whiskey. It won its titles for a reason. And it's not a normal pick. If you've got a friend who likes whiskey who's never tried it before, you should get it for the great gift. It apparently goes very well with sweet chili crisps. So that's another thing going forward. I like the idea of a starter Pete.

this is yeah this is where you start right this is the uh this is the whiskey you start with it's A fresh-faced, zesty whiskey. Yeah, and again, it doesn't hit you too hard, right? But it does have some peat in it. So lots of people don't like peat. You know, if the first whiskey you ever tasted was a Lagavulin, no one didn't grow upset. Yeah, that's very Petey.

So, you know, then you went over to the space guys and you were happy, right? You were drinking McAllen or you were drinking Avalor or something like that. And then somebody said, well, you want to move a little more stronger flavors? Highland Park's a good direction to go. i did also want to mention somebody in our discord mentioned that the book i was talking about programmers at work is now available online on the internet archive

So I don't, I would assume that that's on Kindle. It's so weird. Like, yeah. It was one of the first ones I bought. A long time ago. I really want to reread it because it's, I mean, it's got Dan Bricklin on Visicalc. Yes, love it. Bob Frankston on Visicalc. It's got... This was all current stuff at the time. Hackman's author, Toru Iwatani. Yeah, Andy Hertzfeld from there. Andy Hertzfeld from there. And the Mac operating system. John Warnock, creator of Postscript. Yes.

I know. This is an artifact of the earlier... I know. I'm going to pirate it. No. The only thing I like on the back of it, it's got an ad for Peter Norton's programming, the IBM PC. That is amazing. I love it. That is amazing. Which I own. It actually was a pretty good book. Yeah. I had a bunch of Peter Norton books. Yeah. I don't think I ever owned a Norton product, but I bought a lot of his books. He had one on IBM. It just came into my brain. IBM PC assembly language.

it's excellent i know he was he or his co-authors were well i'm sure whoever really wrote it but whatever i mean like but yeah Norton, God, that's so weird. He's now a rich fellow. Yeah, we hope so. Investing in art. He's an art connoisseur. Oh, look at him. Seems like a rich fellow thing to do. Somebody on the channels was asking about the depletion of Pete. they're not making more right i mean

Well, they're also making sure they don't drain the wetlands so they're protecting the peat that they have. They should. They've also learned to extract the flavors of peat. So a lot of the industrial production of peated whiskey doesn't involve burning as much peat. So you get this flavor without depleting the peatbox themselves.

and they are making more it just takes millennia yeah yeah that's the problem we just need a couple of dinosaurs to slow slow process yeah an anaerobic digestion of plasma There's Bill Gates. Oh, look at that picture. In the Wall Street Journal dot style. You know that people have that picture up on a wall and we're throwing darts at it.

Well, he's redeemed himself like Andrew Carnegie did with his good works later in life. Leo, if the Nazis had won World War II and cured cancer, would we be having this conversation? Let me think about that, actually. That's my horribly exaggerated response to that kind of thing. I'm sorry. Paul, go to your favorite taco bar. I know. Have a little something.

I need to settle down. I don't know. I'm sorry. Paul Thorat is at thorat.com where you currently can get his books for 99 cents. Should you choose, but pay a little more. He's worth it. Two bucks. I mean, come on. Come on. Windows everywhere. Windows 11. The eternal spring guide to Mexico City.

He's also, of course, at therot.com, his blog, and posts regularly there. If you become a premium member, there's some wonderful stuff, including the first drafts of all those books behind the paywall. So maybe spend the money there instead. Cheap bastards. Yeah, no, whatever. However you want to do it is fine. It's all good. You filthy bastards. You dirty animals. Dirty animals. Richard Campbell's at runnersradio.com. And of course, .net rocks is also there. The show he does with Carl Franklin.

And he will be sticking around. We're going to give you about 20 minutes to re... recoup, to hydrate and recoup, and he'll be back on the air with Intelligent Machines, which is great. My butt is killing me. I have a fine gaming chair. That's the key. I'm going to be spending about 20 minutes standing up. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah, there you go. Get the blood to go back down. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

That would be 1800 UTC. And I mentioned when we do it because you can't watch us produce a show live. including all the digressions, the swearing at one another, the fistfights. All of that available only on the live streams. The misunderstanding. Misunderstandings. The later makeups.

old leather butt himself just watch us if you're in the club on the club to discord or YouTube if you're not YouTube Twitch tick tock x.com facebook linkedin and kick we're all over the place after the fact on demand versions of the show audio or video are available at our website twitter tv slash ww and You can also go to the YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share little clips like maybe this. Island Park recommendation. Actually, we turn all of Richard's whiskey.

stories into a playlist which is available on the twit youtube channel youtube or something weird from my closet.com or something weird from my closet.com i love that you kept that site That's great. Just maps to the YouTube feed. Goes right to the feed. That's easy. That makes it easy. We will see you all next week. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. I'll see you in a few minutes, Richard. You bet. See you next time. All you winners and dozers on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.