Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/18 – Microsoft Account Now Required

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Windows 11 now requires a Microsoft account just to load. Intel’s roadmap comes into view. Is Meta’s metaverse play already getting traction? Next week might be the biggest regulatory week for Crypto ever. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: WealthFront.com/techmeme Links: You’ll need a Microsoft account to set up future versions of Windows 11 Pro (ArsTechnica) Intel Discloses Multi-Generation Xeon Scalable Roadmap (AnandTech) Meta’s social VR platform Horizon hits 300,000 users (The Verge) Biden seen issuing crypto oversight exec order next week (Yahoo!Finance) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The World Needs What Intel Makes. Can It Make a Comeback? (NYTimes) Free your mind: Meditation could be VR's next killer app (Protocol) No one cares about your redesign (Garbage Day) If Russia Invades Ukraine, TikTok Will See It Up Close (Wired) Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet (GQ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, February 18th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Windows 11 now requires a Microsoft account just to load. Intel's roadmap comes into view. Is Meta's Metaverse play already getting traction? Next week might be the biggest regulatory week ever for crypto. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Software as a service has been the way of the world for a while now, so this is not entirely shocking. But it does make me double-due. take nonetheless. Windows 11 Pro's initial setup phase will now require a Microsoft account and an internet connection, as it currently does for Windows 11 home. Quoting Ars Technica,

in the current version of Windows 11, you could still create a local user account during setup by not connecting your PC to the internet, something that has worked in the home version of Windows 10, but was removed in 11. That workaround will no longer be available in either edition going forward, barring a change in Microsoft's plans. While most devices do you, require a sign-in to fully enable app stores, cloud storage, and cross-device sharing and syncing, Windows 11 will soon stand alone as the only major consumer OS that requires account sign-in to enable even basic functionality. Apple's Macs still allow for local account creation during setup, and you can skip signing

in when you set up iPhones and iPads. An internet connection is sometimes required for device activation, though. Android likewise needs an internet connection for activation, but doesn't require signing in to get you to the home screen. Even ChromeOS has a guest mode that you can use to enable basic browsing without a user account. This change shouldn't affect anyone who has already configured Windows with a local account, nor will it affect people who use a workplace-provided username and password to log in to their work PCs. But it's a frustrating change for people who regularly set up new Windows installations for development or testing

or anyone trying to set up a new PC in a place without an internet connection. There are some hacky workarounds available, usually involving connecting to and then disconnecting from the internet during setup, but my experience with these has been hit or miss. For those who want to use a local account, the best solution is to create a burner Microsoft account for use during setup, and then to create either a new local user account or sign out of your Microsoft account once the OS is up and running, end quote. Intel Resurrection Watch here, we now know Intel's Zion roadmap. Emerald Rapids, based on the Intel 7 process, is coming in 2023, while Granite Rapids and new efficient core Sierra Forest is due in 2024, both built on Intel 3, quoting an

Nantec. It's no secret that Intel's enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations compared to the competition Intel is chasing its multi-dye strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn't offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Zeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids zion scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap. Currently in the market is Intel's Ice Lake third-generation zion scalable platform built on Intel's 10 nanometer process node with up to

40 Sunnycove cores. The dye is large around 660 millimeter square, and in our benchmarks we saw a sizable generational uplift in performance compared to the second generation Xion offering. The response to Ice Lake Zion has been mixed, given the competition in the market, but Intel has forged ahead by leveraging a more complete platform coupled with FPGA's memory storage networking and its unique accelerator offerings. Data Center revenues, depending on the quarter you look at, are either up or down based on how customers are digesting their current processor inventories, as stated by CEO Pat Gelsinger. That being said, Intel has put a large amount of effort into discussing its fourth generation

Xion Scalable Platform, Sapphire Rapids. For example, we already know that it will be using more than 1,600 millimeter square of silicon for the highest core count solutions with four tiles connected with Intel's embedded bridge technology. The chip will have 864-bit memory channels of DDR5, support for PCIE 5.0, as well as most of the CXL 1.1 specification. New matrix extensions also come into play, along with data streaming accelerators, quick assist technology, all built on the latest P-Core designs

currently present in the Alder Lake desktop platform, albeit optimized for data center use, which typically means AVX 512 support and bigger caches. We already know that versions of Sapphire Rapids will be available with HBO. The first customer for those chips will be the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Labs, coupled with the new Pontivecchio High Performance Computing Accelerator. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is significantly later than originally envisioned several years ago, but we expect to see the hardware widely available during 2022 built on Intel 7 Process Node technology, end quote. Also, Intel says its discrete ARC GPUs for laptops will ship in Q1, 2022, ARCGPUs for desktops will ship in Q2, and ARCGPUs for workstations will ship in Q3, quoting the verge.

Intel has quietly announced a new upcoming service for its ARCGPUs, Project End games, which will allow customers to stream access to Intel's graphics cards for, end quote, always accessible low latency computing experience, end quote. The exact mechanisms here aren't totally clear, but it sounds like Intel will allow customers to rent GPUs in the cloud or even a full-fledged front-end gaming service like Nvidia's GForce Now subscription. There are almost no details yet on Project Endgame, including things like what kind of GPU access it'll give customers,

how much it'll cost, or rather it will even be a gaming-focused product. but Intel is saying that it arrives sometime later this year, so we'll presumably find out more. The fact that Intel is planning some sort of cloud streaming service is also the latest sign of confidence that the company has in its discrete GPUs, end quote. Well, they want to show you traction already, I guess, even if it's not quite at scale yet. Meta has confirmed that the combined monthly user base for Horizon Worlds and Venues has grown to 300,000 people up 10x since launching in December. Quoting the verge.

Facebook has bet its future on virtual reality and the metaverse, rebranding to meta and spending billions a year to build hardware and software that extends beyond traditional social media. But the company has, at least so far, shared little with the public about how well its early bets are performing. Meta's highest profile bet right now is a social VR platform for the Quest headset called Horizon Worlds. It was recently featured in Meta's Super Bowl ad, and Zuckerberg called it core to our Metaverse vision on the company's most recent earnings call. During a virtual meta-all-hands earlier this week, yes, the Metamates one, the company's chief product officer Chris Cox gave employees a previously

unreported update on Horizon's user growth. He said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out to all Quest users in the U.S. and Canada in early December, its monthly user base has grown by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people, according to an employee who heard the remark. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics. The number doesn't include Horizon Workrooms, a VR conferencing experience that relies on an invite system. Before its December rollout, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta for creators to test its world-building tools. Similar to how the gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft's

Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments to hang out and play games in as legless avatars. Meta announced this week that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date, and its private Facebook group for creators now numbers over 20,000 members. Meta still hasn't disclosed how many Quest headsets it is sold to date, which makes it hard to gauge Horizon's success relative to the underlying hardware platform it runs on, but several third-party estimates pegs sales at over 10 million units for the Quest. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta would release a version of Horizon for mobile phones later this year, to quote, bring early Metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR, end quote. And I wanted to put this

on your radar real quick for next week. Sources say President Biden is expected to issue an executive order next week directing agencies to study crypto and a central bank digital currency or CBDC, and to come up with a strategy to regulate digital assets generally, quoting Yahoo Finance. According to an administration official familiar with the matter, the forthcoming directive will commission a study of a CBDC and ask a range of agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, state justice, and homeland security to develop a report on the future of money and payment systems. Meanwhile, the director of the Office of Science and Tech Policy will do a technical evaluation of what might be needed to support a CBDC system. The move comes as Bloomberg News reported

on Wednesday that a rift has developed between the White House and Treasury over crypto regulation, but a Treasury official disputed the account as, quote, inaccurate. The administration is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to regulate the sector with the FBI, forming a new crypto unit led by a seasoned computer crimes prosecutor, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up a profile. We've been discussing Intel's attempt to claw its way back into relevancy. And so from the New York Times, a look at the man who is attempting all that.

CEO Patrick Gelsinger, who I did not know this, first joined Intel at age 18, quote, Now at age 60, Mr. Gelsinger is hot about one thing in particular. Revitalizing Intel, a Silicon Valley icon that lost its leading position in chip manufacturing. Rejuvenating Intel is partly about Mr. Gelsinger's own ambitions. As a young engineer, he once wrote down a goal of leading Intel one day, but in 2009, after spending his entire career at the company, he was forced out. A year ago, he was wooed back for a surprise second chance. His mission is also about America's place in the world.

Mr. Gelsinger wants to return the United States to a leading role in semiconductor production, reducing the country's dependence on manufacturers in Asia and easing a global chip shortage. Intel, he believes, can spearhead the charge. If he succeeds, the impact could extend far beyond computers to just about every device with an on-off switch, end quote. Next, given our discussion of meta's VR efforts earlier, from Protocol, I believe when I said when I first got an Oculus Quest 2 last year, that the thing that VR could be great for was meditation and mindfulness. I was surprised that there wasn't much out there for this sort of thing, but maybe I was just a bit early. Protocol says meditation could soon be VR's next killer app, quote, Home launched its Quest app a little

over a month ago and is now offering a studio-like meditation experience in VR. People can join live classes, catch up on past meditations, or do breathing exercises, all while watching 360-degree videos of trainers sitting in a lotus pose in front of them, ready to bring some peace to their busy minds. Home is just one of a number of apps and services looking to bring mindfulness and meditation to VR. Meditation services were among the first to embrace subscription billing on Meta's Quest App Store, and Meta competitor HTC even built an entire VR headset around the notion of immersive wellness. It's a surprising direction for VR, an industry that was squarely focused on gaming for years. But after fitness apps and services became an overnight

hit in VR app stores, leading meta to spend between $400 and $500 million on VR workout service supernatural. Some are wondering, could meditation be VR's next killer app, end quote. See, I don't need a studio experience. I don't really want a Peloton-like thing. I just want some calming music and some 3D graphics so I can like, you know, go down a rainbow volcano or something after popping a gummy and just be on a head trip for like 15 minutes. VR could literally be the best experience for this type of thing, except it's not exactly easy to use the quest lying down yet. So that's another hurdle, but hopefully this will become the coming thing in VR. Then I don't always agree with the amazing substack Garbage Day, but I always read Garbage Day

because it's always interesting, because Ryan Broderick has a talent for takes on things that even when you disagree with him, you find yourself sitting back blown away by the sharpness of his analysis. The February 16th post does my thing of putting on the history hat and comparing the demise of MySpace to the situation that Meta finds itself in right now, quote, MySpace and 4chan launched in 2003, within three months of each other, interestingly enough, and then Dig launched in 2004, Reddit and YouTube in 2005, and Facebook in 2006. Editor's note, that's kind of not true. the Facebook actually launched in 2004, February 4th, 2004, actually, continuing. The first half of the a aughts was looking back at it, actually a nonstop flurry of online activity. But things got a lot more

interesting towards the end of the decade when MySpace was starting to die. And while putting a date on the actual death of a social network is difficult for MySpace, we do have a decent time range to approximate its demise. What's so fascinating about looking back at all of this stuff is that while there are some obvious differences between where MySpace was in 2008 and where Facebook is in 2022. MySpace never got big enough, for example, to warrant antitrust regulation, nor did Emo Kids successfully storm the Capitol, though I'm sure they would have tried if they had gas money. There are actually a lot more similarities. Myspace was at the top of the world, largely thanks to its increasingly consolidated portal strategy,

which meant there was really no way to shake the weirdos, grifters, and Christian Screamo bands, apparently that eventually showed up and started making the site unusable. And then a new app promising a more exciting, more alive-feeling central feed launched, specifically targeting teenagers. As MySpace's older users began feeling more stuck and bored there, younger users left in droves until there were no new ones signing up at all anymore. And then MySpace announced a bizarre redesign, a dumb logo change, and a shifting of their corporate strategy that they claimed was not related to competing with the new successful social network, but instead was about connecting users with the content they love, though in ways that no one actually cared about, end quote.

And speaking of the up-and-coming social networks, if war comes to Ukraine, expect to see it play out on TikTok, which, to be honest, since it's the dominant social network of the moment, shouldn't be surprising because, you know, life happens on social networks these days, news happens there, but still, quoting Wired, since April 2020. the mobilization of Russian troops has been accompanied by reams of digital evidence. These come from a variety of sources from smartphone footage to high-resolution overhead images captured by commercial satellite companies. Troops, helicopters, and military hardware have all been spotted in satellite images. But for people on the ground, TikTok has emerged as a key platform for showing military movements.

TikTok is definitely one of the main platforms being used to document this, says Elliot Higgins, the founder of open source investigative unit Bellingcat, which has been exposing Russian espioning for years. That footage often finds its way onto Twitter or other social media platforms and joins other footage being posted there. The TikTok videos from around Kursk, all of which have had their location verified by the CIR, provide a snapshot of how powerful open source intelligence, also known as Aoscent, has become. The videos contribute to media reports and policy discussions. They can be low quality and poorly framed, but they show exactly what is happening at a specific moment in time, end quote. And finally, this is, of course, not tech, but GQ has a big profile of Francis Ford Coppola,

and apparently he has one last big movie in him, and he says he's going to make it no matter what, even if that means he has to spend $100 million of his own money to do so, quoting from GQ. It's a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it intermittently for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can't because Coppola can't either. Ask him. Quote, it's very simple, he'll say, the premise of Megalopolis. Well, it's basically, I would ask you a question. First of all, do you know much about Utopia? End quote. The best summary I can offer after literally hours of talking about it with him is this. It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man. It's said in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome. It's scale and ambition, vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something that's like it's a wonderful life, a movie everyone goes to see once a year forever. On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates,

I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is, is the society we live in the only one available to us, and discuss it, end quote. Somehow Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion. Coppola hopes annually? You may be wondering at this point, what Hollywood studio in the age of Marvel will fund such a grand, ambitious, impossible to summarize project? How do executives at these companies react when he describes the film to them? Same way they did. Coppola answered when I had won five Oscars and was the hottest film director in town and walked in with Apocalypse Now and said, I'd like to make this next. I own Apocalypse Now. Do you know why I own Apocalypse Now? Because no one else wanted it. So imagine if that was the case when I was 30.

or whatever the age I was when I had won every award and had broken every record and still absolutely no one wanted to join me. Imagine how they're reacting now to present-day Francis Ford Coppola. But he said, I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think, what's really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does this mean when that happens? And quote. And so this is Coppola's plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune at 82 years of age and make the damn movie himself, end quote.

Quick programming note, I know that it is sort of a holiday here in the U.S. on Monday, but I will not be celebrating it. There will be a show on Monday. Also, there is a portfolio profile episode tomorrow, as I told you, and as I told you, developers, designers, and startups, listen up. This company I'm going to tell you about is going to revolutionize hiring for startups. On the talent side, you can angel invest in companies by lending your time and talent to help startups get off the ground. You can earn cash or equity for your troubles and kick the tires of some of the hottest startups on the horizon. And startups, imagine if at the very earliest stage of building your MVP, you could have access to Fang level engineering and design talent. I think you'll find this company completely fascinating.

That's all from me for this week, eagerly awaiting delivery of Horizon Hidden West, so I can play with my kids when they get home from school. And, you know, that show Severance that just launched on Apple TV Plus is getting the kind of rave reviews that get me interested, so I plan to give that a go as well. Talk to you on Monday.