Episode 192 – SkyNet Is Real

In Episode 192, Ben and Scott talk about the deprecation of Internet Explorer, the impacts of Cloud Shell being open-sourced, and a new button Microsoft Teams for starting new conversations. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 192 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast, recorded live, August 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users where we discuss a recent topic or news and how it relates to you. And this episode, Ben and Scott get back on track and start off the show talking about the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, as well as the latest DARPA AI project. And from there, we dive into Microsoft 365 and Azure news talking about the Microsoft Cloud Shell, about Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Forms Pro, Microsoft Ignite, and other news and announcements related to Microsoft 365 and Azure. - I don't even know how to start. I have nothing creative. It's episode 192. A month from now, we're going to be recording 200, Scott. What are we going to do for, I feel like we should do something for 200. We didn't do anything for 100. We are very poor at celebrating our accomplishments. - What could we do? Continue to stay inside some more? - Sure. - We've gt that going for us. - Two months away, two months, it's the end of some month and the year 2020. October, it'll be like Halloween, right-ish? - So it'll only be, you know, 105, and it'll be nice and humid outside. - Yeah, maybe we can dress up since we did start doing videos, Scott. Last week's episode, I actually published, we were recording our video, I went in and marked it up a little bit. But we actually published video of us on YouTube. So if you want the whole unedited video version of the podcast, you can go find it on YouTube now. And we'll see, hopefully I can keep doing it. I need to fix my camera though. I have a standup desk that wiggles, as you can probably see in my video. - Yeah, well, we'll have to add not only a non-wiggly camera, but like a discord chat or something like that. - Oh, man, this is going to get to be a lot of work. - I know. - So do you want my random news for the day? I have two random news articles for you. Which one do you want, one or two? This one's more interesting. - Well, let's back up. So Flight Simulator came out. Have you played it yet. - No, but it has a 212-story building, you know, in a city. - It's in Melbourne, it's in Melbourne, Australia. Do you know how they got that 212-story obelisk inside the middle of the city? - You found one of my random links and I have not read it all yet, other than somebody had a typo somewhere and they scraped the data from there and that's how it got there. But I have not had a chance to read all the details. - So mapping is an interesting thing. You know, there's a lot of companies out there that potentially provide map data. There are certainly some that build their own. You think maybe about like Google or Apple, you know, driving cars around for their street views and things like that. But they're also collecting telemetry and road data. You've got navigation applications like, coming from the Tom-Toms of the world, maybe you've got Waze. So there's kind of commercial open-source things out there. And one of the things that Microsoft bases it's data, map data off of, for not only Flight Simulator, but things like potentially Bing is OpenStreetMap. And in OpenStreetMap, there's an entry for a building in Melbourne, Australia, which is two stories tall, but was inadvertently entered through a typo to be 212 stories. And when you are leveraging OpenStreetMap and kind of taking it as a source of truth, you would just say, Hey, here's a thing that we need to render on our map in realtime. So combine it with satellite imagery data and kind of do the 3D overlay on it. - And there you have it 212-story building. Have you played it yet? It looks like, I haven't seen how big it is. It's said it comes on 10 DVDs. And I watched some YouTube videos of people getting like their Microsoft unboxing kits of it with all the accessories. I won't lie, I was kind of jealous of these people getting top of the line yokes and sticks and throttle controls along with the game from Microsoft. - Yes, so I did, I don't have any of that stuff. And embarrassingly, I can't start the download this month because I live under the Comcast regime, and if I do, I will go over my data cap, because it is a massive, massive download. So it's on the order of 130 to 150 gigs just to kind of run through the pre-install for it. - Yeah, that sounds about right if it's 10 DVDs worth of data. - Yeah, so if you are a Game Pass subscriber, like a Microsoft Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, there's a version in the Windows Store that you can get through Game Pass for, quote/unquote, free, because it is part of your existing subscription. - I wonder if I can play it in a VM. - I did it and you really cannot. - Yeah, that was kind of my guess. - Yeah. That was going to be my first thing, was like loaded up inside parallels, but I actually went and stole one of my kids' laptops because it's got a newer Radeon chip in it. - That's funny. - So maybe I'll come over to your place and like just hang on the wifi and download it or something. - Perfect, well, cause I have two internet connections now. So I have two one-terabyte limits. I have a terabyte limit from AT&T and a terabyte limit from Xfinity. So we'll just pick the one that I'm the lowest on. You can download it on that one. - That's the way to do it. So Flight Simulator, that'll be the thing to do. - Alright, so my next one is along the same lines. Did you follow any of the DARPA stuff the last few days? - I have not-- - So DARPA had the alpha dogfight trials, and what this was, I should send you a link to this, is a AI competition with AI dogfights, I think that, there it goes, with AI dog fighting. So essentially a simulated dogfight between F-16s. So there were eight, I think there were eight teams. They've whittled it down over the course of, apparently this whole thing has been going on for awhile. But they whittled it down over the course of the last year or so, and then had the finals of it over the last three days where these eight teams were all having simulated dog fights all using AI, teaching their models as they were running through these simulations. And then they capped it all off with the winner of the competition flying against one of the top F-16 pilots, and it was an AI versus human dogfight in a simulated environment. And it was, I watched some of it off and on and it was fascinating to watch the AI battles, but then watching AI versus humans. And all I can say, Scott, is the human race is in trouble. We're going to get exterminated by the machines. - Skynet is real? - Skynet is real. No, it wasn't even close. Like, it was absolute domination by the AI flying the F-16 versus the human. I'm not a pilot nor have I ever been in the military, but just watching it from my perspective, a lot of it seemed to be the fact that, using the AI, once the planes got close to having them in the cone of a legitimate gunshot, the AI was able to precisely aim a lot better than the human was. Kind of like, you know, when you go play video games and if you put like any of the first-person shooters on the expert level, and those bots always seem to be able to precisely aim, it kind of felt like that in these dogfights. That aiming ability was just a lot more steady and a lot more precise than somebody's hands. - Yeah, you know, I think that was always one of the things, right? Computers don't have any, you know, they don't have any shake, they don't have any muscle memory to overcome or, you know, getting nervous in those situations. You also have to contend with, if an AI is driving the process, like say it was even a real plane that was being driven by AI, there's nothing to contend with in the way of natural physical force. So you don't have to worry about overcoming G-forces in a bank or anything like that. And as a human, right, as a bag of like meaty flesh, you are at a tactical disadvantage. - Yeah, so it was interesting. They streamed a bunch of it on YouTube. So I think that all the YouTube videos are still out there, so we can link to this article or you can go search for the alpha dog fight trials and watch some of the videos. And there's definitely a lot of it you can skip through, because there was a lot of talking but, I mean, the fun part was the AI battles. - Yeah, that's the best kind of YouTube, all the stuff that you can skip through. Maybe you just go find the alpha dog fight on TikTok and then doom scroll your way through it. - Yes, TikTok is banned in the US, Scott. No TikTok, bad TikTok. - Not yet. - We're going to make the internet great again. - It still has days left. Days, I say. - Okay, and that's all the political stuff we're getting into on this podcast. - Oh, what else? - On to news doomsday. Here's a terrible segue. Doomsday, Internet Explorer is going to meet its doom in 2021 when it comes to the Microsoft 365 apps. So I think this was, they announced it the 17th, they announced it four days ago. So earlier this week, August 17, Microsoft announced you have one year of support for Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge legacy to work or to be supported. I guess it doesn't mean it's not gonna work, but to be supported in internet Explorer 11. So come August 17, 2021, the only supported browsers for Microsoft 365 are going to be the new Edge, and then I'm going to assume, Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all going to stay supported as well. But maybe, finally, people are starting to kick IE 11 to the curb. - One can only hope. You know, it was a weird road to get to Credge. and I think some people are still put off by the way the upg