Transcript

[00:00:00.650] Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, three time Midwest Pie Maker of the Year, Apple Divine.

[00:00:08.690] Ned: Welcome to Newsweek of Tech Shorts short news weeks week tech shorts. I’m Ron Burgundy. Nope. No, wait, that’s not it. I’m Ned. With me is Chris. Let’s talk about some tech garbage.

[00:00:23.530] Chris: Let’s do that.

[00:00:24.500] Ned: All right, for those who missed it last week, we are splitting the big old episode into the main article that drops on Tuesday. And Tech News of the week. That drops on Thursday. That’s today. At least that’s the idea for now. If you have feelings about this, you could let us know on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email info@chaoslever.com. Now, let’s get back to that tech garbage that floated downstream into our eyeball receptacles this week.

[00:00:50.610] Chris: When you say it that way, it sounds gross.

[00:00:52.730] Ned: It always is. Broadcom moves one step closer to Broadware Vmcom broadvm.

[00:01:01.260] Chris: Whatever not better.

[00:01:04.630] Ned: The EU commission overseeing the intended acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has given the green light. The $61 billion acquisition appears to be lumbering forward after the EU commission extracted promises from Broadcom that it wouldn’t use its newfound leverage to stymy competition in the marketplace. Cute. At least not overtly. The primary concern and concession was over the red hot market that is Fiber Channel HBAs. Now, I know you’re thinking, Wait, didn’t we ditch Fiber Channel, like, a decade ago for iSCSI and HCI? Apparently not. 64 gig. Fiber Channel is, like, a thing. And since Marvell is the only serious competitor to Broadcom’s near monopoly on Fiber Channel HBAs, the EU won a promise from Broadcom that they would continue to supply the code for certifying Fiber Channel host bus adapters with VMware’s API to any interested parties like Marvell for the foreseeable future. The stagnant Fiber Channel market is hardly an area of concern to Broadcom, so I’m sure they’re breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t something more contentious. Now they just need to get backing from the UK and the US investigations to finally seal the deal.

[00:02:28.430] Chris: I remember HBAs.

[00:02:30.290] Ned: Yeah, they were fun. And I say fun, but I don’t mean it, not at all. Do you have the right HBA drivers on your ISO image? I hope you do.

[00:02:43.030] Chris: Watch this. Computer crash. For absolutely no known reason, I get.

[00:02:47.130] Ned: To see a purple screen. Isn’t that pleasant?

[00:02:51.510] Chris: No. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision is finally, probably, I think, happening.

[00:03:05.370] Ned: Yay.

[00:03:06.810] Chris: Yeah, I don’t actually care about this all that much because I am old and sad and don’t play games anymore. But the long, lamented and strongly argued over merger seems like it’s finally going to happen. Microsoft will be able to absorb Activision. To me, this seems like it still is an incredibly short sighted idea, as the only thing of import that Activision has going for it is Call of Duty Ouch, a series that has flatlined over the past years because, innovation aside well, actually leaving the innovation to the side has been the problem for years. Sing. Now, Microsoft, in order to get this past, regulators did sign a deal that would guarantee Call of Duty will be on PlayStation for at least the next ten years. So we can all look forward to shooting each other online on every platform. Fun. I kind of think this is going to end up being a failure for Microsoft, but only time will tell. If it continues the trend of breaking game homogeneity, though, that would be a major win for consumers. Just put all the games out on all the platforms. Let’s just do that.

[00:04:22.870] Ned: It would be nice, though. I have to say, I recently purchased a PS Five and have started playing games again. They’re pretty good. Of course, my point of reference was the PS Three, so it’s been a minute, but they’re real pretty now.

[00:04:43.850] Chris: I think I had a PS Two, and then I had an Xbox, and then that became the Xbox 360, and.

[00:04:51.550] Ned: Then like, the Xbox S One or something.

[00:04:54.430] Chris: Well, then they got really dumb.

[00:04:56.090] Ned: Yeah, their naming just got terrible. Awful, even. Moving on, InfluxDB Deletes data Too soon thinks people read their emails. Let’s be honest. There’s probably a dozen or so vendor emails that you get every week. And you routinely do one of three things leave them unread with every intention of getting back to them after your coffee break, shunt them into a folder that is never viewed and causes you stress because of the ever growing number of unread items it contains or delete on site from your inbox and your mind. If InfluxDB was one of those vendors, then you may have woken up on July 1 to discover your data was gone. The Time Series database as a service company had determined that for economic reasons, it was going to discontinue service in two regions AWS, Sydney and GCP, Belgium. Belgium. Man, Belgium. It tried to notify existing customers via email documentation, website notifications, and sales outreach. Apparently, not everyone got the message after shutting down the two regions they were inundated, with folks being like, WTF. Even worse, while some data is recoverable in the GCP region, the AWS data are gone for good. It’s one thing to pull the plug on a service and see who screams it’s, quite another to also delete all the data.

[00:06:34.910] Ned: One would think that InfluxDB would be able to see, I don’t know, like, active customer traffic to those regions and maybe reach out to those customers to assist in migration. But you got to admire the chutzpah of the hard delete on customer data. Unless, of course, you’re one of those impacted customers.

[00:06:56.070] Chris: Yeah, that was a choice.

[00:06:58.870] Ned: A really weird choice. And the CEO initially was super defensive about it, and then someone was like, Bro, we fucked up.

[00:07:09.850] Chris: This was us.

[00:07:10.810] Ned: Oopsie. Yes, it was. The thing I can’t fathom is it’s your service? You can see the usage metrics. How do you not know that people are still using the region. Right?

[00:07:26.190] Chris: Any hoozle?

[00:07:27.300] Ned: Hey, nothing like burning down all the trust anyone has in your company.

[00:07:33.810] Chris: And speaking of wow. Worthless coward. Elon Musk thinks yet another company is somehow a good idea. Did I say? Worthless coward.

[00:07:45.970] Ned: You might have.

[00:07:47.060] Chris: That was a weird slip of the tongue. What I meant to say was incompetent nini better. Incompetent nini. Elon Musk announced this week that he is starting Xai as a competitor to GPT. Reminder elon was actually on the board of OpenAI way back when, and left it after he lost a power struggle in what can only be described as a brisk and embarrassing fashion. This new company has a mission to, quote, understand the true nature of the universe. Which is? One, I guess. Noble. Two, kind of a deeply philosophical question that doesn’t necessarily require computers, and three, is not going to make any money, which is in line with all of Elon’s other ventures that don’t include government funding. I guess what I’m saying is I really don’t like Elon Musk. What was the question again?

[00:08:46.910] Ned: I don’t think there was a question, but truer statements have never been said. If you really enjoy reading through his broken promises, there’s a website called elon’sbrokenpromises. Com. You just go there and see all the things that he said and then not done. There’s a lot. Well, let’s not harp on that too much, because it makes me sad. Instead, let’s wrap it up. That’ll do it for Thursday’s. Tech News of the week. We’ll be back next week with some thoughtful analysis of whatever dross is dripped from the tech imps. See you then.