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Chaos Lever examines emerging trends and new technology for the enterprise and beyond. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner examine the tech landscape through a skeptical lens based on over 40 combined years in the industry. Are we all doomed? Yes. Will the apocalypse be streamed on TikTok? Probably. Does Joni still love Chachi? Decidedly not.
[01:00:00.00]
Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, an exact replica of myself, but one inch taller.
[01:00:09.04]
Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast where Chris and I go over four interesting stories that caught our attention in the past week, I'm going to go first. Amazon is going nuclear, and not in the way you're thinking, although also that way. Small modular reactors, commonly called SMRs are nuclear reactors delivering fission-based energy in a smaller footprint than traditional reactors. In theory, SMRs should be easier to build, safer to operate, and simpler to expand as needed. That's the modular part of the name. Recently, Google signed a deal with SMR producer, Kyros to build 500 megawatts of capacity for their data centers through seven separate SMRs. Now, Amazon is getting in on the action with an investment in another SMR producer named XEnergy. No affiliation with SpaceX, as far as I know. With an agreement to add 300 megawatts to help power their Virginia and Pacific Northwest data centers. To round out the bunch, Microsoft recently reached a deal with Constellation Energy to reopen Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which had been shuttered in 2019. None of these facilities are likely to come online until 2030, given the glacial pace of construction associated with nuclear power.
[01:01:38.27]
Ned: But all the major cloud players know that the grid can no longer sustain their power requirements, so they will need to supplement somehow. Wind and solar are definitely helping, but they won't be enough to satiate the AI boom to come. And fusion, that's all is about 10 years away. We could try using less power. I'll leave that as a thought experiment to the listener.
[01:02:10.06]
Chris: Bbs inventor, Ward Chr. Dies at 78. This one is a bummer.
[01:02:18.28]
Ned: Way to bring us down.
[01:02:21.01]
Chris: Just a week after we featured BBSes on these hallowed airwaves, we learned that the co-creator of BBS himself, Ward Chr. Has passed away. As is tradition with the, quote, quiet, unassuming technical geniuses of this sort, Ward was more than just the BBS guy. In 1977, he also invented X modem, which is a protocol that enabled reliable transfer of files and data over unreliable telephone lines. Just a year after that, he and co-creator Randy Swees, Seuss, Soyas, Saus.
[01:03:00.10]
Ned: Sure.
[01:03:01.13]
Chris: They banged out the code for the very first BBC in two weeks during a blizzard. And as was tradition at the time, they then just wrote about it in Byte magazine. And the rest, as we talked about last week was history, as was also tradition at the time. That BBS program was open-sourced and as such did not make Ward rich in anything but spirit. Later on in his life, he was awarded the Pioneer Award by no less than the EFF, though. So he had that going for him.
[01:03:34.27]
Ned: Still no money.
[01:03:37.28]
Chris: In general, he was yet one more rarity. He worked one job at IBM for his entire career. Wow. From 1968 to 2012. As part of researching for this lightning round item, I also learned that in 2002, Ward participated in a BBS documentary called, well, BBS, the Documentary, which Ned might have talked about last week, but I was probably not listening. The Documentary is available for free on the YouTube's, or you can get it straight from the source at, you guessed it, bbsdocumentary. Com. Rest easy, Ward, and thanks again for a lot of procrastination in my teenage years. I will dial out to the Cave BBS, which is still a thing that works, and play some Legend of the Red Dragon. That is, if my idiot brother will get off the phone for five seconds, it's supposed to be a shared line, Leonard. Jeez.
[01:04:38.13]
Ned: Exchange server is EOS with no replacement yet available, leaving on-prem Stalwart's SOL. Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 will reach end of support on October 14th, 2025. So that's like Last year, less than a year. Now, if you haven't been paying attention to the world of exchange, not sure why you would, you might think to yourself, so what? Just upgrade to exchange 2023 or whatever. To which I would sadly inform you, There is no newer version of Exchange beyond 2019. Now, I used to work with Exchange a lot. As a consultant, I performed a lot of Exchange 2010 and 2013 upgrades, and even a few 2016 upgrades. During that time, I was certainly aware of Microsoft's growing push to get everyone to adopt Exchange online, a push that would only become more heavy-handed as time marched on. And yet, there were still some stalwart that refused for this reason or that to not migrate their mail services to the cloud. Now, I think it's foolish to host your own exchange servers, as I think it's foolish to host your own websites. Or try to use a Pogo stick. But what the hell do I know?
[01:06:04.05]
Ned: All hope is not lost, and a new edition of Exchange will be released in Q3 of 2025, a whole three months before extended support runs out on Exchange 2016 and 2019. Better be ready to upgrade. The new edition is titled Exchange Server Subscription Edition, and will be code equivalent to Exchange 2019 Cumulative Update 15. However, the license itself is shifting to a subscription, as implied by the name. Microsoft will have their goddamn subscription revenue, and come next year, Exchange admins will have nowhere to hide. It doesn't really matter, though. Exchange 2013 was the bestest exchange, and I challenge you to change my mind.
[01:06:53.15]
Chris: Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
[01:06:54.25]
Ned: Okay, fair.
[01:06:57.02]
Chris: Anguila making surprising amounts of money off of AI. Who? Or. Ai. I suppose I should say. I should back up. Back in my day, there were like I don't know, 12 websites, and they were divided into host names that ended with a period, followed by a three-letter designation. This designation was to signify what site it was. In In 1985, a document called RFC-920 introduced the world to. Com. Edu. Org. Gov. Mill. We did not even have. Net yet. What a wonderful world. The document also introduced the idea of additional domains that ended in the two-letter code that signified a country name for websites that ran out of whatever country because they were there. But But nobody used them because there were 12 websites, and that seemed dumb. Fast forward to now, and there are more than 12 websites.
[01:08:12.06]
Ned: Like at least 14.
[01:08:14.17]
Chris: Far from those two-letter codes being used to simply signify country of origin for websites, though, they've been subverted to make dumb, to make hip and clever names for websites. Ending in things like I-O and, you guessed it. Ai. In our current zeitgeist. Ai is making the country that is ostensibly a part of, Anguila, some serious bank. How much, you might ask? Well, according to a report, there are now more than, and I can't believe this is true, 533,000 websites that end in. Ai. That The number is up 10 times since 1918. That's great. Since 2018. Last year's domain-related revenues for Angular netded around $36 million with expectation that it could double this year. Not bad for an approximately 35 square mile mini-archipelago with a grand total of, at last counting, 14,536 citizens. To their credit, the island's leadership knows that this is possibly, ney, likely a flash in the pan, with Premier, Ellis Webster saying that nobody can predict how long this financial boom will last, and the island cannot rely on it solely. For now, though, as the kids say, when the gold rush is on, be the one that sells the shovels.
[01:09:56.12]
Ned: As a fun add-on to this, there was a bunch of brouhaha over the. Io TLD potentially going away because the country behind it is no longer going to be a country. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.