Techstrong Gang – November 22, 2024

Hi, everyone. Happy Friday. You know, Microsoft made some noise this week.

No surprise there. We, we going to get another update from SC 24. You are watching Text Drug Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel with my Santana hat here, but I'm in studio. I usually only wear this on the road, but, uh, happy Friday to you. We've got a, a text on gang to remember today.

We've got some great stuff to talk about. We're gonna, it's gonna be a little more free flowing than some of our usual ones 'cause we don't have Mike Ard on, uh, with us. Ri who, you know, who usually scripts these out for us.

So hopefully John, Kimberly and I won't go too far afield, but it should be fun. Let me introduce you. I, I already mentioned their names, but want to thank some of our gang members here today with us, first of all, joining us from out in very, very wet Silicon Valley where they have, what's it called?

A, some kind of bomb. Oh, uh, the Atmospheric River. A bomb cyclone.

You know what I call It a bomb cyclone? Call it a, yeah, that sounds worse than an atmospheric River. It's a moderate sport.

Atmospheric River sounds like a, a gray, slick album in the early seventies or something. Uh, but John Schwartz is here with us. Hey John, welcome and thanks for being.

How's it Going? Hey, I had, I, I was gonna share something really quickly since, uh, we're gonna be free flowing a little bit today. I wanted to thank you, Mike and Amanda, who I'll work with because I just signed a book deal, um, to write a book about AI agents, the workplace and their impacts.

And the reason why, the reason why I am doing the book is because the publisher reached out to me and said, we've been reading these stories on Techstrong ai. We really like them, and we think this would make a great book, especially the stuff about AI and robotics. So I want to thank you all because that you made it possible.

That is terrific. Congratulations Is a good, that's a good, you know what, so as someone who's, and Kimberly, you know this, you're a founder too. When you start a business, you start a business for a lot of reasons.

We all want to make money, right? But you also want to kind of do good in the world somehow. Every founder that's been successful in my career that I've met, and I've met hundreds upon thousands of them, think in some small way what they do changes the world, somehow makes someone's life better.

So the fact that you are gonna write a book based upon what we are doing here, that that's, that's like, you know, that's pay it forward. It makes my heart feel. Yeah, I mean, show and website have impacts.

I mean, they, they are read by a lot of people, and I've heard from an acquisitions editor at the publishing house who said, we really like this stuff and we wanna see more of it. And we think there's a book in it. And, and if I were at my previous employer, none of this would've happened.

So thank you very much. My pleasure, John. And we're, we're thrilled to hear that.

And I know you'll write a great book. The pressure's on. Oh no, no pressure.

No. Look, if it doesn't work out, we'll just, or publish it. It's form on tech strong ai if they don't like it, but whatever, we'll do what we can next with us today.

She's joining us from semi cold Colorado. It's not terrible for the Boulder area. It's only about 34 degrees.

Kimberly Bates Hey Cam, future analyst. Cam Kimberly Bates. Hey Kimberly.

How are you? I'm doing great this morning. A little rough from Super Computing, but we'll talk about that in a bit.

Yeah, I can't wait to hear all about it. Um, alright, let's jump into things. Uh, John, you were going to kick us off, I think with that first.

Yeah, With, let's, let's talk about Microsoft security because we don't talk about it enough. Maybe there's a reason why. So, at the Ignite Show this week, Microsoft announced draft as zero trust tools and platforms.

And they put up a $4 million bug bounty in a series of actions that seem to be as much about shoring up their reputation in cybersecurity as fortifying defenses. Um, they seem determined Microsoft to make sure cybersecurity is no longer an afterthought. And the context is this, Microsoft's been under intense pressure over its handling of the CrowdStrike incident that resulted in billions of dollars in damage and exposed fundamental architectural flaws in the Windows platform.

And, uh, Satya Nadel himself has claimed this security is now the company's top priority, and they have the equivalent of 34,000 full-time employees revamping their practices. So they made a tremendous amount of, of announcements, some of which I think were probably overdue. I was at, um, a Tech Field Day event last night.

There was a happy hour, and I talked to several of the people there and asked them for their reaction to the Microsoft News. And they said it was long overdue. And, um, perhaps it will lead to something more positive, although probably will take a significant amount of time.

And so, in a sense, this is kind of a bookend to what happened with CrowdStrike, where, as you recall, at the time, Microsoft was con conspicuously silent while CrowdStrike was taking all sorts of heap from everyone seemed. So, um, it kind of brings me to this idea, um, Alan, I mean, you know, security, well, Microsoft had had this reputation of kind of, and I, from personal experience, I've heard this from just kind of treating this as almost as an afterthought. Is that, I mean, is that too harsh an assessment?

Or is this, is that accurate? Well, look, this is a deja vu, right? This is a deja vu back in, uh, I guess it was around 2005.

So remember Microsoft was late to recognize the coming of the internet, right? And then boom, it burst on the scene. And, you know, they built the, they finally built the TCP stack into Windows natively, I think in Windows 99 or something like that.

And, um, but their security was horrendous. Horrendous. It is.

It was very much like it was worse than what you're saying. It wasn't afterthought. And of course, bill Gates wrote that famous memo, the trustworthy computing memo, that, and that's why I say it's deja vu, that security was gonna be job one for every single employee at Microsoft.

And that they started a whole division of what we call trustworthy computing. And that Microsoft was gonna be very serious about security. Shortly thereafter, we started seeing Patch Tuesdays, if you remember Patch Tuesdays and all of these things, and Microsoft, and, and, and they went out and spent a fortune of money and hired some of the very best security people in the world.

Friends of mine. Many friends of mine went to work at Microsoft. They were serious.

And that lasted through Bill Gates into the Steve Ballmer row. But they slid back, they slid back into their old habits. And, and quite frankly, CrowdStrike's just the last black guy.

They took SolarWinds, uh, a year or two ago, actually right around, uh, COVID. They took a, a good shot, you know, the, the, the president of Microsoft went up and gave the me a couple to, to, to Congress. Uh, there's been Microsoft Exchange is issues.

Look at no one's perfect and we all have security things, but Microsoft, they needed this new trustworthy computing initiative. 'cause that's what it sounds like to me. Um, you know, so they're, they're talking about really implementing Zero Trust, which they should have done a long time ago.

Like, Hey, can I mention something really quickly? You, you mentioned 2005. I have a personal story.

So when I, the, the last time I wrote a book, which was a long time ago, it was about 16 years ago, we were doing research. And in the course of the research, I had an interview with Bill Gates. This was around early 2007, right after the launch of Vista.

And there were questions about security back then. And I remember Gates and Craig Mundy, who was then the chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft, we're in this interview. And I remember when I started asking Gates a general question about security.

Mundy eagerly tried to answer, and Gates, and I'll use, I'll show you what he did. He, he literally put his hand in front of Monday's face and told him to be quiet. And then said something really that I always remember Gate said, you know, the thing people talk about things like spam, we could get rid of this overnight.

And that to me, in a sense, kind of encapsulated the dismissive attitude they had about security at the time. So, you're right, this, this is like a pattern. It's been going on for, It's, it's for decades.

Took their eye off the ball. But let, let's get to what they actually said they're gonna do. They're, they're, they're gonna really go double down on zero trust, welcome to the party, better late than never.

They, they are changing. So the way Windows was architected, in order to make certain changes for security things, you had to really get into the, the, the kernel, if you will, to make those changes. And they, and they used to use that as a shield, why they, they wouldn't let security companies into the kernel because it, something like this could happen.

And the courts said, no, no, you have to let other security companies, not just Microsoft, make changes at the kernel level to enhance security. So Microsoft said, oh, okay, we will probably rec, I don't know if they recognized it or not, but it would, it, it, it was a reasonable assumption that when I start working in the kernel, if something goes wrong and that kernel goes bad, you are gonna have this CrowdStrike type of blue screen of death. And so it was, it was a bad architectural decision.

So now they're, they're lifting these security things sort of out of the kernel so that these security companies like CrowdStrike can make the necessary changes. They did, they will, without it affecting right. At the kernel level.

And then I, I also understand that they, they, they've architected that even if you have like a kernel panic blue screen and death situation, you're not to make it easier to recover from that, then the arcane ridiculousness of what it took to recover from this CrowdStrike blue screen of death, uh, thing. More power to 'em, more power to them. Um, but let, let's see how long it lasts.

You know, they, they have a real short attention span in terms of rehabilitating their security posture. Yeah. There was, uh, one thing that kind of jumped out.

I remember, uh, somebody mentioned the biggest change and you referenced to the kernel biggest change of all what would let developers build security products that operate on a user mode instead of requiring in the kernel mode. But wouldn't something like that take a while to, to implement? I mean, leveraging those changes?

No, and they probably had this sitting in the wings for years, but okay. You know, they, they look, they don't like to give third party access to a lot of the inner workings of Windows. It takes, you know, we could talk about they're not alone, right?

Google and others as well on their own Platform. So cur this is curious and, and I don't know, thank you very much for educating me on this. This is fascinating.

When I was with Veeam a couple weeks ago at their conference, one of the things they're working on is, is moving everything, moving their platform to Linux. Um, they're gonna offer both, but I, and it seems that, you know, they're in the data protection business, of course, which mirror, you know, companies, the data security side of the house. And you start to see companies now saying, build on Linux.

I'm not gonna build on that. And maybe that even much like what we're seeing, you know, with Broadcom's actions, just saying when people start, you know, walking with their feet, um, out the door, um, that kind of, they say, well, okay, so we need to wake up. And it's not for the goodness of everybody that they're doing this.

There is a revenue issue that they're facing that they're getting the heat on. So I would suspect on the situation, A absolutely. Look, people have been migrating to Linux for security issues For a long time.

Yeah. And before Linux it, you know, it was uni I always loved OS too, but what can I tell you? Um, anyway, I thought it was much more hands down, much more secure than, than Windows ever was.

But, um, That was also a major selling point for the Macintosh, right? Or Apple products. Yeah.

They made hay for years about their, But let's be fair, be fair. When, when your operating system controls 95% of the market, like they did in the nineties, when, you know, Mac was barely alive, you had that big stick where you wanna go to Linux, go ahead. You're walking away from 95% of the desktops in the world.

Now Windows is still, I think about 80%. Well, and the other piece to that is, if you are, if you're Tam as a bad guy, the target Tam Yeah. Where do you go?

I needs to be Microsoft if you're gonna attack something. Right. Though though, Mac has garnered a big enough, uh, share of market where they, they do get targeted.

You see targeted attacks on Mac Os. And, and quite frankly though, Linux is, is, I hate to say the word more secure, but Linux has had less incidents than let's say Microsoft or Mac for that matter. But, um, look, we've had problems with bad packages in Linux, distress all That.

Well, and that gets back, back to saying, is that, is that because we've, the tam is not that big. Exactly. So if you're Exactly, you're the bad guy, you're gonna say, what, what's, what is, what can I attack?

And if I, That's why lowest hanging fruit for the biggest buck bang for the buck. Well, The biggest bag, those hanging fruit for the biggest buck. Yes.

Yes, that's true. So, but that is how I've always seen wine. Yeah.

M Microsoft is the most attacked. But, and, and I think that's what Microsoft would like you to, to all t tout down. That Was part of their message, that was part of their messaging for You.

Absolutely. When what Apple would Apple, what Apple would say, oh, they're, they're, we are much more secure. Microsoft said, of course they're gonna, the attackers are gonna come here.

This is where the money is. Why, why the Well Apple was, we're secure by design. Right.

Um, the other thing I just wanted to mention, and we can move on, is they also announced the biggest bug bounty program ever. I believe like $4 million for bugs, which, you know, for our researchers out there, that's, that's like, you know, Bitcoin mining, right? That's big money.

They're often, they're off and running looking for bugs and, and bug bounty programs work. I know, uh, I have a lot of friends from that side of the house, my friend Katie Moura, who actually used to work at Microsoft and started the original Bug Bounty programs there. Can you, and even the bug, I'm not sure if you've experienced this at Techron, but when I, with Evaluator Group, um, twice over the 10 years, I had somebody, you know, initiate a conversation with me to say, We found the bug.

We found some things in your website, yada, yada, um, here. And if you would Please surprise. You only got it twice, Kimberly.

We got, I get it once a month. I mean, but the world is changing. Well, did you pay that?

Did you thank them and pay them some money? Yes. Good.

I mean, it's not a lot of money. They're not $4 million bucks. I send them a hundred bucks, $200.

But it, you know, the world's changed a little bit in that when you look at text storm, we don't really have any custom apps. We're running all off the shelf SaaS stuff. Yep.

So oftentimes when they find a bug, it's usually a configuration issue, or it goes back to the underlying WordPress program or database or something. And then I gotta forward it, you know, to WordPress or to our WordPress host. So, um, but if it's a misconfiguration, yeah.

We've paid several times because it's well worth the money. Mm-Hmm. In my mind.

Anyway, let's take a break on our Microsoft story. We're gonna come back and John, you wanna talk about deep fakes or Deep? Sure.

Let's talk about it. Alright. You're watching Text on Gang.

Welcome back to Textron Gang. Uh, social Platform. X last week sued to block a California law that targets AI generated political DeepFakes months after Elon Musk, its owner and world's richest person.

And Donald Trump's best friend claimed a law would make parody illegal, quote unquote. So the lawsuit basically claims that this law in California, which goes into effects next year, violates the First Amendment and would result in the censorship of wide swaths of, uh, valuable political speech. Um, the pla, the platform X said it has policies in place to moderate, quote, synthetic or manipulated media that might deceive or confuse and lead to harm.

However, X includes exceptions for memes or satire, illustrations in cartoons, commentary, and counter speech. Now, the, I will open this up to the gang. This, what this is interesting to me about is that X's bid is to block the law.

Could be like a litmus test amid a wave of legislation to, to tamp down on AI powered election contest. Especially deep fakes. More than half the 50 states have passed or mulling such bills according to an Axios report.

Uh, it kinda brings up this, this whole notion of what is parody and the definition of, of free speech. And I think it kind of goes down this road that we've been hearing a lot involving social media. And X is trying to put their thumb down on the scale to accelerate maybe, uh, attacking laws in different states since there won't be any national law.

And I just kind of wanna open up to you and, and ask you what you think about this, especially it coming from Musk and X, Kim, Kimberly, I, I wouldn't necessarily, you know, I'm not gonna focus on Musk and ask, um, because I believe that part of what X ended up doing opened up a lot of conversation. And we've seen some tapping down even through the, the last four or five months coming up into our election of some of the other platforms. Um, which given what we have in terms of our information that we come, come into us, um, that free, free speech needs to roll and it shouldn't be tapped down.

I understand what he is saying in the parody. I mean, one of the things you've heard, we've heard over the last year or two years from comedians, I mean, Jerry Seinfeld, a whole bunch of others have come out and said, you, you can't crack jokes anymore because if you do, you insult somebody, you can't do comedy anymore. You can't do sarcasm.

And that's, you know, part of, part of life is laughing at yourself. You know, I used to make blonde jokes all the time until somebody said, why do you do that for yourself? And I quit doing the blonde jokes and, um, kind of, but, but I, you know, I understand part of it.

We have to laugh at ourselves if we don't, it's kind of like, God, this is like a boring life, you know, that is part of it. And parody, I mean, the memes that show up, I mean, when we have something that happens and we see funny memes and that kind of thing there, I mean, it gives me giggle and it gives me giggle on both sides. Um, and just, you know, just to be very clear, I do listen to both sides.

I have podcasts from both sides that I'm, you know, and sometimes every once in a while I'll be listening to when I'm like, oh no, I can't stand in that. And it's like, Nope, don't turn it off. Listen to it.

Because if it bothers you, look in the mirror. And that is, you know, because when my, my principle of myself is that if I'm really bothered by what something, something that somebody says, I need to look in my mirror and mirror and understand what it is about me that's causing me to get p****d off at that person. Because it's usually something internally.

So lemme put on my legal, lemme put on my legal hat. Um, I got, I got the, I got the warm and fuzzies today, I guess is what I have. Good for you.

Ah, dude. No, but here, here's the deal. First of all, I think, Kimberly, you're right, you need to take Musk out of it.

Mm-Hmm. Because at this point, anything Musk says has to be looked at through a conflict of interest, uh, lens because of his involvement. Yes.

Right? So you gotta take him out of it. But, and, and let's be adults and take him out of it.

It's hard for me to be an adult, but let's be adults and take him out of it. Parity. Parity is a long held legal exception to, to, um, to, uh, uh, libel, slander.

Well, it's not a, a blanket exception. You can still libel and slander someone by, you know, using parody. But it, it's generally a long held carve out.

Right. That parody is absolutely part of our free speech heritage here in the United States of America. Well, Shakespeare come On.

Well, yeah, but, but in England, you had his comedy Plays were all parodies. Right? But, but in England, quite frankly, the king could have come in at any time and off with his head.

Mm-Hmm. Right? It wasn't protected in the common law.

It is protected in our constitution. Mm-Hmm. But here's what we're doing.

Here's what's going on here. These people are pulling an animal house Hoover thing. They're wrapped, you know, they're being brought up on double secret probation charges and they're wrapping themselves in the American flag of parody.

Let's be clear, this bill, or it's now a law, 'cause I guess it was signed. Well, it's gonna go on it, it's supposed to go into effect in January. Well, that means it's signed.

Yeah, it's signed by Newsom. He signed it a couple, a couple of weeks ago. Well, that, that's how it was in California.

Get passed. They go through the legislature. Yeah.

The governor signs them. They're now law signs off. Right.

This law is not aimed at cutting down parity. This law is aimed at politic, mainly political, but it could be other things besides political deep fakes where misinformation, deception, like they're doing stupid bad things they shouldn't do. The the problem runs into, and this is always the case when you talk, you know, legal kind of principles and balancing is how do you distinguish between parody versus Kimberly?

You get a phone call and it sounds like some older man saying, hello, I'm Joe Biden, and I think we should give Ukraine atomic bombs to blow Moscow out of the planet. And you say, oh my God, f**k it. Joe Biden is crazy.

I I'm making this up, obviously now. And, and by the way, maybe there's a, it's not even a a, a audio call. Maybe it's a video of Joe Biden saying that.

And then all of a sudden, you know, the whole world's saying, Joe Biden is calling for Ukraine of New Russia, and then it's a deep fake planted by some sub by Russia themselves or China or someone. And we're going to try to sue them or to stop that. Put a prohibition against this.

It's a deep fake, you know, misinformation propaganda. And Russia says, oh no, can't you, don't you have a sense of humor. It's just a parody.

That's the issue, right? Anytime you look at these laws, you gotta look at extreme examples and, and, and then you'll see whether they fly or not. How do you determine parody is the question that's always malice.

That Seems to me the sticking point is, is how do you define it? Well, that, it always comes down to that Sense of malice, right? You gotta look at that kind of thing.

And it's, it is, it is hard. It is hard because parody is absolutely allowed. Freedom of speech absolutely allowed.

But at what point do you have the right to take someone's likeness and spread propaganda misinformation shall fire in a crowded theater? Well, this is gonna be interesting because this was probably make it to The Supremes, and we'll go along the lines of when we talked about pornography and classic, you know, the, the classic quote is, I'll know it when I see it, um, from, And that, that might be the quote that winds up ruling the day here is I'll know it when we see it. I hate that though.

'cause that's too wishy-washy for me. So do I. But then the other flip side of this, I'm not sure if you saw what happened with Google.

Google has, it will no longer take any political ads in, in Europe. They have said no more because of the laws that they have passed. We can't abide.

We can't, it's, they're too fla flaky, or it's too mushy. You know, what does it mean? What is it?

So they've just completely pulled outta the political ad business. You know what, at some level, believe it or not, I'd like to see all the social media pull out of the political ad business. They are, they are starting to, I think, be better off.

They're starting to, I think we'd be better off as a society. There are days where I think social media is the worst thing that's happened to us in the last 25 years. Well, and it's not just the ads, it's because you have all the influencers are making their statements or whatever, and then the broadcasting of it.

So it's not, I can understand when, when you think about what has gotten pulled out, it's just the ads, not the commentary. Not the Well, no, I will tell you on Facebook, I mean, I, right before the election, if you put posts up about politics stuff, they, they were clamping it down regardless of whether it was red, blue, white, green, you know, still want politics. Facebook has made, Facebook has made a concentrated effort to do that, especially after what happened in 2016 and their implications, right?

So they have made an effort as Google has, as you said, Kimberly, in a sense that in a sense, gonna censor it. Not censoring themselves, but trying to show some sort of discretion. But, um, did you, I say we don't want politics on this, on this, uh, platform, right?

And is it, is that their right because it's a privately owned platform to do that? Or do they have an obligation to the public to give people freedom of speech? That's the nitty gritty of this.

Mm-Hmm. If it's a, if it's my, Hey, I don't go go ring someone else's doorbell on Sunday morning. Right?

I don't want you on my porch Sunday morning preaching and it's gonna be Interesting sign on your door. Like my husband did, he put a sign on the doors? I I have voted and submitted my vote, please For me, go away.

Go Away. But go play in front of your own house. But I mean, you know, but when you're private or private home, you could do that.

But what obligations does X or, or, or, or Facebook or Google or Apple or any of these folks have to, to just, 'cause the problem is, is once you open the door, a creek to the whole door goes flying open, you gotta let everything in. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. And wild card is just keep the door closed. The, you know what, the wild card in this though, too, is also what happens if the FC chair, Brendan Carr becomes the chair because he's making noises about lifting Section two 30, which protects social Platforms, third party liability.

So again, if I'm Mark Zuckerberg or any of these folks, and now all of a sudden I'm faced with liability over what someone else puts on my platform, screw that. I'm not letting anyone put anyone on my platform Exactly. Put anything on my platform, you'll Eradicate it Almost overnight.

And, and, and how can you, you can't at the same time hold my feet to the fire from a liability perspective and not give me the ability to just say, I don't want this on my house. I don't want this in front of my house. So I guess we won't have parodies on Techstrong.

We always have parodies on Techstrong. We're judgment proof. Oh no, maybe not with the fu I'm only kidding.

I'm only kidding. Let's not go down that road. com.

Our friend Rob, Bob, Bob Reman used to do cartoons two, three days a week. And we had some that were edgy, really edgy that like, I was, you know, I I, it was a little wr we had one, one time he put, it was a man and woman in bed and, and, and the, you know, just a cartoon drawing of it. And the man is saying, uh, you know, not tonight, I need a rest.

And the woman says, I thought you were Mr. Continuous delivery. And, and I, I laughed too when I first saw it.

Then I said, oh boy, I don't know. I don't know how this is gonna fly. Oh, that's great.

That's great. Yeah. So you gotta be, I mean, but that clearly parody take it from where it's at.

Yeah. Um, it's a, there's a thorny, thorny issue that has much bigger repercussions than I think just the deepfake stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. We're gonna break here at Text Drunk Gang.

Let's come back and talk about SC 24. We had Guy Coer give us a little report yesterday, but Kimberly, we want to hear what you saw, Right? You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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Hi guys. I, uh, got back last night or yesterday, um, from Supercomputing 24, which was in Atlanta. Um, SC SC 24, I think is, uh, how they branded themselves now.

Um, incredible show. 17,000 people was the number that they said were in attendance. Um, huge show floor.

And let me give you a perspective, because I've been going to the show for a long time, and my recollection of when I started going to it, it was about 5,000 people. It was the domain of all the research labs, including the labs that come out of your university. So all the, all the major universities that have research labs that have supercomputers that are coming from around the world, whether it's Zurich or Texas or Stanford or UCSD, et cetera, that would, was there, or Harvard even.

Um, they were there along with Orange, Livermore, JPL, those kind of folks who were there. And it was all PhDs. And I used to call them the propeller heads.

I'm sorry if I insult you. It was a lot of, lot of people, You know what? Those people were not insulted being propeller heads.

Kimberly, they, they wore that with pride. Absolutely. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. And then a lot of PhD, um, graduate students were there, um, what I would call as a slave people that the professors used in order to maintain their systems, eh, under super, super computers and why they would use open source so much for it. Anyway, that was, that's changed.

And that has changed because the world of gen AI has entered the enterprise space. It's not like HPC has been in enterprise oil and gas, pharma, you know, very specific areas where they're doing deep research, but now it's gen ai, which is different architecture than HBC. Um, and so it's a totally bigger show.

It's not 5,000 people now, it's 17,000 people, which was better, bigger than CubeCon, right? Twice the size almost. Yes.

Um, it is, it was, I think there were 45 rows of, of exhibitors. Um, I loved 7,007 miles a day walking back and forth to the show, talking to people. Incredible.

And I think that it wasn't just, you know, usually what we saw is a lot of booths with the major universities there, because what they were doing is farming this. They were doing business development, getting people to use their computers and their scientists and their, their PhDs to do research. What we saw this time is a huge amount of vendors and a couple big themes that were there.

Number one, liquid cooling is huge, huge amount of announcements on it. I just including, and we'll talk, we can talk about this later, Valvoline was there, the, the oil people. Okay.

Yes. You had to go. What are you doing there?

Okay. That was one. Um, number two, yes, we're all of a sudden seeing new data systems, new data infrastructure systems, which has always been the domain of the parallel file systems from IBM, Panasas, BGFS, et cetera.

We're now seeing new file systems coming in to address the needs, the unique needs of this market space. Uh, that's the second piece of it. And then of course, um, coming into this, we had a huge amount of announcements from Dell, Lenovo, I, BM, um, HPE, penguin, you name it, you know, the server business is on fire, uh, bringing out everything from the GPU to CPU, to all those different systems and where they're going with this.

So that's gives you a little flavor for what's been going, what was going on down there. Very, very lively. Very active floor, You know, interesting.

As you said, probably almost twice as many people than CubeCon yet CubeCon, I bet you had 90 rows of, of vendors because they have a lot of 10 by tens. They, I mean, they're one half of the cube con floor was, you know, the big 40 by 40, 20 by 40 kind of things. But then they had, it seemed like it went on as far as the, I can see rows and rows of 10 by tens, all of these little stands of companies, mostly startups, because CNCF, the people buying CubeCon, there's over 180 projects in CNCF right now.

So if just every project had a booth that was 180 booths, And what you're looking at here, I I, I called it the petting zoo for technologists, Uhhuh. I mean, there was more, I mean, hardware is a little bit harder to get out the door, right? Literally.

Mm-Hmm. And so you're, you're talk and, and there were quantum computers there. Um, were there, yeah, they, I mean, the first time I saw a quantum computer was IBM, and that had to be Me too, it looked like in a cappuccino machine to me.

But, Um, the first quantum computer was as big as a room. I mean, as HU was massive. The ones that we saw here were probably like, you know, I don't know, not quite as about about half the size of me, Uhhuh significantly smaller.

Um, and saw two of the, I saw two of 'em on the floor. There might have been more. One was IBM and the other one was in another company.

I can't remember who it is. But, um, the quantum computers were there, but that wasn't the story. I mean, there was a quantum section there, but quantum is a ways away from coming on board.

You know what, we're there, what's really talked about is the GPUs and all the stuff that's gonna drive the GPUs, the gen ai, the software behind it. Uh, well even not even the soft that too much of the software because there wasn't a lot of ML lops kind of pieces there, um, in, in those areas. But how do you build these systems and deploy them?

So call out also to HPE. Uh, they took the number one spot on the H-P-H-H-P-C compute, which was a system called L copy ton. Yes.

Um, that was done with, um, a MD, um, to great fan fare. So congratulations to them for their taking the top dog. So the last eight top supercomputers were HPE computers is, is what we had.

We had heard about that. Um, I, it looks like you wanted something. Well, yeah, I was, you know, it's interesting, Kimberly, a guy when we were talking to him yesterday, mentioned this huge amount of, of, of interest or, or the larger crowds.

He said basically three times what you remember a couple of years ago, more vendors for, for instance. Well, there are probably significantly more brand name vendors in a sense. Liberal Allen, we were talking about this earlier, this kind of analogy with black hats in a sense.

How, how it's blossomed in terms of attendance and in terms of people attending. And, and again, gen AI has just kind of spiked what was already an interest, but it's also made it much more visible. It was kind of interesting for you to mention all the vendors that were there.

Are they normally there every year? Or is this, were there new additions from last year? Well, Lenovo, HPE, all those guys are always there.

Mm-Hmm. But what, and, and you had all the parallel file system people there. You had used to have some of the tape vendors there, because tape was where we put all that old stretch.

But now it's having to be more live, you know, the live data. I think what was increased there is some new and different, um, data, data store, data infrastructure, technology that's there. Um, the infrastructure systems that are providing liquid.

Cool. Because that has exploded. I believe Lenovo mentioned on their latest earnings at 25% of the stuff they shipped was, uh, liquid cooling this last time around.

Huge uptick on that piece of it. So they were all over the place. Um, you know, what's not there?

You didn't see security there at all. None of the security data protection is there, which is, which is understandable because it's still not part of that, that community. It will be eventually, but not, I've seen what It is like eventually we'll be in a, a couple of years when, when, when their customers demand it, it will and not a day before.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, That's security.

Yeah. But I, I think there's a couple of mega trends at play here. First of all, I, I, I think as we mentioned, AI has made hardware cool again, right?

Certainly everyone now gives a hoo about, you know, how many tariff flops and, and, and MIPS and all of these things that these processors can do. Number two, well, Kimberly, when I first came out to Boulder in 2001, you know, there was that whole storage area up near Interlochen, right? Storage deck and then going into Interlochen, all the storage McData and all those folks.

And then by about 2005 or six, maybe seven at most, they all disappeared, right? Storage, storage became anonymous. It seemed like.

Well, storage isn't anonymous anymore. People, people are gla are happy and proud to stand up and say, I've got a hundred guy was talking about 120 terabyte SDD card. Right?

Which kind of boggles my mind. Um, so storage hardware is cool. Storage is back out from the shadows.

Um, and, and then we, we actually have some really big problems in this world that make for great use cases for high powered computing. Yeah. Right?

The, the other things that you saw, which were still development optics, um, being used for, you know, the, uh, some of the networking pieces of it were big. Um, the, all the networking piece of it. Um, and even like I, your labs was just talking about using the optical, um, transfer, you know, to transfer between a processor and the memory, um, and how that would work and what the design looks like and how, you know, that's a, that's in a year or, but there's multiple of those guys that are on there because just having to speed, you know, that little space right there, how much faster can we make that thing move?

Um, and of course we have all the network people there. Uh, that's, although I didn't spend any time with them, but we, you know, they were all over the place as Well. Well, 10 gigabit, a hundred gigabit are all becoming real.

I mean, it, it's funny because what you mentioned about the speed between memory to, to CPU mm-Hmm. You know, a lot of people try to, Intel tried to short circuit that. We've, they've all tried to short circuit it by putting memory on the chip, right?

And then the computer on the chip is the memory move to there, to to, to take away that millisecond latency that, that that can happen. But now we think we can widen that bus and we don't maybe have to put all the memory on. We can't put all the memory on the chip because today's uses have so much more memory, uh, consumption that, you know, how big can the chip be?

Um, let me ask you, was was let the Taiwan chip manufacturers and stuff there? I am sure they were. I don't recall because I wasn't looking for them.

Yeah. Only because, you know, they're, they're baking now. I'll take that.

There's a lot, there was a lot of China there, there's a lot of Asia there, there's a lot of Europe there. There's a lot of, um, emea, particularly from Israel, um mm-Hmm. That was present.

So yes, I'm, I'm sure that they were there, but I can't cite off the top of my head that what, since they were, I, I think the Taiwanese are, you know, especially with the new administration coming in here, are being very cautious about what they're gonna let out of Taiwan, because that kind of is their ace in the whole, right? That you can't let re you can't let China invade Taiwan because then you'll lose access to those Taiwanese, uh, manufacturers and and manufacturing. Anyway, it, it's great that, you know, guy mentioned yesterday, there is sort of a European version of SC 24.

It's not called sc, Right? It's called ISC and it's held in Germany in June. Excellent.

Excellent, excellent. All right guys. I think we're about outta time for today's, uh, text on gang.

Kimberly, thank you for coming on. I know you got just literally just got in from SC 24. So many, many thanks, John.

Always a pleasure. And congratulations on the book deal. Thank you.

Author. Author. And, um, we'll be back on Monday with a, another fresh text or gang episode with whatever, who knows what'll happen between now and then we could talk about, but we'll talk about it.

Maybe talk about go. Yeah, we might talk about Google some more. Yeah, well this Google thing.

Oh wow. Yes. We'll be talking about that.

That's gonna be fun. Um, until then though, this is Alan Shimmel for Textron Gang. Have a great day everyone.