In Focus: Microsoft's Majorana 2

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 16, 2026. On June 2, at the close of its Build 2026 conference, Microsoft held up a small gold-and-blue chip and made a claim that would be hard to overstate. Its quantum bits, the company said, had become 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. One Microsoft technical fellow put it plainly from the stage: "We're 1,000 times better." The room und… Read More

Architecture: Amazon Aurora

You have a production MySQL database on RDS. It works fine at low traffic. Then your load doubles, and you start running into the ceiling: replication lag, failover times measured in minutes, and the uncomfortable knowledge that your data lives on a single EBS volume. You can throw more compute at it, but the storage layer stays the same. The database is the bottleneck, and there is no obvious way out short of a full re-architecture. Amazon Auror… Read More

In Focus: Siri AI

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 10, 2026. For years, the running joke about Siri was that it could not reliably set a timer without mishearing you. While OpenAI shipped ChatGPT to 900 million weekly users and Google folded Gemini into every Android surface, Siri answered questions about the weather and occasionally called the wrong contact. The gap between what Apple's assistant could do and what the co… Read More

Explained: RAS on z/OS

A memory chip fails inside a running mainframe. In a typical server, this would be a crash: a blue screen, a kernel panic, an outage. On an IBM Z system, the error is detected, the affected memory is reconstructed from redundant data held elsewhere in the memory subsystem, and the repair is logged. The running workload continues without interruption. No operator is notified. No ticket is opened. The system fixed itself. This is not exceptional be… Read More