Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#441

Post by giantrobot » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

mandevil wrote: post #289

4636760295 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point, I have seen technology adopted in the EU in ways that the US has lagged far, far behind. Probably the best example of this is chip & PIN for credit cards. In the US we finally have chips, but still no PIN.

Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? I don't know the exact details on credit cards, but I know that's true for CDMA vs. GSM and NTSC vs PAL. In the US there were so many black and white TV's already out there that they couldn't abandon them, hence NTSC (which allowed the older blac…

Pedantic note on NTSC: the signal has a luma (brightness) and chroma (color) component. The NTSC standard had a place for chroma information from the get-go but it was unused for a long time. Color cameras were expensive, storage more complex, and the televisions themselves more complex and expensive. As technology improved it became more practical and broadcasters started doing color broadcasts. Old black and white televisions worked as before but then new color ones...had color. Huzzah for forward thinking specifications.

Black and white televisions just displayed the luma component of the signal. The luma component was not just the "red" signal but a measure of total brightness.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#442

Post by Pedrit0 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

Axsuul wrote: post #424

joelbluminator wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, not the last few years... there are things U.S did great. Building a sustainable, democratic society isn't one of them.

America's diversity is its biggest challenge.

And what about EU with its 27 nations and different languages. Not even talking about immigration. Diversity is a challenge for all of us.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#443

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #97

thamer wrote: post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

You know? When you hire someone to manage some VPS or dedicated server in some DC, why not have them manage your own rack(s) connected via your own fiber on premise instead?

That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.

It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.

And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.

Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.

How is that different?

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#444

Post by exolymph » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

deathcakes wrote: post #359

heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

"University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a Germ…

When Europe outproduces the US on this kind of thing, I'll be impressed with your "less obsessed with the quick buck" culture: https://rootsofprogress.org/things-that-happened-in-1973

Until then, feel free to keep that niche cornered.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#445

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

turbinerneiter wrote: post #82

icelancer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general i…

I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government…

> * Politicians who aren't clowns *

How did you get that impression? Hm K, maybe not horror clown grade, rather sad clowns.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#446

Post by Pedrit0 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

rswskg wrote: post #52

zoobab wrote: post #41

Usual suspects, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which shows the corruption of our elites.

As a brit it is especially hilarious, they rail at american monopolies only to want to replace them with their german ones. Yawn, laugh at the failures.

Well in the EU we still have opportunities to fight against other's monopolies and try to impose ours. Which a single small country can't and, at the end, is expected to become vassal of the US or China.

> laugh at the failures

Talking about failures, there are so many in the UK right now that the Brits, rather than laughing, should first focus on their own internal issues, which by the way, are seriously impacting the future of Europe.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#447

Post by sitkack » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #443

piokoch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

You know? When you hire someone to manage some VPS or dedicated server in some DC, why not have them manage your own rack(s) connected via your own fiber on premise instead? That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on. It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more p…

It really is about the affordances of getting access to space, power and the network. Nothing is hard individually, but not knowing how to navigate the landscape is much more daunting than typing some numbers into a web page.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#448

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #399

barrenko wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a self-taught junior, my move from Croatia to Germany in attempt to get a "better IT job" at the end of last year was something between amusingly comical to amazingly absurd. Even before the Corona wave hit.

I wish Croatia became a go to place for remote work. Beautiful place and climate, sit at a cafe with a laptop sipping Radlers all day long. I'm guessing there are corruption/inefficiency problems opening remote offices or office parks.

As an EU expat you can easily move to Croatia thanks to EU freedom of movement, most people in the tourist areas speak decent English. I don't know anything about bureaucratic issues for non-EU expats though.

Foreign companies however aren't really willing to open remote offices/parks there because most of the talent pool (not just in IT but across all industries!) heads off to Germany or other countries where there is real earning potential. The "brain drain" across the whole Balkan is immense.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#449

Post by joelbluminator » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #423

joelbluminator wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without. Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.

And ASML has competition as well in Canon and Nikon, although they’re ahead of them in EUV. Are you an EE? Or a Physicist? I’m wondering why you’ve shrouded ASML in such a golden halo? They’re a company doing basic research in solid state physics, but there are a lot of companies like that. And the issue here isn’t EU vs US - it’s private vs public industry. ASML is a private company that was spun off of Siemens. Bui…

ASML is just an example of a complicated, competitive, hi-tech leading company coming from Europe. None of the competitors you listed are on par with ASML at the moment as you said. So we've established Europe can actually make tech critical competitive products (sorry for being hung up on ASML, I live in the Netherlands so that example comes to mind)

As for the government vs private venture, I cannot say it's set in stone. China is developing crazy ass infrastructure and companies, all very techy, and none of it is free market. So we've had bad precedents like USSR but also contradicting successful examples like China.

Also - Europe doesn't have to make Gaia-X BETTER than AWS. It doesn't have to become a 1T dollar market cap company. It just needs to do it's job and reduce reliance on China and U.S , that is the whole goal.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#450

Post by jandrewrogers » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

iagovar wrote: post #107

turbinerneiter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government…

Yes, the DoD is behind a lot of stuff but they seem to get it right, unlike most EU countries with gov funded programs that are an absolute disaster. EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US. So we waster money and we basically burn it witho…

The US DoD has a unique advantage relative to their counterparts -- I've worked with a number -- in that they culturally have a very high risk-tolerance for a government org. They will readily spend vast quantities of money on a high-risk/high-reward project knowing that it will likely fail, and they are okay with that. They've internalized the idea that maintaining an absolute tech advantage, which is an explicit objective, requires being willing to fail spectacularly. We talk a lot about those failures in the US but they also have many brilliant successes.

In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.