Earlier quoted context omitted.
The European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.
Is “Asia” a well-defined market? Honestly curious.
Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
371–380 of 420 posts
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#372Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful. In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like. It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might o…
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly skilled engineers leave to places where they get their money's worth (i.e. not germany/eu).
Lots of people in this thread talking about low salaries in tech in the EU, but maybe it’s the case the US is the outlier? And not even the US as a whole, more like SV? Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like builder or maker, then farmer.
I have never heard any native German say "Bauer" for builder. "Bauer" is definitively Farmer unless it is used as a suffix.
But the relevant point here is, that Youtuber has a channel about building and testing Hardware. I don't know whether he has any relation to farming, but considering the content I would think his intention was a wordplay on building, not farming.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s one plausible escalation scenario: Trump wins and America becomes authoritarian state the same way as Russia did, gradually destroying democratic institutions and opposition. In such scenario EU will be forced to reconsider the relationship with America and pursue strategic autonomy. It is still not a matter of days, months or years.
Oh it's much simpler and immediate than that: Trump wins and stops funding Ukraine, like he has already promised to dozens of times. That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending, which would certainly mean increased unrest within the EU and a whole lot of grudges towards the US. And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certa…
Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb. In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.
Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique so…
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh it's much simpler and immediate than that: Trump wins and stops funding Ukraine, like he has already promised to dozens of times. That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending, which would certainly mean increased unrest within the EU and a whole lot of grudges towards the US. And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certa…
>That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.
It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed to succeed.
Except for certain segments of the populist right and far left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very…
> it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally. > The fact that people treat it as a national gov…
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is cheap, good it is not. You can complain about AWS and GCP support as much as you want, but given their sheer volume it is an accomplishment how rarely you actually need it. The situation when you need it is of course a different thing and I understand that satisfaction there greatly varies. Their support might be hit or miss, but at least their processes are streamlined and tried and tested enough to have you r…
Do you have some examples?
Hetzner did nothing to help rectify the situation. Thanks for nothing Hetzner.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've joined some large EU efforts in the past, and it's always like this. Lots of different parties involved focused on producing tons of absurd documents, and nothing else. Some have good intentions, but it doesn't matter. There's a great thread on X now discussing the same topic: "25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is…
In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities. As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify t…
well, newer hardware is more efficient than older hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is also non-zero.
desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc. On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are highly power-constrained etc.
it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't something you can make a blanket regulation on when is the Right Time to upgrade.
MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the power issues ("they just can't get power into the datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and he balances this concern against the massive price factor confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=588
This engineer is a good reality check on a number of sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock. They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the market unless the provenance is known, and even then it destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't even bother parting them out and basically the channel for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too much of a secondhand market left, largely because of AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=5667
He also is not mincing any words about the Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a huge, huge issue for datacenter operators and it's bullshit that AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major issues and need to be patched ASAP.
I remember the "root password lets you do root things, where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media. Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD simply left unpatched and insecure, and (very) quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared. "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhkvGBljWI&t=3053s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HxkLlmh4EY
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/849paz/assassinat...
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