111–120 of 383 posts
at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use Fedora or Ubuntu.
IT has to cover much less technical users than someone who would prefer to use Linux
As long as they have an obvious way of opening a web browser, an office suite, and maybe an email and calendering client, the average office worker will barely notice the OS.
Depends. Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials? If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely. People usually never look beyond getting rid of O…
If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
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Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection. Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products, one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural selection (sort of) and there still were shortages. Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to put resources into it. European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
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A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded that while “some regions and industries could suffer”, for Europe overall the hit may be “limited but not negligible. The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Mi…
If that was so easy to do then they would have done it already years ago
It's a priority for economic and political reasons. The Trump Tariffs and the US's policies towards Ukraine, and questionable commitment to NATO highlighted the dependencies and exposed the EU is to Trumps corrosive tactics.
I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought. More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, d…
Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?
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I would argue that the root issue in America right now is that you have one guy that can pass 200+ executive orders in less than a year completely bypassing the other two supposed branches of government. There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of the three can make any sort of change of their own.
> There's no such position or a branch in the EU. cough vdL cough
Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?
Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard. Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite. LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something li…
What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them free. It is really hard to compete with free. They get windows for free, they get gmail for free at some point even unlimited google drive for free.
Now the situation is changing as the corps are tightening. I've seen 40k student university switch from gmail to office360 in two months because google suddenly wanted money and microsoft didn't. Now Microsoft also wants money. And it's not small money. So the school is doing cost assesment - you can give it to european third party provider that will be way cheaper tham microsoft. Or you go back to your own infra.
Turns out that what to be really expensive when google was giving people 30gb of free space to everyone in 2012 now is actually not that bad and you own your future. My guess is they will pay Microsoft for a year while they transition their email to their infra. The other parts gonna come later. But the students are required to use libre office (or latex) for writing their thesis so i don't think they see google docs as big blocker.