Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

dub.uu.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 383 posts

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#151

Post by canyp »

freehorse wrote: post #67
saubeidl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not what others may see as europe.

It always struck me funny how Americans refer to it as "Europe". Like, "I traveled to Europe this summer"; what does that even mean, lol. It's like their country's land mass is so large that they intuitively assume that other entities must have a large mass too, and see homogeneity where there is none.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#152

Post by anonzzzies »

canyp wrote: post #148
trinix912 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things…

Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government.

When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I guess that is the point; I was working in China when one year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only. Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that was that. Try doing that over here...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#153

Post by code123456789 »

canyp wrote: post #148
trinix912 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things…

Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government.

Yes, see Great Chinese Firewall. Providing a VPN access to civilians is a criminal offense in PRC. This is not the same as forcing companies to use domestic software, but to illustrate the ability of Chinese government to implement draconian limitations in general.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#154

Post by vanschelven »

vid wrote: post #150

I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...…

It's not strictly true, but the distinction between the truth and the assertion is small enough that the ICC itself draws the conclusion that Microsoft didn't yet:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#155

Post by anonzzzies »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #91
ta20240528 wrote: post #81

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.

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#156

Post by bojan »

ramon156 wrote: post #29

I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years. Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.

We switched completely to Microsoft/Azure a couple of years ago. My previous employer as well.

There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.

At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#157

Post by downrightmike »

LPisGood wrote: post #88
seanieb wrote: post #21

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…

What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?

Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#158

Post by anonzzzies »

saubeidl wrote: post #9
bojan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

I agree with you but until we speak the same language, this is going to take a while. I am Dutch, speak Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese (and Mandarin) rather well, but I speak mostly English to prove a point as I believe we should pick a language (does not have to be English but seems the most obvious). I won't see this in my lifetime, nor my childrens or grandchildren.

With easily accessible and massive funding by the EU for issues like this would get a lot of uniting done without more federating. I easily can point out 1000s of people who would spend their time working on EU sovereign/open source office 365, ai, aws etc etc the rest of their working lives and beyond, but it needs to make money and there is no money. Both investor money and EU money are incredibly hard to secure here for these type of efforts. Not impossible but very hard.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#159

Post by YC9834689 »

ta20240528 wrote: post #126
YC398739847 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge o…

The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe? As I said, still licking the car battery.

Most European countries barely have a standing military to defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let America do what they need to and try to return back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're not the types to think beyond the status quo.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#160

Post by mr_mitm »

project2501a wrote: post #89
seanieb wrote: post #21

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?

Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos' issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.
Post reply on HN