Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#181

Post by lossolo » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

jack_tripper wrote: post #169

ta20240528 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan Reddit level argument ignoring the fact that the US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there, it was to funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex for 15 years. Pretty sure the US could have glassed Afghanistan off the map if they really wanted but probably wouldn't have been very popular decision.

> US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there

War is only a tool, dominating a country or region militarily is not the same as winning a war if you have not achieved its political goals. In Afghanistan, those goals were not achieved, which means the war was lost.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#182

Post by econ » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

systemtest wrote: post #179

lpcvoid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well written. I hope one day the united states of europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.

As a EU citizen that moved to a different EU country: Yes please! I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't u…

Having people vote who don't live in the country has always struck me as weird. If you are some place else for say a year or even 10 years it seems a reasonable topic for debate but longer?? Never pay taxes either???

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#183

Post by mcv » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

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…

I work for a company that now uses everything from Microsoft. They used to have Jira, AWS and tons of other different products, but now everything is Microsoft, and it's terrible. Azure DevOps is particularly horrific. It's like Jira+Jenkins except you can never find anything. Nothing about it makes sense to me.

As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.

And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#184

Post by canyp » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

anonzzzies wrote: post #152

canyp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Hilarious. Such efficiency, not even the free markets can catch up!

Also, curious: did you not like it there and left, or was that a fixed-duration contract or something?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#185

Post by fuzzfactor » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #84

arethuza wrote: post #23

When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!

When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.

My first experience with an original IBM PC, I wondered what this thing called Microsoft was.

It just didn't seem right. Why would you need that?

What if you just wanted a plain IBM computer? Why isn't that the mainstream without need for any third party software? Or is it software? How do people do without it? What if you just want to compute? Not use the PC as an office machine or do any gaming?

Is this Microsoft content really essential?

Isn't the hardware any good without a Microsoft?

How would you go about doing that?

I guess Linus eventually asked himself the same kind of things and drove it home :)

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#186

Post by BenFranklin100 » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

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…

This is blatant nonsense. The best security choice for any small business that doesn’t have a dedicated full time security staff is Microsoft 365.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#187

Post by edwinjm » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #54

dietr1ch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want. Until you have companies trying to intervene. If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies? I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from servic…

Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways. For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus of the decisions to purchase though. It’s likely you value open source much higher than they do based on your own principles.

What’s the alternative?

WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing

https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#188

Post by project2501a » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #121

project2501a wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D"). Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.

sssd is a dogpile of dogcrap. I have 15 tickets on github about fixing their manpages.

and you really need to read the kerberos book before picking up sssd.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#189

Post by project2501a » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

lokar wrote: post #172

project2501a wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Kerberos solves the problem that doing public key authentication is slow on a i386

kerberos solves the problem that you can have short one time tokens using your password.

Add public key infrastructure support, make ldap the default store and you got AD. Even better, you can throw all the OAuth crap down the drain.

now, starting services with a password becomes an issue of booting the machine.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#190

Post by Loughla » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #181

jack_tripper wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan Reddit level argument ignoring the fact that the US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there, it was to funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex for 15 years. Pretty sure the US could have glassed Afghanistan off the map if they really wanted but probably wouldn't have been very popular decision.

> US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there War is only a tool, dominating a country or region militarily is not the same as winning a war if you have not achieved its political goals. In Afghanistan, those goals were not achieved, which means the war was lost.

What were the goals for Afghanistan?