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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#211

Post by mcv »

wiseowise wrote: post #144
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…

Only invasion, or a real threat of invasion, from Russia, US or China can shook Europe into real change.

Threat of invasion from Russia doesn't seem to be doing it. China is too far away. The US? Half of Europe might actually side with them.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#212

Post by edolstra »

arianvanp wrote: post #194

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to be…

It wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX and a bit of HP-UX.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#213

Post by crazygringo »

omnimus wrote: post #120
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At 4 european universities i studied/taught this has never been the case. Most universities are used to run their infra, they ran their email servers way before google existed and they run big fleets of servers for thin clients. Afaik they still kept their own internal messaging as backup but it was still email servers hidden behind web gui. What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them fre…

There's a huge difference between running an email server and some additional servers for thin clients -- all traditional stuff -- versus running an entire private cloud that redundantly stores the many many petabytes for your 40,000-person university, and all the web servers for the office software. Keeping it secure, keeping it updated, and having a live failover site if there's a fire or flood in your main data center that takes it out for weeks or months.

If it were that easy and cost-effective to do, large corporations would be doing it too. But there's a reason they're not.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#214

Post by machomaster »

econ wrote: post #182
systemtest wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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???

Often the rule is that one gets the vote in local elections after living for some time, but only citizens can vote in national elections (Parlament, President). This makes sense. If you want to fully participate in a society, you should integrate and become a citizen.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#215

Post by machomaster »

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…

Why should countries allow foreign influence - the voting in the most important elections in the country, by foreign citizens who didn't integrate enough to even get their citizenship?

Participating in local elections is often allowed.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#216

Post by isk517 »

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'm always amazed at how needlessly complicated and useless administration of Microsoft products and services are. So much of 365 feels like it is 75-90% completed then abandoned. Every time I find something that sounds like it should be really useful, it turns out to lack at least one function or feature needed to do what I would need it to.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#218

Post by nebula8804 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #167
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.

In fairness, the US has a pretty good record when it comes to invading continental Europe. They already have troops and nukes on the ground in the Netherlands... And they didn't exactly struggle with the invasion parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor in the getting of high status targets in those theaters. Arguably, the ICJ in the Hague is actually a result of one of those successful deployments of US forces on the cont…

>And they didn't exactly struggle with the invasion parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor in the getting of high status targets in those theaters.

That was post 9/11. The mentality and motivation was different back then. Im not saying the US Military is anything less than a top tier orderly organization, its just that morale is generally low now among not only ranks but the entire country that supports them. You can't just throw out events occurring 23 years ago under a completely different context and assume things are the same.

I'd argue an initial moves against Europe, Canada, etc. would be a bigger mess initially than Afghanistan/Iraq were.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#219

Post by machomaster »

canyp wrote: post #151
freehorse wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be like Russians traveling to America, but making no distinction between Canada and Mexico. Except that Russians don't do that. This is an entirely and purely American problem.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#220

Post by solid_fuel »

nightfly wrote: post #175
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?

What issues on Linux would this actually solve?

I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other day and it was like pulling teeth. You need Kerberos if you want to map user names instead of user ids and still have some security.

Ultimately I gave up and used samba instead, but it does seem like there's a big gap in linux offerings for "home/small business network file sharing" with shared auth

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