Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.
They're working on it, they've recently stopped allowing the Australian government to be treated a single customer. [1]
While each agency still gets the same whole of government pricing for the next five years, I worry the next step is to make each agency negotiate their own individual licences, which squeezes the smaller ones with no bargaining power.
Microsoft's key customers aren't consumers, its business and government: specifically enterprise licensing agreements. If Microsoft seriously upset business and governments, they wouldn't be profitable, if in business at all, not long after that.
Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.
It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.
Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.
The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.
I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).
> Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft
You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.
In this context 'enforcing the law' means letting them get away with (via token inconsequential fines or the like) and then giving them even more money.
Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them anything. And even if it did, it wouldn't really matter. It's a relationship of convenience. A country can figure out an alternative if it really mattered, MS is not integral in any way, using it is just the path of least resistance. Something like ASML embargoing a country would actually be a threat, but Microsoft is very replaceable.
> Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers.
People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.
Maybe in the US, but not globally, which is the subject here. MS has been fined billions and made adjustments to its software due to the court cases in the EU, and it did not, in fact, decide to block the entire EU out of spite but simply adhered to the judgments.
Microsoft themselves won’t do that. They are already under severe scrutiny internationally for fear of the US using Microsoft as leverage. They don’t want to stoke those fears. Once they do something like this, everyone who has been saying “stick with Microsoft services, they are the cheapest option compared to doing it ourselves, and have the lowest business continuity risk” will lose that argument at the same time. That creates a massive and clear opportunity for credible competitors to rise up.
This type of action would be like Trump in Iran “I am do much more powerful than you, so submit or suffer the consequences” can trivially backfire, and really reduces the effectiveness of your power.
Microsoft wouldn't do that, because it would drive away other customers too. Maybe Australia would fold or maybe they would tough it out, but most other nations (and companies!) would start thinking about how quickly they could transition away from Microsoft.
Interesting how this has generated such negative response.
I wonder why Microsoft has so many defenders here.
Also, the change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen as well. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
The problem with "criticism" from the perspective of the average person is that "Is this film worth my time and money" isn't really a question criticism answers. The linked article touches on this when it bemoans "the consumer guide approach" but until we firmly separate criticism from reviewing we're bound to keep going around and around on this.
I think that's not true for me and a lot of other people. If I read a specific criticism/review of a movie or book I often make a decision not based on good/bad but based on what the criticism is about. If a movie has slow pacing for example, I might be ok with that depending on the mood I'm in.
I'm not sure what you mean by separating review from criticism. Can you expand on that?
> I'm not sure what you mean by separating review from criticism. Can you expand on that?
Let's start with applying both to "Eraserhead":
A critical approach might have a thesis on how it links with Lynch's interest in Buddhism and how those concepts surface in the film, how different events and characters in the film can be read through that lens and how the resolution of the film makes sense in a Buddhist context. Absolutely none of this tells you whether the person who watched the film was enraptured by it from the first scene or whether they got through it out of academic obligation and immediately bitched about it on social media afterwards. Criticism has a thesis about a work and defends it, which doesn't usually involve how enjoyable the work is.
A review of "Eraserhead" would tell you about the experience of watching it, whether the person writing the review thought it was a well-constructed and engaging film, and maybe some thoughts on how much sense they made of it, but the analysis wouldn't be the focus. Thumbs up, thumbs down, that's the meat.
It's entirely possible to mix the two realms, but there's a difference in focus and intent. The better YouTube channels (Folding Ideas) mix the two quite deftly, in fact, but I'd put Folding Ideas in the realm of criticism more than reviewing because he does tend to have a thesis and defends it in addition to saying how much he enjoyed (or, more often, didn't) the films he talks about.
For example, in his video about The Nostalgia Critic's review of Pink Floyd's movie The Wall (that is, his video about another person's review of a band's movie made from their rock opera album) his thesis is that the person behind The Nostalgia Critic character is creatively stalled and fundamentally lazy. He defends this thesis while lambasting the video he's talking about, but the thesis is centered. That's criticism.
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?
Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them.
Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.
Nobody “needed” the web to do these things. We decided that the effort and cost of making native applications was too great. I’d argue we went the wrong way given that even the same browser will exhibit slightly different behavior depending upon the underlying platform upon which it runs.
If we outlaw plagiarism, we've just killed culture.
Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.
OK, is there a horrible speed penalty for writing your SIMD in pure assembly functions and then calling those functions? If you're writing assembly anyway, just drop the "inline" part.
Sure, if you're willing to write a large enough chunk that you can eat the cost of not inlining it. If you just write a small leaf function or two, it will probably be a wash or perform worse.
It's a fact that Germany turned off nuclear and subsequently extended the lifetime of brown coal power plants (they still run). Germany has plenty of renewable energy, but that is not a replacement for a steady base supply of power yet.
And perhaps meaningfully contributed to a reduction in the quantity of radioactive waste products requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
I always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons:
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
I don't trust the coal industry to manage forever chemicals over the long term, and I don't trust the nuclear industry to manage spent nuclear fuel over the long term.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
It's not just coal and nuclear. We have intentionally set up our society so that the people that own and run corporations are not responsible for the long term damage they cause. They extract the profits, and when the bill comes due for what they have done to the rest of us, limited liability and bankruptcy protects them from what they have done.
We did this so that people can buy stock on the market without having to take any responsibility for what they are doing. It's certainly a great funding mechanism, though.
Coal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
You argue it is safe. When it is not (Chernobyl, Fukushima) then you argue it kills less people. That is before considering the possibility of these sites being attacked during war (see Zaporizhia in Ukraine) and how centralized they are vs solar.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
Meanwhile, deaths in the fossil fuel industry total hundreds to thousands every year.
Now before you say "but wait, I've seen estimates of thousands of deaths linked to Chernobyl" - then we must also include all the deaths caused from fossil fuel carbon emissions and radiation emissions, which total in the hundreds of thousands every year.
> You argue it is safe
I do! The fact that a nuclear plant was struck by a tsunami and yet just 1 person died from the radiation fallout is pretty damn amazing. That's about as bad as it gets and yet the result was the same as an oil well accident.
Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
Those numbers are still in the single digit thousands. Meanwhile how many deaths have been caused by fossil fuel emissions (both carbon, and local, and radiation). Very very hard to predict, but you see estimates going up to the many millions.
Would you argue that Bhopal was a nothingburger because it is dwarfed by residual emissions worldwide over decades?
These are consequences from single incident, for a power source that has minuscule share of generation worldwide. The second similar event had also led to exclusion of substantial territory and only avoided massive health effects due to wind pattern towards the ocean.
And if nuclear proliferated more to geography prone to low safety culture and warfare the toll could up considerably.
Either way nobody argues for replacement of nuclear with coal in this day of age. Renewables are the fastest growing energy sector.
Bhopal helps my argument. The consequences of that were far worse than Chernobyl and yet I’d bet for every 1,000 people who have heard of Chernobyl only one or two would know about Bhopal.
> If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
Events like Fukushima would be worthwhile tradeoffs. Events like Chernobyl would not, but that would require nigh non-existent safety regulations.
To put it in layman's terms - I'd much much much rather live right next to a US operated nuclear power plant than a US operated coal plant. In fact I do live rather close to several nuclear power plants.
Im also not against solar or wind, but energy diversity is important for national and energy security purposes
Because of anti-nuclear sentiments we are right now currently storing used nuclear waste in its most dangerous form in the most open and uncontained and open storage lots. Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me. If humans blast themselves back to the neolithic era and 5,000 years from now some dudes die from walking into some old facility die, who cares? There are masses of people dieing right now because we are still relying on fossil fuels, many of them from cancer from breathing the radioactive fallout that is downstream of every coal plant.
Seems to me that pro-nuclear sentiments have at least as much to do with ongoing accumulation of nuclear waste as anti-nuclear sentiments.
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
> by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
Onkalo is the best approximation so far of of a memory hole for nuclear waste — but Finland has not agreed to accept all the world’s nuclear waste, similar sites are not available for all countries, and in practice storage remains a major point of contention as a wander through this discussion will show.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
Brazil nuts and bananas are radioactive too, compared to other foods — but do not pose risks compared to coal ash.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
It's close to true about personal computers. The poorest can't afford Apple computers, but you don't need to be that rich to buy Apple hardware and what's up from that in terms of mainstream status? Nothing, as far as I can see. Specific groups might want a Framework laptop or System76, but those brands are invisible to most people, including, it seems, most rich people.
(And for servers and other business machines, well, other criteria apply, but owning something in the Top500 has to count for something in terms of prestige.)
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