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Comment by harha | Hacker News Reader

This would be incredibly funny to follow. Fax machines and mainframes would make an impressive return, as Europe moves even more towards a more relaxed pace.

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Mainframes wouldn't be that bad; give me a mainframe client (we have a few) any day over a 'move fast break things we now use the latest wasm kubernetes micro nano services backplane react liveview fiber cloud' crap that somehow breaks literally every day, even without deploying.

The EU economies were better in the early 1990s, before all this unnecessary Windows, cloud nonsense, social networks etc. invaded.

The US exports hot air and gets real goods in return.

Yeah, I too had better personal life back in the day when MS-DOS was the main operating system for the common people and offices.

There was at least a lot more sex with ms-dos as your partner wouldn't be very importantly commenting 5 depressed bananas to some shite post about nothing while you try to get them all fired up.

Jokes aside, I would rather have mainframes than Windows and cloud services everywhere in public administrations.

Fully with you on dropping Windows, and I don’t think cloud really has positive ROI vs building or hosting in a lot of cases. There are a lot of good cases though, scaling, access etc.

Thanks for making me chuckle. You call it a return of fax machines. You would have some fun looking into German government offices.

No, Europe will not go back to the Stone Age. US services will be substituted for somewhat shittier European services. That’s how it goes. On average, everyone will be worse of. The European customer loses, US tech loses, European tech wins.

I’m somewhat surprised about this kind of gleeful condescension in this particular forum, of all places.

I'll take a hezner and ovh cloud.

But you are right, we might have to use SAP instead of siebel and peoplesoft

I think this is essentially the exact same approach as the "bring back US electronics/heavy industry"-- you subsidise a sector (either directly, via regulation or tariffs). This can have positive outcomes (crisis tolerance, less reliance on international trade), but all those jobs that it brings, are basically paid for fully by additional costs for taxpayers/consumers (and there are also negative side effects on other sectors).

I think this is currently in vogue globally (both sides of the political spectrum), but its important to remember that we had good reaons to stop doing this in the past (or at least scale it down to absolutely vital sectors like agriculture).

I would be pretty happy if the EU ploughed a load of money into a FOSS office suite on an ongoing basis.

Import substitution is one of these ideas that sounds great but seldom works out as intended. Bureaucracies instead of markets now pick winners, and their picks tend to be significantly worse. I really hope they are smart about it and treat this as a measured retaliation against easily substitutable products like twitter, Facebook and gmail, maybe cloud hosting and Amazon marketplace. There is zero chance of any initiative to produce a competitive office suite or operating system, but there will be undoubtedly real pressure to burn billions of taxpayer euros to try exactly that.

I sort of agree, except they are already picking by making Office their IT procurement choice. Choosing to only use documents in .odf format would definitely do something, and they could start funding bugs etc in whatever libraries/office software would bring value to their org.

Tbh some alternatives are popping up, such as lidl having a cloud division that offers services similar to aws

I just hope that if it happens, it's a very gradual rollout and not a hard one

Nah, we would get fine with SuSE Linux and Jolla.

That makes me think, would Linux, having been made in Finland originally, fall under an export restriction if it came to that? I mean it's open source and thus can no longer be contained but still, interesting thought experiment in what would happen if linux was no longer allowed to be used from one day to the next.

One can already access AI with fax. What else would one need?

https://simple-fax.de/fax-ki

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