The issue is, if the request is too vague or obviously infeasible, it will simply get rejected.

I’m all for telling our politicians we need to move away from walled gardens and US based big tech. But I think recent events have already made that clear to them.

A strongly worded feeling might feel good to get supported. But if we want actual change, we need to request something that can be acted upon. Of course the time line would be long and it’s up to the EU to implement it. But if we want the time line to be shorter, we need to provide something they can use.

If we can identify some low hanging fruit without a lot of strings attached, I’m sure we can put a proposal together. Then we would need to drum up support, which can be hard but is probably at least partially doable.

Philips is known for selling their brand to Chinese companies, where except for the name the product has nothing to do with Philips. The best known example is probably the TVs made by TP Vision, which are sold under the Philips brand.

However it seems like the Sonicare toothbrushes are still made by Philips themselves. Or at least still made by Sonicare which Philips acquired in 2000. They were traditionally made in Indonesia, but have been made in China for the most part these days.

Oral-B would be a better option for European toothbrushes, they are made in both China and Germany. Although the ones made in Germany still use pre-production parts from China. But that’s just par for the course these days, almost everything is made in China.

I definitely like the sentiment, but how would this work exactly? Like what exactly are we trying to accomplish? I’m having trouble to see what it would mean in reality.

Let’s say for example a small local government want to do a thing with software. Normally they put out a tender for local suppliers to get the thing done. These suppliers use a whole scale of software solutions. For some things they all use the same big brand solution because that’s just what everyone uses, for other things everyone does their own thing. Some may include open source solutions, some may not. Some may even have created their own solutions. Especially with government this is very common. Governments usually have to do very specific things in a very specific way. Some provider comes along with their own custom made to do that exact thing. And once a couple of local governments use it and work out the issues, a lot of them will use it. Especially if specific certifications apply.

So how would this work if this becomes a law?

If the government puts out a tender, would they be required to use a supplier that uses open source software in their stack? Or does it only given them “bonus points” (not sure how that would work?). And does the provider need to use open source in all of their stack? Or how much is allowed? Say they provide a service that’s fully open source, but the people in the office use Windows on their machines, would that disqualify them?

And one of the nightmares of the previous decade was GDPR. Specifically I mention it because one of the requirements is for any provider to have a personal data processing statement. But not just between the customer and the supplier, but also any suppliers the supplier uses and every supplier they use etc. etc. This is why you get those crazy “Do you want to share with our 3924 partners?” prompts. So if we circle back to our open source proposal, does the provider need to use open source or do all of their suppliers also need to use open source.

This is not even mentioning different open source licenses, like what is open “enough”? And how does this work when a commercial company gets a government grant to create something? I’ve seen governments that require the end-product to be open sourced at some point, but not in all cases.

And do we also care about how it’s open sourced? Like does the EU need to setup their own Github alternative and require everything to be on there? Because releasing the sources on something controlled by Microsoft feels wrong.

I’m all in for this and if anyone want to put some serious time into this, I would definitely be available to help out. I have some practical experience in this space and I can warn you it gets complicated real fast.

Use your pointy nipple antennae to transmit data back to Earth!

And as an even worse cherry on top, they did this just 2 weeks after they announced they would not honor requests by the Trump administration if they thought those requests weren’t legal. They vowed to sue whenever such a thing happened.

Literally weeks later such a situation presents itself and they don’t even give anyone a heads up or try to fight it. They just roll over like the traitors we always knew them to be.

Europe needs it’s own cloud fast. Unfortunately we are lagging behind around 10 years in my opinion. But are working hard to make up ground in record time.

We might not be there today, but we will get there. And when we do, the US will never see any of our money ever again. Fuck the US and fuck Microsoft

This not news, this is an idiot saying stupid shit. Please fuck off with this nonsense.

The EU can do a lot more than fine them. With the whole USB-C port issue the EU threatened to straight up ban all Apple products from being sold in the EU. That’s a hit Apple won’t be willing to pay.

I used to have a cat with a very long tail. He would be laying around and his tail would wrap around and hit him in the face. He would get pissed off about it, so he starts waving his tail like cats do when they get annoyed. But that would just make it worse because he would hit himself in the face with his tail even more. So he would get really pissed off, grab his tail and bite into it. Only then he would realize it was his own tail and start cleaning it, pretending he was cleaning it the whole time and didn’t just bite into his own tail like an idiot.

My brother used Google Home/Nest speakers with Google Assistant to automate his entire home. Everything from turning on lights, setting the heat/ac, turning on the TV, listening to music, controlling curtains and blinds etc. It was all based on voice commands. He also used it to make simple shopping lists.

Since it got turned into the LLM based one he’s been complaining non stop. It’s super slow and doesn’t understand what to do half of the time. Very simple voice commands will not be understood. Or it would understand perfectly, but instead of executing the command it would search on Google or something dumb like that.

The latest update has made it much much worse it seems, with the thing becoming even slower and basically unusable. The dream of a Star Trek like setup where you can talk to the computer is dead at the moment.

I’ve looked into Revolt and it isn’t there quite yet. But the road map is extremely promising. I’ll keep my eye on it and as soon as they finish up a couple more features I’m going to use it.

What are you trying to say? Those are all shit hole countries so it doesn’t matter what they do?

I live in Germany, no fluoride is added to our water and it isn’t there naturally. There is salt with added fluoride available and almost all toothpastes have it. There’s also fluoride tablets people can take. And the dentist will apply fluoride treatments where needed or prescribe high fluoride toothpaste.

Dental care and hygiene is excellent here.

The same thing applies for many countries in Europe.

Other countries don’t have fluoride in the water, it isn’t the end of the world. And don’t people usually drink bottled water in Florida anyways?

HOWEVER other places that don’t have flouride in the water do normally have affordable and accessible dental heathcare. And most people brush their teeth with toothpaste with flouride in it. You don’t really need all that much of it, as long as you get some.

With the anti-fluoride mindset, people are not going to get it through other means most likely. And this especially hurts poor people and the homeless, since they are going to have the hardest time getting enough fluoride and won’t have access to dental healthcare. So small issues that would normally be prevented, are going to cause huge issues.

It’s just another way the Republicans can punish the poor.

Can’t wait for this update, those audio indicators being bugged annoys me every day.

I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.

And then the troubleshooting steps are like reset the app, reset your account and if that doesn’t fix it reinstall Windows. If it still won’t work, buy a new computer.

It’s terrible, just give me the info I need to figure out the root cause. It’s probably very easy to fix. Instead of the ol’ nuke it from orbit approach.

And it’s not just on the side of consumers either. More and more people are using docker to run shit and just reset or reinstall whenever an issue pops up. Sure that’s often faster and it might work, but it won’t prevent the issue from returning and you won’t have learned anything. I learned the most from fixing broken shit. It requires you to figure out how it should work and what’s preventing it from working like that. We are making ourselves dumber this way.

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I had that exact AMD 486DX4 100mhz. It was awesome! It was on an older socket, where Intel was pushing people to go onto a new socket. But motherboards were super expensive back then and often you would need to do a memory upgrade as well. Then AMD came along with a 3x multiplier for a really good price. It gave my system a couple of extra years.

Later they did the same with the K6 series, where they pushed socket 7 systems to their absolute max. Those 550 mhz K6-III chips were super fast and cheap and you didn’t need to upgrade your entire system. And in my experience the 450 mhz models were much cheaper and could be overclocked to 550 mhz without any issue.

It’s all fun and games until your computer turns into a black hole because there is too much information in too little of a volume.

NASA gave SpaceX a bunch of money because they were developing Starship. It’s this super powerful super versatile do all launch system and platform to do a lot of stuff. With NASA being required to use and fund private companies for part of what they do, they put out the call for a bunch of missions. SpaceX said they could do it with Starship and do it for cheap, much cheaper than any other company. They also have an amazing track record with the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. At the same time other companies are either startups with pretty much nothing but a good idea. Or the old garde which were used to getting a bunch of government money to do very basic shit for way too high of a price. ULA and Boeing seriously dropped the ball lately.

It’s easy to shit on Musk and his bullshit. But there are some really talented people working at SpaceX and a lot of the stuff they do has been impressive.

As far as Starship goes, for now it’s still a total pipe dream. Nowhere close to being what they promised it will be. But the same was said for Falcon and they pulled that one off (eventually) with the block 5 Falcon 9 being one of the most reliable rockets ever made.

I was very critical of the Starship booster. The whole we have a whole bunch of engines concept isn’t a good idea in my book. Sure if one of them fails, or even a couple, you can still do the mission. And each engine can be simpler, smaller and easier to build. And take advantage of scale to build them faster and cheaper. This is why the Soviets tried this concept with their Moon missions back in the day. However the issue is, you need to be able to detect issues and shut down engines fast enough. All the engines are close together and when things go wrong, so much energy is involved it usually leads to shit flying places it should not. This means a single engine going wrong has the potential of throwing pieces of itself at great speed into other engines, control systems or fuel tanks. And a whole lot of engines means a whole lot of points of failures. It also makes things like pipe and cable routing much more complex. Monitoring and controlling is much more complicated as well. So it isn’t all upsides, there are significant downsides also.

However their testflights have seem to have shown the engines to be reliable. The monitoring to shut down engines in time when issues are detected. And a whole lot less big booms than I was expecting. Before hand I thought the thing would just explode every time. So I have to admit, they might have figured it out. Now a couple of testflights doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough, but at least it works some of the time.

There is however also a lot of BS, as usual when Musk is involved. NASA has figured SpaceX isn’t going to deliver in time or within budget. The booster might work, but Starship is still very much a dream at this point. Some other companies have since received money for missions which earlier were claimed by SpaceX. And I believe there are multiple lawsuits going on, claiming SpaceX just under bid to deny the contract to its competitors with no expectation of delivering.

Starship was an important part of the now canceled Moon missions. But before it was canceled a lot of folk didn’t think what SpaceX promised was viable. Even if they had Starship working the way they said they would have, their plan was never going to work. It relied on launching a Starship to orbit and then have it be refueled by other Starships. But after calculating how much fuel the thing lost while waiting in orbit and how much a single Starship could provide after using most of the fuel to get itself to the other ship, it turned out best case scenario you’d need a dozen launches. And these would need to be back to back, so no refurbishment time. And this assumed the booster would be lost or at the very least land in the ocean, no returning to base. With more realistic scenarios there would need to be many more launches. And keep in mind the Starship to Starship fueling hasn’t been done before and is extremely difficult.

But as always people believed all of the BS Musk has been spouting. And to be fair SpaceX does have an impressive resume. So the NASA folk were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Deny SpaceX, even though they had the best papers and the best price? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or grant them the contract, knowing there is a good chance SpaceX isn’t going to deliver. But the same can be said for all the other companies, many of which only had concepts and not the track record like SpaceX. And we’ve all seen how good Boeing is doing right now, that crew needed a ride home provided by either the Russians or SpaceX, total embarrassment.

Its profits are plunging, as is its share price.

Looks at share price: Up 10% in the last month…