Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas.
The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government. But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need.
“We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones,” said Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist. “But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Microsoft said Friday it has “ended the employment of some individuals in accordance with internal policy” but declined to provide details.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
I still dualboot because I have games that don’t work right, but every instance of that in my case seems to be problems with DXVK. In some cases, but not all, I’ve noticed it severely degrades performance, and in others, it seems to break certain features, such as streaming video. I actually had one game that I finished about 90% of before I encountered a sequence with a projector playing a video with important information. That would only display on Windows without DXVK, which was… unpleasant.
Of course, the most extreme DXVK problem I ever encountered was about two years ago, but I can’t remember what game it was. What I do remember, however, is the extreme and rapid flashing it caused as the visuals horribly corrupted. IMO, DXVK functionality seems to still be one of the bigger hurdles.
So the projector thing isnt from DXVK, but rather from the Windows Media Foundation library. Basically, there are a bunch of video codecs that are completely illegal to reimplement locally because of the patents on them.
The good news is that Valve is working on a major workaround, and just pushed it out to Proton Experimental recently. They’ve had okay-to-good support for video codecs up until recently (they pushed out some fixes for it right around after you had that problem), and now it should be moving towards great-to-perfect.