• 9 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • We had been a university with office365 for several years, and the price change came well after the product comparison and decision was made. Once you are in an ecosystem like that the cost of changing is astronomical when you include migration labor, training, and loss of productivity during the transition. When you are a university with thousands of student, staff, and alumni accounts, and the office, mail, and authentication environments are integrated, it’s realistically functionally impossible to migrate.

    The student A1 licenses are 0 cost without upgrades, which is why it was chosen, but the storage change was a blindside. We had hundreds of accounts using over the 100GB of data (which was within TOS) and had tons of data in onedrive which had to be moved or we had to fork out per account. This was a bait and switch, plain and simple, and that is the issue with “cloud for everything” is you are at their mercy.


  • Completely disagree. This last March, Microsoft changed the storage limit per user on OneDrive for education from 1TB to 100GB, and users either had to delete a ton of files or pay for increased license/space. We ended up standing an on-prem file server back up shortly thereafter because we could not get our users and faculty to delete research data and could not afford to nearly double our cost expenditure. In my experience doing IT budget for years, cloud has meant that you cannot predict your yearly expenditures, Especially if you use your services that are funded in part by venture capital. Let’s say you start using some cool research presentation project and suddenly the economy dips and they lose funding, the cost goes way up. Life cycle management has gone completely out the toilets in my experience with cloud products.














  • A lab in China synthesized a flake of material that behaves the way a superconductor might under a strong magnet, and a separate lab in China made a flake which showed high resistivity. Neither of those qualify for full validation and point to the fact that synthesis has a lot of unknowns that will require more precise doping methods than we have today. This is likely the start of a research path into doped crystals, a path on which a future discovery WILL lead to better conductors that are easy to make.


  • I am not a scientist but I have really been trying to understand this breakthrough. My understanding is not that room temperature ambient pressure semiconductors have been created. It is that several simulations back up parts of the discovery that would lead to said semiconductors, in some reviews are showing that some of the crystalline structures do successfully resemble what would be needed for superconductivity in super preliminary experiments on a tiny scale. We aren’t going to have magic superconducting wire yet, this is still very much in the theoretical material science phase. Ultimately, specifics around the way the doping has to work are pretty unproven. At this point it looks like things like electron photon interaction is happening as it would need to happen on a scale relevant to similar crystalline structures. LK99 isn’t yet in physical testing in any other labs yet, and any labs that would publish results already wouldn’t be worth listening to because there hasn’t been enough time for peer review.