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Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
Incredible. McGill really went all-in on cloud storage without ANY local backups. An institution. Wow. I bet next you’ll tell me they’re gonna open a consumer Backblaze account.
This is pretty standard in corporations these days. My org did the same. The assumption is that if it’s not in confluence or GitHub then it’s not worth keeping this goes in one drive. It is quite frankly insane.
But in general it is a trend that IT services are outsourced and that IT departments, and in general administration, in many universities suffer cuts, which is really bad. Apart from the problems this causes, imo this also pauses a security risk as if people's needs are not well covered by services provided, people will find their own solutions without knowledge or consideration to security.
Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
Sacrifices? Who wanted a different charger that only works on their phone? I like having one connector for everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a valid criticism. The only thing that usb-c got right as a standard was the symmetrical shape.
Just like mobile phones had in '90s.
That company had tremendous hardware but the serious affliction of being grotesquely obsessed with proprietary everything. I have nightmares trying to sort through my old boxes of cables.
Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
They could make the theme for bing and other microsoft websites dark instead of white, literally just a change of color, if they wanted to reduce screen power usage globally - so many "no impact" changes with software that this has to be a fake justification.
Is that the same Microsoft which is throwing money into running environmentally destructive AI workloads as their key business driver?
It sounds like it's McGill asking "And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email." https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense: 1. security risk of storing files 2. environmental impact 3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/e…
> Sustainability is an important consideration that drove Microsoft to make that decision.
Why is a university IT's announcement written as if by Microsoft's PR office? The style of the announcement is very weird. Has McGill outsourced all IT support services to Microsoft, thus it is written essentially by them?
It sounds like it's McGill asking "And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email." https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense: 1. security risk of storing files 2. environmental impact 3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/e…
Yeah, literally scrambled and verified but I still have 25 Tera bytes of data (this is the limit since forever) with no notice of reduction. I'm not saying that this isn't true, but I'm saying that McGill admins can set data limits. Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill. Update: there'll be a change apparently but not…
Lay-offs similarly also reduce the demand on energy since people have less money to buy things that are energy intensive to produce, and have less money to pay their electricity bills and fuel.
Sure, in the long term this move by MSFT may reduce new energy producing capacity coming online, but so will lay-offs, and pay cuts, and recessions, depressions, famine and war.
I don't think it's bad that MSFT is cutting cost in this way, it makes them a more efficient business, but this is being done for cost-cutting, not because MSFT cares deeply about the environment, it just so happens that money is a proxy for energy (i.e. the ability to generate entropy) and most cost-cutting will also reduce energy demand regardless of the nature of that cost-cutting.
It sounds like it's McGill asking "And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email." https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense: 1. security risk of storing files 2. environmental impact 3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/e…
Yeah, literally scrambled and verified but I still have 25 Tera bytes of data (this is the limit since forever) with no notice of reduction. I'm not saying that this isn't true, but I'm saying that McGill admins can set data limits. Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill. Update: there'll be a change apparently but not…
Compare that to datacenter NAS with RAID and with replica NAS redundancy and operating overhead (space, power, people), you're looking at a 9 months to 18 months price tradeoff before factoring in how to maintain a rotating set of users/accounts' storage. Storage is an area it's not difficult to do better than cloud if you are single user just storing one user's content, but it's much harder to do better than cloud if you have user management at scale to add in.