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by perihelions 656 days ago
That's hilarious. Isn't this the same "Berkeley" that runs a sustained 20 petaflop distributed supercomputer from freely-donated volunteer machines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_f... ("Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing")

They are Kropotkin when you are volunteering for them, and neutron-bomb Jack Welch when you expect something of them.

3 comments

There is no "they" - academic research labs are funded by their own grants, and are pretty close to being separate companies that just rent space from the university. BOINC is funded by donations and grants from the NSF and NASA.

Academic administration that makes decisions about things like e-mail account policies is an entirely different thing from research labs doing projects like BOINC, ultimately controlled by the state government- although it can and does choose to delegate some responsibilities to academic faculty.

Distributed computing is a different beast than a storage service for students for stick all their pirated media on.
Their email systems are managed by Google Workspace.
Then the obvious solution is to instead have them managed by their CS department. And fire whoever previously thought it should be otherwise.
They would probably crack down on storage more if they had to run their own storage arrays.
Why? 5GB of storage is like five cents of storage.
You can’t be serious? I can’t think of a bigger waste of time.
For the people who write the SMTP RFCs and teach students how to implement them to have hands-on experience operating a mail system?
This wouldn't be RFC work, this would be sysadmin work.

Probably not the worst use of time, but you'd need to find interested students and faculty year-over-year.

Students do worse for less money in the search of internships all time.