The experiment may have been successful, but if it was why don't we see underwater datacenters everywhere? It probably is a similar reason why we won't see space datacenters in the near future either.
Space has solar energy going for itself. With underwater you don't need to lug a 1420 ton rocket with a datacenter payload to space.
Salt water absolutely murders things, combined with constant movement almost anything will be torn apart in very little time. It's an extremely harsh environment compared to space, which is not anything. If you can get past the solar extremes without earths shield, it's almost perfect for computers. A vacuum, energy source available 24/7 at unlimited capacity, no dust, etc.
The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit
Also solar wind, cosmic rays etc. We don't have perfect shielding for that yet. Cooling would be tricky and has to be completely radiative which is very slow in space. Vacuum is a perfect insulator after all, look how thermos work.
I understood that part of Microsoft's experiment was to see how being hermetically sealed would affect hardware durability. Submerging is a good way to demonstrate the seal, but that part might have been just showmanship.
They are not only a wrapper for Wireguard even though people keep saying that.
Each of the tools gives different benefits and yes, you can roll all of that on your own, but let's take Tailscale as an example: You have custom ACLs to secure your network on a client/user/device basis with tagging of devices. You have your own tailscale SSH connection, the possibility to create private-public tunnels (just like Cloudflare tunnels). The hole punching using DERP servers and native IPv6/IPv4 interoperability means it really connects any device on any network type to all other devices. And of course the management pane and GUI you talked about.
This is not supposed to be a marketing ploy for Tailscale, but saying "they are just a wrapper for Wireguard" is plain wrong.
Why do you assume OP paid $5 a month? You get Tailscale for free in many use-cases. Your argument that self-hosting is more expensive is still valid, but I don't get the 5$.
So if this happens, what are your remedies if any? I guess a VPN wouldn’t help since there are no routes? Something like Starlink would work or would there be a problem with ground stations not having internet?
I had this same question recently. There's mesh networks like meshcore. But you would be limited to just sending text messages to other users. I would imagine the government would be able to easily identify and destroy such a network as well.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Also the OneDrive Backup feature is great - previously people had to rely on other services (Box, Dropbox) and remember to save stuff into those folders. Now your most important Documents folder is saved in the cloud. Great. Backup! I don't think that OneDrive pestering you about buying more storage after using up your free storage is a bad thing, somebody needs to pay for stuff.
I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.
I prefer the Dropbox solution, and tend to configure OneDrive, Google Drive, etc the same... I like to be explicit about it... I don't want all my general docs sync'd, for that matter, most of my projects are in a git repo anyway.
I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.
How does this work with multiple PC's? Does it just merge all files into the same Documents folder? What if apps are saving app data to these folders, and you have the same app on multiple computers?
All your multiple PCs have the same Documents folder. Files created on one PC are synced to the cloud and appear in all the other PCs' Documents folders, and will be downloaded to the local storage if you try to access them. You get a small icon next to each file or folder to try and tell you if the files are local or in the cloud or whatever status. If apps are saving data to synced folders (eg. all those many many games happily polluting my Documents folder), then that same data is available to the same app on different computers. Could be good, or bad if the apps are being used on different computers at the same time with no real way of determining which PCs changes win for which particular file.
> All your multiple PCs have the same Documents folder. Files created on one PC are synced to the cloud and appear in all the other PCs' Documents folders
That sounds horrible.
> Could be good, or bad
It sounds bad either way. If the app exists on both computers there's good chance of conflicting overwrites of whatever is saved there. If the app is not used on a device then it's just a waste of downloading and syncing useless data.
They should just make the computers and have subfolders in a shared documents folder AND prompt you about so this before starting so you can turn off this or that folder before anything gets uploaded or downloaded. It's user-hostile design currently
It doesn't matter what I think, and you don't have to understand. Just don't turn it on by default, and if you do, make it safe and easy to turn it off.
Tooling and workflows that make sense on a centrally-administered domain do not belong on my home computer.
There is? Not at all. Whatever I save from my browser (Edge/Firefox/Chromium) is automatically saved to Downloads and Downloads is not automatically synced with OneDrive Backup. Backed up is Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop etc. but Downloads not AFAIK.
That's true. I wasn't clear - I was thinking mainly of the Office products: Word, Excel, etc. They've got a whole different Save As dialog that go out of their way to funnel you into OneDrive. So it's interrupting my flow precisely in the course of things I need to use brainpower on themselves.
Additionally if you don't save on Onedrive autosave is disabled.
Autosave worked decades ago before we even had cloud storage, but apparently in 2026 we just can't have feature parity with Word 97 without cloud storage.
How am I supposed to work with user devices (laptop/phone) then if not tags? Because from the Laptop I want the user (me) to be able to use e.g. the SSH ports on my servers, but from the phone I don't want SSH enabled.
I currently assign the tag SSH to the phone/laptop which either enables or disables SSH, now I am unsure because without tags I can only assign the user the tag?
Space has solar energy going for itself. With underwater you don't need to lug a 1420 ton rocket with a datacenter payload to space.
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