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Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by skissane on Thursday March 25, 2021 @07:38PM (#26587049)
Years ago I worked as a research assistant for a university. One day, my boss (a professor) pulled me aside for an impromptu meeting. "I have $5000 left in a research grant I need to spend this week or else it's gone forever – do you have any ideas of what I should spend it on?"

Unfortunately I couldn't think of much. I suggested maybe we buy some more computers with it but I'm sure he'd already thought of that himself. I don't know what he ended up doing, but I'm sure he'd have decided to buy something with it rather than just losing it entirely.

Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by lostlogin on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:59PM (#26588039)
This is usually handled much more elegantly by senior academic staff.

You contact a department who’s services you use a lot, then you arrange to pre-pay for services. Ideally you negotiate a discount.

Then you use the service and state which grant to draw from.

This way you have grants paying for things that are completely unrelated to their intent, you have one nightmare of a billing system which no one understands and you get to use everybody cent.

Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by chuckleMuscle on Thursday March 25, 2021 @08:21PM (#26587430)
This as a fairly recent occurrence in my research group. It’s often quite tedious because you don’t want to waste the money and it’s never clear if there’s going to be a period where we’re short on cash at some point in the future. most of it’s spent on boring but expensive things to be used down the line. Would be far better if funding wasn’t quite so cyclical!
Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by EveYoung on Friday March 26, 2021 @08:54AM (#26591522)
Could you order conference tickets or something similar that allows free cancelations in the future? In my previous job, we did this to carry over training budgets.
Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk by noisy_boy on Friday March 26, 2021 @03:18AM (#26589572)
Buy annual licenses. Then renew if you want to block the same amount next year OR don't renew and use it for what you actually need.