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Penn State Students to Get Free Music From Napster
Mr. Show writes "Napster and Penn State have unveiled a deal to give faculty and students free access to music beginning next spring. The deal would give students only limited access to downloads, so presumably most of the free music will come through the streaming service that would otherwise cost a monthly fee. Will this help curb piracy on college campuses?" It might, except for students that don't run Windows.
For those who read a little more closely, the service is not being offered for free. The cost of the monthly subscription is covered by the $160 service fee that on-campus students are required to pay if they want to hook up to the network.
Presumably, Napster offered a steep discount on the $9.95 monthly fee, but I'm sure it's not free.
I'm perfectly fine with it. On top of it, since I am a Penn Stater at a branch campus I get NO benefit from this at all.
Penn State makes WinXP Pro, Office, Visual Dev Studio, etc. free to any student, so there is no one who doesn't at least have access to the proper software for free.
I'm also sorry to state that as a long time Linux user, I still prefer Windows to Linux on the desktop and I don't see that changing at all except maybe to a Mac. DRM will probably become the only pressing issue that would make me go through the configuration hell of Linux on the desktop.
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
Just a quick note... My dad is the one who's working on the live.psu.edu site. It's running on apache and php on MacOS X Server. The server's getting hammered today, he says, but the machine's holding up quite well. It's a shame that open source and Mac technologies can be used to promote this new Napster program at PSU, and yet students with machines running similar OS's will be wasting their fees paying for a service they can't use. It's a shame PSU couldn't figure out way to work with the cross-platform iTunes Music store.
" Yeah, the taxpayers also help pay for Nittany Lions football (which not everyone watches), concerts at the stadium (which not everyone attends), etc. etc.
"
No tax payer money goes to fund the football team. In fact in the 6-7 home games each year the profits from ticket sales and so forth pay for all PSU athletics and then some. The university makes money off the football program. No state money is used. In fact you pay less in state taxes because of the football team.
Also there are no concerts at Beaver Stadium, concerts are at the Bryce Jordan Center, which once again makes money for the school.
And, I guess he's not a member of the board, but Senior Counsel. I guess that means he's responsible for suing grandparents and little girls.
the network will become more stable and be able to handle traffic better. This also means less resources needed which translates directly into money.
This is one of the silliest things I have heard all day. As a college student, I assure you that most campus networks (the one here and the ones my CS friends at other schools talk about) are set up to handle much more traffic than they currently get. My school, for example is running 2 T3 lines, so a little filesharing is not particularly taxing on the system. Also, since it's on all the time, no one saves any money if we simply don't use it. Finally, you have got to be kidding yourself if you think that using less bandwidth (even if it did save you money) would save more than $130,000 per month. That is a lot of money - as was mentioned in a previous post, that is about $1million per year. There is no way that any school could save that much from decreased bandwidth (actually, I expect that this deal will increase bandwidth, because now the students against illegal file sharing will start downloading music too).
This is obviously just a way to get the RIAA to back off and stop bullying them. I for one cannot think of another reason why this could be reasonable or economical.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
As much as I really, really, really hate Nittany Lion Football (No!, Really!), and pretty much despize the entire "We are Penn State" culture, I've got to clarify one thing about your post.
Penn State's football program is one ofthe few football programs in the country that actually pays for itself, the stadium, and turns enough profit that football at Penn State pays for much of the other athletic programs (Lacross, Soccer, ultimate-frisbee, etc) at the university.
The other part of the sentance is equally wrong, in that they do not allow concerts at Beaver Stadium, mostly because they grow thier own strain of grass for the feild (yes, I know the locals there all have thier own strains of "grass" as well) and this makes it somehow too valuable to be walked on but not so valuable that it cannot be torn to shreds several times each fall.
The rediculous tax expendatures in Happy Vally are the convocation center, building freeways for the stadium traffic, the CIA "recruitment" on and off campus (counter-intelligence), and the Ferguson Township Police Department (cushy jobs for officers that got kicked off of various urban forces for doing stupid shit like dropping bombs on houses and burning down neighborhoods).
The University was at one time (and may still be) very good about allowing public and open access to almost all of thier facilities (except parking) including the libraries, the Natatorium and other Phys Ed facilities (raquetball courts, weight rooms bowling alleys), and museums and labs (the old Entomology Museum was really cool).
Most publicly funded (or otherwise) uni's are not nearly so open, and I would not be surprised if Penn State no longer is, but at least for a time there was a place that you could benefit from the tax expendatures if you chose to do so.