Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges

An Anonymous Reader writes "Forbes is reporting on the teaming of Dell and Napster to provide music directly to college campuses. The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads will enable colleges to use Dell blade servers on campus to store music from Napster's library locally. This will allow network processing speed to remain fast while hundreds of students simultaneously download digital music." From the article: "Campuses were 'shrinking the [available] bandwidth on the network to discourage' illegal downloading, says John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business. He says schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads."

Comments

And?

[samael]

"Hardware vendor sells file cache" is hardly a big deal.

And similarly...

[base_chakra]

Forbes is reporting on the teaming of the RIAA and the Yakuza to go directly to college campuses and start slapping people around.

conversation with school admins

[syrinx]

"So, Mr. School Admin, why is it that you're going with this service that won't work on 90% of the students' music players, and can't even be burnt to CD?"

"Well, Dell is a, uh, leading provider of technology to education, but mostly we've just always enjoyed big sacks full of money."

(should probably credit: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10- 23 )

Re:The mindset of a typical University Admin.

[f0rtytw0]

Sounds like the thinking of the network admin at my old university. He heard there was an AIM exploit that took 10 minutes to do. So like clockwork everyones AIM client would disconnect every 9 minutes or so. This went on for about a week. I'm glad ccs had their own network and that I could tunnel through it.

Re:Boycott both.

[iamhassi]

"Obviously, if you live off campus you can enter into whatever type of Internet service contract you desire. I think the one I was using last year had a bandwidth cap but I never ran up against it."

I just hope they don't automatically charge students for the stupid mp3s.

STUDENT: What's this "music usage" fee??
CASHIER'S OFFICE: Oh, that's so you can download music from the school's servers
STUDENT: But i dont want to download music from the school's servers, i got other sources
CASHIER'S OFFICE: Oh, well, sorry, everyone has to pay
STUDENT: WTF?? What about this "multipurpose building fee"
CASHIER'S OFFICE: That's the gym
STUDENT: I don't use the gym
CASHIER'S OFFICE: Doesn't matter, you still have to pay
STUDENT: !!#$%@#$~$@%&&#

damn universities...