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Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges

Posted by Zonk on from the like-back-in-the-day dept.

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."

9 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Takes 1 by turtled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "He says schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads."

    It just takes one student sys admin with access to the whole freaking library, and there you have it, piracy at it's best.

    --
    "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
  2. This won't help by thundercatslair · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Almost everyone has their base music collection built by now, they would just be adding songs here and there. This won't help bandwidth issues, the big culprit is movie and tv downloads. I would just laugh a rep that came and talked to me about their service.

  3. In my experience... by yellowbkpk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In my experience, although "music downloads" sap up a lot of bandwidth on campus networks, I would have to say that more and more the problem is becoming worm/virus/zombie-infested computers coming in from a summer of broadband connections.

    A bandwidth shaper can more-or-less block or slow down "music downloading", but a virus spreading on the network is much harder to contain.

  4. The mindset of a typical University Admin. by everphilski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    True story.
    I used to be a resident advisor at UAH. One morning I woke up and tried to log on to Everquest. No workie. That's OK I thought, maybe an unscheduled patch... so I went to check some other stuff. It didn't work. AIM didn't work. This is all sounding a little fishy so I check my voicemail and sure enough, a bunch of my friends note that every game, filesharing and otherwise service is down, with exception of POP3 email and WWW. Couldn't even IMAP or FTP off-campus.
    I brought this to the attention to the housing director, who knew nothing of any plans to alter the network. I knew one of the higher-ups in the network ladder, I talked to him but he was out of the loop. He set up a meeting with the appropriate people. I got there, along with the head of the housing department. Remember, we were represening a bunch of very pissed off college kids living on-campus. The guy blew us off, saying "school is about education" and "If my daughter lived on campus I wouldn't want her playing video games and downloading music." I countered by saying some of us come from thousands of miles away, and this is home, and we need to relax on the weekends when we aren't studying.
    Long story short, we ran a petition drive, appealed to the president of the university, and after a few weeks of hard work and lobbying got ports back on a case-by-case basis, but they put in a load-balancing system and metered the filesharing ports to the point of being unusable.
    From talking with colleagues from other schools, this seems to be a typical mindset of a University administrator. Good luck, Dell. It sounds like a good idea, but I think it will be a hard sale to make.
    -everphilski-

    1. Re:The mindset of a typical University Admin. by zoomba · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What you need to remember is that Univ Network Admins have to balance the needs of students, faculty and staff when it comes to network usage. I was at Penn State when Napster really took off and even lived in the dorms. I was also a computer lab student manager for one of the colleges at the time. One day we all woke up and the network was just slammed. It had been getting progressively slower for weeks leading up to this point as everyone and their brother was downloading off of Napster (and uploading a fair bit too). The traffic from the student housing network eventually flooded the entire state-wide University system.

      Network traffic is like traffic in major city areas. You can keep adding capacity but people will just use up to that capacity no matter how large. We had a pretty big pipe to the net, but the student network segment alone saturated it, preventing faculty and staff from conducting research, using university systems related to classes etc... In short, students downloading music had managed to shut down any and all legitimate academic uses. The University could no longer operate.

      The solution initially was to put an overall cap on the student segment, limiting all residence halls to one shared 20mbit connection. Needless to say that was a nightmare and students had faster connections dialing up to the Univ modem bank. Then they moved to bandwith caps. 1gig up, 1 gig down per week. A pretty reasonable limit if you ask me.

      You want to cast blame at the admins, saying they're evil and uncaring and just out to screw the students, but you have to always remember that there are others who have just as much need for the network as students do. When it comes to downloading music and movies, I'd even say they have a more legitimate claim too. Giving students unlimited bandwidth has been proven to be a bad idea. Given limited resources, they have to portion everything off so the most people have usable access for legitimate purposes.

  5. Shrinking bandwith to prevent illegal downloads... by Arthur+B. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    is plain stupid. Who needs access to the outside world to download illegal mp3s when... on a student's campus. Seriously, if these folks have their personal computers on an intranet, nothing preents them to do massive file sharing through ftp servers and the like.

    --
    \u262D = \u5350
  6. Cornell and Napster by karvind · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Cornell had (2004-2005) a pilot program where Napster services were provided free to the students. At that time it was supported by corporate sponsors and gifts fund in Student and Academic Services.

    And the way it saved bandwidth (obvious) was by using a local caching server.

  7. And similarly... by base_chakra · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  8. Re:Boycott both. by twifosp · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Congratulations, do you want a cookie? A gold star perhaps?

    Quick, someone call Dell & Napster! Tell them that an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot doesn't need thier service and to halt all production immediately!

    I don't plan on using this service for some of the exact same reasons you do. Additionally, I prefer listening to the actual CD itself in most cases. Or when I do listen to my digital library, I like knowing I ripped it myself with my own personal fanatical settings and preferences.

    But I still fail to see why that merits a boycott just because you, personally, have no need for their service and product. Is this service going to do you harm some how? Is it going to prevent you from doing exactly what you are doing so far? No. Because you won't participate in it.

    It's actually a rather decent offering with a specific market in mind. Clearly you and I aren't part of that market, but why ruin it for those who might be?

    Grow up.