Would you mind detailing the hardware and software being used for those 4TB arrays? In particular, what kind of drivers do you have to use and what kind of monitoring of the array do you have? I'm just getting started building a 1TB array using a 3ware Escalade 8506-12 card and 5 250GB Western Digital SATA drives. Right now it's running under Win2k and the 3ware software is helpful, providing an alarm app, web interface for monitoring and configuration and the ability to send alert emails. They have drivers for specific distro versions (RedHat 8,9 SUSE 8) and a non-distro specific disk management utility but I don't know if the utility requires using their driver.
Our interest is not in performance or even uptime, just lots of disk space and maintaining data integrity (we'll be mirroring the data between multiple servers as well as using RAID). We're starting with 1TB but will probably need 2TB very soon and the data set will keep growing. An additional 1TB/year is quite possible.
Please email me if you'd rather not put your response in the comments.
[I haven't tried either of these products.] Gateway 840 Serial-ATA RAID Enclosure is cheaper per GB than Xserve RAID. It has 12 bays and uses U320 SCSI instead of Fiber Channel for the connection to the system. Currently the cheapest config you can do is $4,749. That's with 4 250GB SATA drives and their cheapest 3yr warranty (another nice thing is you can increase the warrany to 4 or even 5 years and they have a variety of response times you can choose). Gateway gives you all 12 carriers no matter how many drives you buy from them. So you buy 8 more 250GB drives for $225/ea. ($1800) for a total of $6,549. Apple won't sell you drive carriers, you have to buy the carriers with their drives. They currently charge $450 for the driver carrier + 250GB ATA drive. Xserve RAID with 12x250GB drives and a 3yr. warranty costs $10,998.
The cheapest way to go is to build you own using a PCI RAID controller and drive cages in a large PC case. There are drawbacks to the DYI method but a 12x250GB SATA RAID system would cost you about less than $5000 ($2700 for drives, $750 for 3ware 8506-12 RAID card, ~$450 for 3 drive cages, the rest is for a big-ass case, mobo, etc.). Note that includes the cost of the computer which the above OEM options do not include.
All but the lowest-end flash-based iRiver players include an FM tuner. Even the lowest-end ones include a microphone for voice recording (the format is mp3) and many of the models can record FM broadcasts and from a line-in jack.
I have the iFP-380T (128MB), the cheapest model with line-in recording. To be honest, I haven't used it a lot. Most of my time is spent at my home or office computer where I can listen to all my mp3s or radio streams but I do use the iRiver at the gym. I've also used it a bit for voice recording, just "notes to self" kind of stuff. I've been happy with the recording capability. Since the flash players are so small, they have to use just a few controls to do everything. This takes some getting used to but once you learn them, the number of steps required to do any particular task is not onerous.
I haven't tried firmware updates yet to add support for other file formats or USB Mass Storage support but I've very glad the options are there.
MP3.com's MyMP3 service wasn't called a "locker" service. The locker services gave you free disk space to which you could upload mp3s you had ripped yourself. MP3.com was busted for providing a service based on copyrighted materials it did not have the right to distribute. It seems like a stupid and inefficient distinction but legally, it's clear cut.
You're right that the legality of downloading copyrighted materials is still kind of a grey area, especially in a format shifting case as the GP post is suggesting. A Canadian court recently ruled that downloading is *not* illegal, I assume because the law is all about distribution and when you download you're not the distibutor.
It's quite possible a US court could rule that P2P leeches aren't breaking the law. I don't think that's a case the ??AAs would let get that far.
Law enforcement uses special equipment to "see through" walls and observe the occupants inside a building, without a warrant because it's observable from the street.
I don't recall if the Supreme Court made this decision or of it was a circuit court but I know there's been a federal decision that said the use of IR imaging to find indoor marijuana growers without a warrant was a violation of the 4th amendment. Using such high tech imaging is in no way a "plain view" case.
Speaking as someone who is in my setup, I can tell you that Rendezvous does work. I am sorry that stating that the clients can "see each other" did not make that clear.
Here's a little picture of my network, the mini-hub is connected to one of the Netgear's 4 LAN ports. Yes, the mini-hub is usually extraneous, I could connect the NAT/DHCPd to the Netgear and the wired clients to the Netgear but sometimes I have more than 3 wired clients I like that I can remove the Netgear without disrupting anything except the wireless clients.
Bridging isn't that big a deal anymore. All I did with my cheap Netgear MR814 is turn off its DHCP server and plug my uplink into a LAN port instead of the WAN port. Voila, my wired and wireless clients are on the same subnet and see each other, no problem (yes, I use a separate box as my cable/dsl router + DHCP).
What the ABS can do that many of the cheaper access points can't do is bridging between two wireless access points. Still, you don't have have to spend $300 for that feature either, we boughts a couple of D-Link DWL-2000AP's for ~$85 each.
This new Apple Enterprise software could be good though, usually you have to get pricy Cisco equipment of the like for centralized management of access points.
I like Apache::MP3 also. Namp! is the name of the project when all the bits are rolled together (apache, mod_perl, perl, Apache::MP3). Also CPAN is your friend.
There's a demo site so you can see the default interface and try some streams (Apache::MP3 includes a "demo" mode which stops the streams after 30 seconds).
You can block casual access with a simple.htaccess file. I'm pretty sure it *will* work on Windows, Apache, perl, & mod_perl are all available on the platform, it's just more work because all those components aren't already there.
I'll tell you two problems I've run into. If you use username/passwords in.htaccess to secure it, the username & password will be a part of the URL for each streamed track and may be clearly visible on the desktop, depending on which streaming client you're using. Also some older clients may not work with URLs that include the user:pass in it. It's been a while but I think Windows Media Player was the one that gave me the most trouble.
Embedded album art in a track may also cause trouble for some clients, specifically iTunes and RealOne (v9 at least, haven't tried the beta). In my testing the album art was added by MusicMatch and iTunes adds them another way (so each app can't see the other's album art) so how the art is added to the track may be a factor. Actually, I think it's more likely that some clients just can't handle streaming tracks with too many bytes of ID3 tag data but I haven't tried any experiments to prove it.
Whether or not you can fast forward or rewind *within* a track depends upon the client. WinAmp does it like a champ. I'm pretty sure Xmms does too. iTunes does not. Someone has told me RealOne Player can do it but it hasn't worked for me.
iTunes is a bad streaming client because it permanently adds each streamed track to your Library. You have to manually select and delete them to clean it up.
If you don't want to bother streaming your own music, I recommend the "Internet radio station" RadioParadise. 128Kbps (or lower in a variety of formats, eclectic, listener-supported, no ads.
Every large institution has ineffeciencies but largely the FDA process takes so long because you're talking about people's health. You need to be careful and you need plenty of people with no financial interest in the outcome to be examining the data.
Re:So many stories, so little time...
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 1
Dustjacket blurbs are also self-advertising. I don't think I'm unusual because I make note of the names on blurbs. If someone writes a blurb for an author I like, that makes me more interested in the blurb writer's work. Likewise, if an author I like writes a blurb for an author I don't know, that's a pretty important recommendation.
Blurbs don't get an unknown author on an Authors-To-Buy whitelist but they add a couple of points to the scoring which may push a book over the To-Buy threshhold.
It works because the Sterling audience should become familiar with the name "Cory Doctorow." It's advertising directed at the audience most likely to be interested in the product. Unfortunately, the system eventually breaks down because a mutual admiration society develops and you see the same names again and again on each other's books. It seems to take too long for new blood to show up on the jackets.
Gibson coined "cyberspace," not "cyberpunk." SF editor extraordinaire Gardner Dozois" came up with "cyberpunk" to describe the 80s sub-genre which included Gibson, Sterling, John Shirley, and others.</pedant>
I definitely agree Sterling is the Big Idea man and Gibson is the poet. I wouldn't be so harsh about the depth of Gibson's characters though, especially not in his later books.
Runas is in Win2k too, but XP made the GUI interface slightly better. Hold the Shift key and right click an executable. Runas shouldn't be needed as often as it is but it's very useful.
As for the Fisher Price comment, you do know you can turn all that shit off, don't you? Select the "Windows Classic" theme and set the Start menu to "Classic" and it looks almost exactly like Win2k. There are lots a little improvements that makes an XP upgrade worthwhile. Maybe I wouldn't spend $100+ to upgrade an existing machine to XP (I only run Windows at work so it's not my money) but all else being equal, I'll pick XP over 2k any day.
If your kid has a birthday party and you hire a clown to come in and he sings Happy Birthday, the law was broken.
It's not illegal to sing "Happy Birthday," it's illegal to sing it publicly and not pay the requisite fee to ASCAP or whichever organization handles the collecting of fees and distribution of royalties to composers.
An outright banning cell phone from the workplace is extreme and should be met with a quick move to another company. To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
Gosh, what did people do before cel phones? I know! They called your place of business and got your direct number, was transferred by an operator or, if you didn't have your own phone, someone would get off their ass and find you. After all, if it really is an emergency, only the laziest, cold-hearted bastard would refuse to help contact you.
However, a cel phone ban would be pretty childish in most places of business.
You are totally correct about why it's in Microsoft's best interest to make sure older software works on their newer operating systems.
So no one uses NT 4 any more, right? Wrong. There are still plenty of bussinesses that are dragging their feat and whining about MS cutting off support "so soon". Basically it comes down to money (they are too cheap to buy an upgrade) and the fact that it still works fine for them.
The problem is with the migration from NT domains to Active Directory. At this point, I think most of the NT machines out there are domain controllers. I'm sure there are a few desktops running NT Workstation just as there are desktops still running Windows 95 but those are the die-hard "if it ain't broke..." people. For the rest, it's only partly about the direct OS expense, there's also the hardware for the servers (most likely) and all the CALs for the clients. Migrating to Active Directory is a bitch; for small outfits there's a lot to learn while still trying to do their routine work and for bigger outfits there's the above mentioned expenses and the labor of dealing with so many desktops and users.
I'm sure Linux has won a number of converts who chose to switch to a Samba domain in favor of doing the AD migration. I would consider it except A) we're a part of a larger organization with which we need to interoperate and B) I really think GPOs will be very useful to us.
Indeed, I was thinking of the Marauder's Map as being like a PDA with a map and everyone's tagged with WozNet.
I also thought there should be more magic that emulates Muggle technology so I was pleased when I came to the Extendible Ears as a magical substitute for various forms of bugging (I was disappointed by Rita in the previous book).
I think it's good to ask Mr. Undercofler these questions because so far the information about "original content" has been extremely vague. You probably haven't signed a release which would allow the commercial distribution (which is what a deal with Napster would be) of any performance or composition by you so I doubt it's going to "just happen."
The panel is about P2P file sharing and was scheduled before the Napster deal was made (or finalized at least). While having someone from Eastman on the panel might make sense they do have someone from the Yellowjackets to represent the "creatives." The Yellowjackets press and sell CDs which probably makes the topic more relevant to them than to most Eastman students (that's not meant as a value judgement at all).
This wasn't leaked, the link is to a press release from the UofR and Roxio (owns Napster). It's also the top story in the current issue of the Campus Times. Previous issues of the Campus Times have had stories about the university investigating making this kind of deal (the Napster service part, not the "original content" part). You may find this Q&A page informative.
At this point they're not specifically making the Napster service a part of tuition so in a sense, you may be paying for it. Of course the release says they plan on making the service available to non-dorm residents too. The university has a lot of revenue beyond tuition or room & board. They're also doing this deal to reduce the amount of bandwidth used, thus saving money. I doubt the money saved on bandwidth will cover the cost of the Napster deal but if a significant number of students stop using other means of getting music and switch to Napster, it'll make a real difference.
I'll take your word for it because I'm not going to go over to a dorm with a laptop to try it out. It sure would be nice if these kinds of things were documented somewhere. I found out about the per-week cap from the Campus Times, it sure wasn't on a university site!
www.rochester.edu has PHP, mail.rochester.edu, the only university server students have accounts on, doesn't. At RIT, students have their home directories on www.rit.edu where they can use SSL, use their own CGIs, in addition to PHP. I'm not really a web guy so I don't know what else is there but it's pretty useful. I suppose the UR answer would be "use CIF," I don't know what it's like being on their server.
The article is about Napster, your own post is about Napster. You must have been wearing your tin foil hat when you wrote "this" and "it" but expected people to read your mind to know you were referring to all forms of DRM'd music.
The AC claimed the cap was at UR, they weren't talking about RIT. I'm not sure how those graphs are supposed to prove your point anyway:)
It looks like I was wrong anyway, sorry AC. Gee, silly me for thinking such a thing would be documented somewhere! I still haven't found any mention of rate limiting but I did find an article the campus newspaper from August 2003 saying there was a per-student/per-week outbound cap.
"ResNet is setting its per-week limit at 12 outbound gigabytes per student per week, which is comparable to about 17 CDs and three to four DVDs."
Frankly, that's a lot of bandwidth and seems pretty resonable for a residential network. And that's just uploads, there's not cap on downloads, according to the article. But across-the-board rate limiting, especially as little as 10KB/sec, sucks. I experienced problems with something like this at my wife's college. I was trying to setup an rsync backup script to backup her laptop to my home computer and the transfers were crawling. After a lot of messing around with other things, I determined it was something the college was doing on their ResNet. Basicaly we hat do wait until she came home to do the initial sync then the nightly runs could complete because it just wasn't that much data.
Duh. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., is a legal service which is trying to supplant the illegal distribution of music via P2P protocols. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., does not use P2P protocols in its service. We all know this, you are not +1 Informative.
I don't see anyone here "lauding" or "cheering this on." I certainly don't think these Napster deals at universities are a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you mind detailing the hardware and software being used for those 4TB arrays? In particular, what kind of drivers do you have to use and what kind of monitoring of the array do you have? I'm just getting started building a 1TB array using a 3ware Escalade 8506-12 card and 5 250GB Western Digital SATA drives. Right now it's running under Win2k and the 3ware software is helpful, providing an alarm app, web interface for monitoring and configuration and the ability to send alert emails. They have drivers for specific distro versions (RedHat 8,9 SUSE 8) and a non-distro specific disk management utility but I don't know if the utility requires using their driver.
Our interest is not in performance or even uptime, just lots of disk space and maintaining data integrity (we'll be mirroring the data between multiple servers as well as using RAID). We're starting with 1TB but will probably need 2TB very soon and the data set will keep growing. An additional 1TB/year is quite possible.
Please email me if you'd rather not put your response in the comments.
[I haven't tried either of these products.]
Gateway 840 Serial-ATA RAID Enclosure is cheaper per GB than Xserve RAID. It has 12 bays and uses U320 SCSI instead of Fiber Channel for the connection to the system. Currently the cheapest config you can do is $4,749. That's with 4 250GB SATA drives and their cheapest 3yr warranty (another nice thing is you can increase the warrany to 4 or even 5 years and they have a variety of response times you can choose). Gateway gives you all 12 carriers no matter how many drives you buy from them. So you buy 8 more 250GB drives for $225/ea. ($1800) for a total of $6,549. Apple won't sell you drive carriers, you have to buy the carriers with their drives. They currently charge $450 for the driver carrier + 250GB ATA drive. Xserve RAID with 12x250GB drives and a 3yr. warranty costs $10,998.
The cheapest way to go is to build you own using a PCI RAID controller and drive cages in a large PC case. There are drawbacks to the DYI method but a 12x250GB SATA RAID system would cost you about less than $5000 ($2700 for drives, $750 for 3ware 8506-12 RAID card, ~$450 for 3 drive cages, the rest is for a big-ass case, mobo, etc.). Note that includes the cost of the computer which the above OEM options do not include.
All but the lowest-end flash-based iRiver players include an FM tuner. Even the lowest-end ones include a microphone for voice recording (the format is mp3) and many of the models can record FM broadcasts and from a line-in jack.
I have the iFP-380T (128MB), the cheapest model with line-in recording. To be honest, I haven't used it a lot. Most of my time is spent at my home or office computer where I can listen to all my mp3s or radio streams but I do use the iRiver at the gym. I've also used it a bit for voice recording, just "notes to self" kind of stuff. I've been happy with the recording capability. Since the flash players are so small, they have to use just a few controls to do everything. This takes some getting used to but once you learn them, the number of steps required to do any particular task is not onerous.
I haven't tried firmware updates yet to add support for other file formats or USB Mass Storage support but I've very glad the options are there.
MP3.com's MyMP3 service wasn't called a "locker" service. The locker services gave you free disk space to which you could upload mp3s you had ripped yourself. MP3.com was busted for providing a service based on copyrighted materials it did not have the right to distribute. It seems like a stupid and inefficient distinction but legally, it's clear cut.
You're right that the legality of downloading copyrighted materials is still kind of a grey area, especially in a format shifting case as the GP post is suggesting. A Canadian court recently ruled that downloading is *not* illegal, I assume because the law is all about distribution and when you download you're not the distibutor.
It's quite possible a US court could rule that P2P leeches aren't breaking the law. I don't think that's a case the ??AAs would let get that far.
Law enforcement uses special equipment to "see through" walls and observe the occupants inside a building, without a warrant because it's observable from the street.
I don't recall if the Supreme Court made this decision or of it was a circuit court but I know there's been a federal decision that said the use of IR imaging to find indoor marijuana growers without a warrant was a violation of the 4th amendment. Using such high tech imaging is in no way a "plain view" case.
Here's a little picture of my network, the mini-hub is connected to one of the Netgear's 4 LAN ports. Yes, the mini-hub is usually extraneous, I could connect the NAT/DHCPd to the Netgear and the wired clients to the Netgear but sometimes I have more than 3 wired clients I like that I can remove the Netgear without disrupting anything except the wireless clients.
Bridging isn't that big a deal anymore. All I did with my cheap Netgear MR814 is turn off its DHCP server and plug my uplink into a LAN port instead of the WAN port. Voila, my wired and wireless clients are on the same subnet and see each other, no problem (yes, I use a separate box as my cable/dsl router + DHCP).
What the ABS can do that many of the cheaper access points can't do is bridging between two wireless access points. Still, you don't have have to spend $300 for that feature either, we boughts a couple of D-Link DWL-2000AP's for ~$85 each.
This new Apple Enterprise software could be good though, usually you have to get pricy Cisco equipment of the like for centralized management of access points.
I like Apache::MP3 also. Namp! is the name of the project when all the bits are rolled together (apache, mod_perl, perl, Apache::MP3). Also CPAN is your friend.
.htaccess file. I'm pretty sure it *will* work on Windows, Apache, perl, & mod_perl are all available on the platform, it's just more work because all those components aren't already there.
.htaccess to secure it, the username & password will be a part of the URL for each streamed track and may be clearly visible on the desktop, depending on which streaming client you're using. Also some older clients may not work with URLs that include the user:pass in it. It's been a while but I think Windows Media Player was the one that gave me the most trouble.
There's a demo site so you can see the default interface and try some streams (Apache::MP3 includes a "demo" mode which stops the streams after 30 seconds).
You can block casual access with a simple
I'll tell you two problems I've run into. If you use username/passwords in
Embedded album art in a track may also cause trouble for some clients, specifically iTunes and RealOne (v9 at least, haven't tried the beta). In my testing the album art was added by MusicMatch and iTunes adds them another way (so each app can't see the other's album art) so how the art is added to the track may be a factor. Actually, I think it's more likely that some clients just can't handle streaming tracks with too many bytes of ID3 tag data but I haven't tried any experiments to prove it.
Whether or not you can fast forward or rewind *within* a track depends upon the client. WinAmp does it like a champ. I'm pretty sure Xmms does too. iTunes does not. Someone has told me RealOne Player can do it but it hasn't worked for me.
iTunes is a bad streaming client because it permanently adds each streamed track to your Library. You have to manually select and delete them to clean it up.
If you don't want to bother streaming your own music, I recommend the "Internet radio station" RadioParadise. 128Kbps (or lower in a variety of formats, eclectic, listener-supported, no ads.
Drug policy globally is dictated by the US, for a start, and thats really just a start.
Of course. Haven't you ever heard of "The Customer Is Always Right?"
+0 Funny
Every large institution has ineffeciencies but largely the FDA process takes so long because you're talking about people's health. You need to be careful and you need plenty of people with no financial interest in the outcome to be examining the data.
Dustjacket blurbs are also self-advertising. I don't think I'm unusual because I make note of the names on blurbs. If someone writes a blurb for an author I like, that makes me more interested in the blurb writer's work. Likewise, if an author I like writes a blurb for an author I don't know, that's a pretty important recommendation.
Blurbs don't get an unknown author on an Authors-To-Buy whitelist but they add a couple of points to the scoring which may push a book over the To-Buy threshhold.
It works because the Sterling audience should become familiar with the name "Cory Doctorow." It's advertising directed at the audience most likely to be interested in the product. Unfortunately, the system eventually breaks down because a mutual admiration society develops and you see the same names again and again on each other's books. It seems to take too long for new blood to show up on the jackets.
Gibson coined "cyberspace," not "cyberpunk." SF editor extraordinaire Gardner Dozois" came up with "cyberpunk" to describe the 80s sub-genre which included Gibson, Sterling, John Shirley, and others.</pedant>
I definitely agree Sterling is the Big Idea man and Gibson is the poet. I wouldn't be so harsh about the depth of Gibson's characters though, especially not in his later books.
Runas is in Win2k too, but XP made the GUI interface slightly better. Hold the Shift key and right click an executable. Runas shouldn't be needed as often as it is but it's very useful.
As for the Fisher Price comment, you do know you can turn all that shit off, don't you? Select the "Windows Classic" theme and set the Start menu to "Classic" and it looks almost exactly like Win2k. There are lots a little improvements that makes an XP upgrade worthwhile. Maybe I wouldn't spend $100+ to upgrade an existing machine to XP (I only run Windows at work so it's not my money) but all else being equal, I'll pick XP over 2k any day.
If your kid has a birthday party and you hire a clown to come in and he sings Happy Birthday, the law was broken.
It's not illegal to sing "Happy Birthday," it's illegal to sing it publicly and not pay the requisite fee to ASCAP or whichever organization handles the collecting of fees and distribution of royalties to composers.
An outright banning cell phone from the workplace is extreme and should be met with a quick move to another company. To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
Gosh, what did people do before cel phones? I know! They called your place of business and got your direct number, was transferred by an operator or, if you didn't have your own phone, someone would get off their ass and find you. After all, if it really is an emergency, only the laziest, cold-hearted bastard would refuse to help contact you.
However, a cel phone ban would be pretty childish in most places of business.
Cheese and beer don't need to be advertised there, they are ubiquitous. What you need is ads for heart disease clinics.
You are totally correct about why it's in Microsoft's best interest to make sure older software works on their newer operating systems.
So no one uses NT 4 any more, right? Wrong. There are still plenty of bussinesses that are dragging their feat and whining about MS cutting off support "so soon". Basically it comes down to money (they are too cheap to buy an upgrade) and the fact that it still works fine for them.
The problem is with the migration from NT domains to Active Directory. At this point, I think most of the NT machines out there are domain controllers. I'm sure there are a few desktops running NT Workstation just as there are desktops still running Windows 95 but those are the die-hard "if it ain't broke..." people. For the rest, it's only partly about the direct OS expense, there's also the hardware for the servers (most likely) and all the CALs for the clients. Migrating to Active Directory is a bitch; for small outfits there's a lot to learn while still trying to do their routine work and for bigger outfits there's the above mentioned expenses and the labor of dealing with so many desktops and users.
I'm sure Linux has won a number of converts who chose to switch to a Samba domain in favor of doing the AD migration. I would consider it except A) we're a part of a larger organization with which we need to interoperate and B) I really think GPOs will be very useful to us.
Indeed, I was thinking of the Marauder's Map as being like a PDA with a map and everyone's tagged with WozNet.
I also thought there should be more magic that emulates Muggle technology so I was pleased when I came to the Extendible Ears as a magical substitute for various forms of bugging (I was disappointed by Rita in the previous book).
I think it's good to ask Mr. Undercofler these questions because so far the information about "original content" has been extremely vague. You probably haven't signed a release which would allow the commercial distribution (which is what a deal with Napster would be) of any performance or composition by you so I doubt it's going to "just happen."
The panel is about P2P file sharing and was scheduled before the Napster deal was made (or finalized at least). While having someone from Eastman on the panel might make sense they do have someone from the Yellowjackets to represent the "creatives." The Yellowjackets press and sell CDs which probably makes the topic more relevant to them than to most Eastman students (that's not meant as a value judgement at all).
This wasn't leaked, the link is to a press release from the UofR and Roxio (owns Napster). It's also the top story in the current issue of the Campus Times. Previous issues of the Campus Times have had stories about the university investigating making this kind of deal (the Napster service part, not the "original content" part). You may find this Q&A page informative.
At this point they're not specifically making the Napster service a part of tuition so in a sense, you may be paying for it. Of course the release says they plan on making the service available to non-dorm residents too. The university has a lot of revenue beyond tuition or room & board. They're also doing this deal to reduce the amount of bandwidth used, thus saving money. I doubt the money saved on bandwidth will cover the cost of the Napster deal but if a significant number of students stop using other means of getting music and switch to Napster, it'll make a real difference.
I'll take your word for it because I'm not going to go over to a dorm with a laptop to try it out. It sure would be nice if these kinds of things were documented somewhere. I found out about the per-week cap from the Campus Times, it sure wasn't on a university site!
www.rochester.edu has PHP, mail.rochester.edu, the only university server students have accounts on, doesn't. At RIT, students have their home directories on www.rit.edu where they can use SSL, use their own CGIs, in addition to PHP. I'm not really a web guy so I don't know what else is there but it's pretty useful. I suppose the UR answer would be "use CIF," I don't know what it's like being on their server.
Email aliases or anything else was not a problem, I had root access on a good number of the machines on the network.
;)
Maybe you're the reason the Unix group is so paranooid
The article is about Napster, your own post is about Napster. You must have been wearing your tin foil hat when you wrote "this" and "it" but expected people to read your mind to know you were referring to all forms of DRM'd music.
The AC claimed the cap was at UR, they weren't talking about RIT. I'm not sure how those graphs are supposed to prove your point anyway :)
It looks like I was wrong anyway, sorry AC. Gee, silly me for thinking such a thing would be documented somewhere! I still haven't found any mention of rate limiting but I did find an article the campus newspaper from August 2003 saying there was a per-student/per-week outbound cap.
ResNet limits student use of uploading bandwidth (reg. required)
"ResNet is setting its per-week limit at 12 outbound gigabytes per student per week, which is comparable to about 17 CDs and three to four DVDs."
Frankly, that's a lot of bandwidth and seems pretty resonable for a residential network. And that's just uploads, there's not cap on downloads, according to the article. But across-the-board rate limiting, especially as little as 10KB/sec, sucks. I experienced problems with something like this at my wife's college. I was trying to setup an rsync backup script to backup her laptop to my home computer and the transfers were crawling. After a lot of messing around with other things, I determined it was something the college was doing on their ResNet. Basicaly we hat do wait until she came home to do the initial sync then the nightly runs could complete because it just wasn't that much data.
What does Napster have to do with P2P?
Duh. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., is a legal service which is trying to supplant the illegal distribution of music via P2P protocols. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., does not use P2P protocols in its service. We all know this, you are not +1 Informative.
I don't see anyone here "lauding" or "cheering this on." I certainly don't think these Napster deals at universities are a good idea.