"...is a crazy fucked up state bureaucracy" That's redundant no?
I don't think I missed the point. The bottom line is that they have complete control and the service that they offer to the students is exactly that, a service. They are not required by any regulation to provide the amount of access that they do and bottom line is they can stop it whenever they want and continue to take in the funding and there is nothing the students can do but no go to Clemson. There are thousands upon thousands of other Universities across this great Nation of ours that certainly must offer similar facilities to Clemson. With that said everyone at Clemson has the freedom of choice to move on. It's totally up to them.
I am glad to see to that you have expanded your vocabulary beyond your first post as well. Wow, blather, man, that almost gets you a double word score.
Clemson is a land grant public university. They receive funding from tuition and from the state. Whatever monies they cannot receive from the state have to be gained from other places, namely the students. That will be the same in nearly all institutions. There is no one that will attempt to hide that from you.
Regarding Clemson and DCIT, I was a CS student and also worked for DCIT supporting the employees for 3 years.
The state of computing has increased by leaps and bounds. From what I last heard Clemson has the 3rd largest Novell network in the world with over 200,000 objects in their tree. Clemson has instituted a program called the "Virtaul Desktop" allowing students to have roaming dekstops and settings that follow them anywhere on campus. They also have created, still in it's infancy, a program called CLE whose goal is to allow students to hand in papers and share materials electronically. They are not just sticking with a minimal network that works, they are trying to push it to do things that will make the lives of everyone at Clemson better.
In the dorms students have been given the abilities to connect to the clemson network. As for the password protection. Who in their right mind would allow anyone, anywhere on campus to simply plug in and wreak whatever havoc they may from a Clemson connection? That would be ludicrous, hence the pw scheme they have in place.
The 50 bucks a semester students pay does not go all to DCIT. In actuality closer to 5 bucks a student goes to DCIT to pay for all aspects of their computing. That covers computers, facilities and staff.
Regarding the comment about two dorms that are most expensive being wired first. You left out that they were also the most recently built, being finshed in either 97 or 98. Obviously making them the first choice. The others were wired as quickly as possible while also trying not to disturb the dwellings of the students which means only being able to do the necessary wiring during the summer. 3 months to wire 5,000 rooms?
Regarding the college of Eng and Science. That network is worse than that of the rest of the university. For the CS dept there is a mediocre staff of Grad students that fits in network and computer support between finishing their masters. They only recently upgraded the computers in the CS labs from the ones they bought 4 years ago and have only recently changed a program that taught ADA to one that taught JAVA and some other languages that more than 2 percent of the students could use.
The DCIT staff may be considered mediocre because DCIT faces the same challenges that all state run institutions and most all companies face, providing the salaries and benefits that will make computer people happy in their current positions. Having seen it first hand most ppl that will work in a state job like Clemson work their knowing that the pay sucks but also knowing that it is a place to start, that the State is more than willing to pay for training and knowing also that as soon as they have their certs they can leave. That's the computing industry today.
Now all that aside, the internet connection at Clemson was very bad for quite awhile and they knew that. We are talking 100 percent utilization from 9am - 2am everyday of the week. But again Clemson faces beuracracy to get anything done. They can't just spend the money to get things changed. They had 3 T1's for nearly 20,000 people. They knew adding another T1 wasn't the solution but they also knew there was no way they could get approval for $16,000 a month for a T3(that is what they were quoted at the time). Clemson is part of the Internet 2 project and has held up that end with the vBNS connection. As for general Internet access they moved things as quickly as they could. They now have 10mbit with 20Mbit burst access.
Speeds are terrific and Clemson wants to see that it stays that way. To do this, they have to make decisions to protect their best interests, speed and funding. Whether or not they receive funding from TigerTel is irrelavent. They receive funding form the university which is funded patrially by TigerTel. To protect that speed they will take into consideration anything that they consider bandwidth "hungry" such as dialpad. Now whether it uses 10k/sec or 5k/sec, if there are 100 people using it it gets to be a problem. By making the decision early to block the site they are preventing problems down the road. Whether they are actually interested in "evaluating" it's impact on university facilities I don't know.
As someone pointed out earlier, these facilites belong to Clemson and is their concern so they will take the necessarry actions to ensure that they can please the majority of the users.
As a side comment, just as the media has always done, they have brought to light an issue that may have affected a minimal number of people just to make a story. So they blocked dialpad.com. How many people at Clemson really knew about it in the first place? But now that The Tiger has made an issue of it, more people will get on the bandwagon and cry wolf even though they don't really understand what the service is or what it can offer them.
If ther are any issues to be raised, it shoudl be things like the rising cost of tuition at all universities, the cost of books, and dare I say the parking situation? If there is a bandwagon to be started, it should have more to do with parking at Clemson. In the fiscal year(July-June) of '97 and '98, Clemson's Parking Services took in more than 1.5 million in parking fees and tickets. They have a staff of approximately 20 people and say that the rest of the money goes to parking lot maintenance.
Or how about Clemson athletics? The cheapest tix to a football game is 25 bucks and IPTAY gets nearly all the revenue from that.
DCIT strives to provide a network that is easy to use and can provide the maximal amount of services to the largest number of people.
For all you LAN admins, think of the number of businesses that block streaming audio and video because bandwidth is in high demand. It's simply the same situation.
I no longer work for DCIT so I do not speak on their behalf. I am just sharing what I have been through and what I have seen and heard.
Flame me if you like but believe me, I don't take it personally.
Slashdot Mirror
"...is a crazy fucked up state bureaucracy"
That's redundant no?
I don't think I missed the point.
The bottom line is that they have complete control and the service that they offer to the students is exactly that, a service. They are not required by any regulation to provide the amount of access that they do and bottom line is they can stop it whenever they want and continue to take in the funding and there is nothing the students can do but no go to Clemson. There are thousands upon thousands of other Universities across this great Nation of ours that certainly must offer similar facilities to Clemson. With that said everyone at Clemson has the freedom of choice to move on. It's totally up to them.
I am glad to see to that you have expanded your vocabulary beyond your first post as well. Wow, blather, man, that almost gets you a double word score.
This Post will be long - you are forewarned.
Clemson is a land grant public university.
They receive funding from tuition and from the state. Whatever monies they cannot receive from the state have to be gained from other places, namely the students. That will be the same in nearly all institutions. There is no one that will attempt to hide that from you.
Regarding Clemson and DCIT, I was a CS student and also worked for DCIT supporting the employees for 3 years.
The state of computing has increased by leaps and bounds. From what I last heard Clemson has the 3rd largest Novell network in the world with over 200,000 objects in their tree. Clemson has instituted a program called the "Virtaul Desktop" allowing students to have roaming dekstops and settings that follow them anywhere on campus. They also have created, still in it's infancy, a program called CLE whose goal is to allow students to hand in papers and share materials electronically. They are not just sticking with a minimal network that works, they are trying to push it to do things that will make the lives of everyone at Clemson better.
In the dorms students have been given the abilities to connect to the clemson network.
As for the password protection. Who in their right mind would allow anyone, anywhere on campus to simply plug in and wreak whatever havoc they may from a Clemson connection? That would be ludicrous, hence the pw scheme they have in place.
The 50 bucks a semester students pay does not go all to DCIT. In actuality closer to 5 bucks a student goes to DCIT to pay for all aspects of their computing. That covers computers, facilities and staff.
Regarding the comment about two dorms that are most expensive being wired first. You left out that they were also the most recently built, being finshed in either 97 or 98. Obviously making them the first choice. The others were wired as quickly as possible while also trying not to disturb the dwellings of the students which means only being able to do the necessary wiring during the summer. 3 months to wire 5,000 rooms?
Regarding the college of Eng and Science. That network is worse than that of the rest of the university. For the CS dept there is a mediocre staff of Grad students that fits in network and computer support between finishing their masters. They only recently upgraded the computers in the CS labs from the ones they bought 4 years ago and have only recently changed a program that taught ADA to one that taught JAVA and some other languages that more than 2 percent of the students could use.
The DCIT staff may be considered mediocre because DCIT faces the same challenges that all state run institutions and most all companies face, providing the salaries and benefits that will make computer people happy in their current positions. Having seen it first hand most ppl that will work in a state job like Clemson work their knowing that the pay sucks but also knowing that it is a place to start, that the State is more than willing to pay for training and knowing also that as soon as they have their certs they can leave. That's the computing industry today.
Now all that aside, the internet connection at Clemson was very bad for quite awhile and they knew that. We are talking 100 percent utilization from 9am - 2am everyday of the week. But again Clemson faces beuracracy to get anything done. They can't just spend the money to get things changed. They had 3 T1's for nearly 20,000 people. They knew adding another T1 wasn't the solution but they also knew there was no way they could get approval for $16,000 a month for a T3(that is what they were quoted at the time). Clemson is part of the Internet 2 project and has held up that end with the vBNS connection. As for general Internet access they moved things as quickly as they could. They now have 10mbit with 20Mbit burst access.
Speeds are terrific and Clemson wants to see that it stays that way. To do this, they have to make decisions to protect their best interests, speed and funding. Whether or not they receive funding from TigerTel is irrelavent. They receive funding form the university which is funded patrially by TigerTel. To protect that speed they will take into consideration anything that they consider bandwidth "hungry" such as dialpad. Now whether it uses 10k/sec or 5k/sec, if there are 100 people using it it gets to be a problem. By making the decision early to block the site they are preventing problems down the road. Whether they are actually interested in "evaluating" it's impact on university facilities I don't know.
As someone pointed out earlier, these facilites belong to Clemson and is their concern so they will take the necessarry actions to ensure that they can please the majority of the users.
As a side comment, just as the media has always done, they have brought to light an issue that may have affected a minimal number of people just to make a story. So they blocked dialpad.com. How many people at Clemson really knew about it in the first place? But now that The Tiger has made an issue of it, more people will get on the bandwagon and cry wolf even though they don't really understand what the service is or what it can offer them.
If ther are any issues to be raised, it shoudl be things like the rising cost of tuition at all universities, the cost of books, and dare I say the parking situation? If there is a bandwagon to be started, it should have more to do with parking at Clemson. In the fiscal year(July-June) of '97 and '98, Clemson's Parking Services took in more than 1.5 million in parking fees and tickets. They have a staff of approximately 20 people and say that the rest of the money goes to parking lot maintenance.
Or how about Clemson athletics?
The cheapest tix to a football game is 25 bucks and IPTAY gets nearly all the revenue from that.
DCIT strives to provide a network that is easy to use and can provide the maximal amount of services to the largest number of people.
For all you LAN admins, think of the number of businesses that block streaming audio and video because bandwidth is in high demand. It's simply the same situation.
I no longer work for DCIT so I do not speak on their behalf. I am just sharing what I have been through and what I have seen and heard.
Flame me if you like but believe me, I don't take it personally.
-- Tom