Best one yet.
Month: November 2008
Boston College Drops Student E-mail Accounts
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Boston College has decided to stop offering students e-mail accounts beginning next year. Instead they have set up an e-mail forwarding system, so each student is assigned a Boston College alias that then forwards to whatever personal e-mail system the students are using.
Some of the comments reflect what seems to be the prevailing IT view in academia about university-provided e-mail accounts: if they don’t use the e-mail account we give them, we can’t be sure any e-mails our faculty/administrators send actually reach them.
Which is certainly true. Just as it is true that unless we assign all students on-campus mailboxes that they must check, we can’t be certain any snail mail we send them actually reaches them. And unless assign students to a university-provided voice mail system that they must check on a regular basis, we cannot be certain any phone calls we make to students will actually reach them.
I’ve never understood the rationale for treating e-mail communications any different in this regard from voice/physical mail accounts. Most students would find having to manage a university voice mail/physical mailbox system a major headache, and clearly a lot of students find it annoying to have universities assign them yet another e-mail account they need to check.
Given the budget crunch that many universities seem to be facing, why are they in the student e-mail business at all?
Timothy B. Lee Makes Persuasive Case Against Network Neutrality Regulations
The Cato Institute recently published Timothy B. Lee’s thorough examination of proposals to regulate ISPs to ensure “network neutrality.” Lee persuasively argues that doing so would be a mistake that would likely have long-term unintended consequences.
Lee’s argument against network neutrality is two-pronged. First, he argues that proponents of network neutrality laws/regulations vastly overestimate both the power of ISPs and the benefits that would accrue to an ISP that decided to wholesale violate the end-to-end principle of packets. When Comcast decided to interfere with the BitTorrent protocol, for example, not only was this very quickly discovered, but the public outcry quickly forced the company to backtrack. Similarly, Lee notes we’ve already seen a business model predicated on the idea of privileging a company’s own favored content over that of the vanilla Internet. That was, after all, AOL’s model and look how well it worked for them.
On the other side of the equation, Lee argues that any regulation could have long-term unforseen consequences, much as previous well-intentioned efforts to regulate interstate commerce, the telephone system, and air travel had. In each case, laws intended to benefit consumers ended up killing innovation for decades and costing consumers in higher prices.
Part of the innovation-killing in network neturality regulation would be introducing legal uncertainties that could persist for years in an industry where innovation frequently seems to be measured in months. For example, consider the problem of network jitter in multimedia applications,
As previously discussed, random delays in packet delivery (called “jitter”) degrade the performance of latency-sensitive applications. Of course, some of the major broadband providers are also telephone companies, and these firms may be tempted to increase the jitter of their networks in order to discourage competition from VoIP services. Such a strategy would sidestep some of the difficulties that would come with a strategy of explicit packet filtering because it could be applied indiscriminately to all traffic without significantly degrading the quality of nonlatency-sensitive applications such as websites and e-mail. On the other hand, it would degrade the quality of latency-sensitive applications like network gaming and remote IPTV
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In other cases, jitter may have innocent explanations, but network owners may choose not to perform network upgrades that would reduce it. In still other cases, a network owner might deliberately introduce jitter but pretend it had made the change that caused it for unrelated reasons. It could be quite difficult for a regulator to distinguish among these cases. Of course, a network owner under a network neutrality regime will never admit that it is increasing jitter on its network. So the FCC could be forced to second-guess the complex network- management decisions of network owners.
Lee raises a lot of interesting questions that proponents of network neutrality are going to have to address.
XBOX 360 NXE Update
So early this morning my XBOX 360 downloaded and installed the NXE update which overhauls the visual interface for the XBOX as well as adds Netflix streaming to the device (rather than having to use third party software).
The XBOX interface is, for the most part, a vast improvement. The original XBOX interface was extremely ugly and nonintuitive. The new one is pretty and a lot easier to figure out what to do next.
The Netflix streaming is a mixed bag. One the one hand, it works a lot better than the third party solution I was using did. Specifically, fast forward and reverse never really worked when viewing Netflix streams. The official Netflix app does suppor that.
On the other hand, the third party app sorted all of the things in my Instant Queue in nice alphabetical system of folders and subfolders. So if I wanted to the second Disc of the Voltron series, I’d scroll down to the “V” folder, then wait a second for it to refresh and select the Voltron disc, and then finally it would list all the episodes and I’d select whatever episode I wanted to watch.
The official Netflix app uses a lameass coverflow-like setup which is bad enough. But it also sorts the queue by strict order rather than alphabetical. So if I want to watch Voltron I have to scroll through all of the DVD covers that are in completely arbitrary order until I get to the correct one. I’d at least like the option to sort alphabetically rather than by queue order.
Good Riddance PC Magazine
Teleread notes that PC Magazine will no longer exist as a print publication, though its website will continue on. I’ve always thought PC Magazine exhibited utter incompetence — how else to explain the continued feature spot that the clueless John Dvorak continued to get in the magazine right up until the end.
But don’t take my word for its incompetence — check out the PC Magazine website for what must be one of the most hideous, overcomplicated web designs anywhere. Just for fun I copied the HTML to the front page into my text editor and counted all the instances of “http” to figure out just how many links are on that single page.
The final tally was 378. Even Yahoo! was never that insane.
Asshats at Sony Pull Netflix/XBOX Streaming of Columbia Pictures Films
Tomorrow, Microsoft pushes out an update to the XBOX 360 that, among other things, allows Netflix subscribers to watch streamed videos from that service on the XBOX. And today — purely by coincidence — all Columbia Pictures movies and TV shows are blocked from being streamed to the XBOX.
Columbia Pictures, of course, is owned by Sony. So instead of streaming them, I’ll just have to get that Family Guy boxed set in my Netflix queue and see if somehow I can figure out a way to overcome the impenetrable DRM on the DVDs to rip them to my server.