Here we have the basis for an interesting empirical study.
I assume that those of you responsible for such things track traffic,
usage trends, etc. You probably have a good baseline of what Napster
traffic currently looks like. This is the "control group".
Enter our treatment: a small educational campaign bringing to users'
awareness (no, they don't read the AUP or TOS or anything else - can
they disagree? sure, and never use the service. is this feasible? no. so
no point in reading the AUP) about traditionally high traffic times, and
where to find the university network utilization website. A link off the
main university front page would probably be a good start.
The "experimental group" is then the data that you gather on network
utilization after the campaign has been put into effect.
For those who are busy, the total time to "administer the treatment" is
something like this:
- 30 second phonecall to campus newspaper to arrange for interview
- 5 minute interview about new initiative aimed at "saving the campus
network" or some such rhetoric; including a programming contest for a
network saturation notification applet with OPT-IN automated Napster
shutdown (winner gets $20 gift certificate to the campus bookstore)
- 2 minute phonecall to campus webmaster explaining the situation and
requesting a link on the main university homepage
- 30 seconds next time you're in the book store to pick up the gift
certificate
- 5 minutes to explain to student assistant that you need a webpage
where people can vote on the winning applet (so that you don't have to
touch the selection process) and, when the voting is over, download the
winning software. The newspaper interview should run on this page too.
- 1 hour of an SA's time to complete the above task.
So your total investment is under 15 minutes of your own time and about
1 hour of your SA's. Not much of a cost to give people the chance to do
the right thing. Then you can decide empirically whether they will or
not (because you're already analyzing usage data for trends anyway, so
that's no extra cost), and force them to turn off as a last resort if
you absolutely have to.
David
--
Impress your friends, anger the MPAA! Decode DVD's with 7 lines of PERL!
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
For more info, see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
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