Napster starts on campus to mixed reviews
Napster officially opened for River Campus and Eastman residential students on March 15. However, the service was ready for downloading as early as the week of spring break. By Tuesday, about 600 students had registered with Napster. “It’s been a relatively smooth start, only a handful of students have needed help establishing their accounts,” Associate Vice President of University Public Relations Robert Kraus said.Information Technology Services staff and representatives of the Dean of Students Office, as well as Residential Life representatives, had been working in the preceding weeks to prevent any glitches in the system, and in addition have been on hand to help students in need of help.The same team is preparing to test students’ experiences with Napster. So far, students’ reactions have been mixed. Freshman Mike Iannotti has found the program relatively easy to use. “It’s great. So far the selection has been good,” he said. Mac users have also expressed problems. “I appreciate the school’s effort in trying to get us access to music legally, but the program is not designed to work on a Mac, and can only run very slowly using Virtual PC. So, I don’t really benefit from [Napster],” junior Becky Cortesi said. On the other hand, some think Napster is not worth the trouble. “After a few days of limited usage, it’s evident that this medium for curbing piracy is still in its very early stages, its infancy, and has quite a ways to go before it can effectively alter peoples downloading habits,” senior David Selby said. “Once technically efficient, I still doubt that the streaming content servers will convince the majority of students away from their current routines of downloading and sharing music illegally,” he said.Toward the end of the semester, the Napster implementation staff plans to organize meetings of students at the River Campus and Eastman to hear how well Napster is serving them. Currently, there is preliminary planning for a web-based survey of students who are eligible to sign up for Napster.
RTS bus route 70 will now stop at the Distillery
The Rochester Transit Service bus route 70 will stop at the Distillery at certain times. The bus, which provides an important link between the River Campus, the Medical Center, the Graduate Living Center and the South Campus will now make a detour to pass by the Elmwood Inn and the restaurant and bar Distillery at times of peak usage. Between 11:26 a.m. and 1:37 p.m. on weekdays, the bus will stop at the Distillery four minutes after leaving its Wilmot stop. All buses between 10:16 p.m. and 2:21 a.m. on weekdays and between 9:30 p.m. and 1:56 a.m. on weekends will also stop there. The new service is expected to be popular with students. “It would provide easier options for us to get good food off campus, for those students who don’t want to eat on campus or don’t have cars,” sophomore Jay Min said. “I would personally take advantage of this service. I think it’s a great idea.””I think it’s grand,” senior Steve Oswald said. However, he says that “I would probably not [use it], because my friend gives me a ride or I walk as a last resort.”
MERT attends national emerency conference
The Medical Emergency Response Team recently sent eight members to attend the 11th annual conference of the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation in Baltimore, Md. The conference, held from Feb. 27-29, included more than 400 representatives of campus Emergency Medical Services organizations from universities across the country. “The National Conference is a rich source of new ideas for our organization,” Director of Operation for MERT and sophomore Joshua Brown said. “[It] allows us to exchange different solutions to them.”Issues discussed at this year’s conference included insurance programs for EMS, club drugs, sexual assault, leadership development, professionalism in collegiate EMS and beyond, suicide and tactical EMS.Reporting by Kim Gorode, Jeff Keesing,Sandeep Madhur and Cyrus Levesque.
