On Tue, 2003-06-03 at 18:47, John Carter wrote: > Except she is permanently pissed that Canty University is too cheap to > provide 'net access as part of the course fees. > > I shouldn't wonder, given the fairly steep course fees, that many other > Canty students feel aggrieved at this user pays gone psycho attitude. > (especially when they realise that globally speaking, they are being > "had") Administravia 1. If, as a student, you have an IT grievance, you can contact your friendly student rep' on the University IT Committee: me :) 2. Bitching about anything in private will not get anything done; it is good you bitched about this publicly :) (The UCSA is poor at telling people who the reps are.)
Now, as your student rep I feel obliged to inform you that I will screw the system as much as possible if IT brought in flat-fee Net charging. The students who only send the occasional email will be paying heavily to allow me to daily "apt-get upgrade" my unstable Debian box. Net traffic costs, and the only fair way to recover the costs is on a user-pays basis. IIRC the total Net bill for the Canterbury was close to $1.5M, with the majority of that being students, lets say $1M. I can't remember how many EFTS [1] attend Canterbury, but I do not think that the fees increase will be trivial. Add to that people downloading more because "I've already paid for it". The user-charging is fair, and (believe it or not) just passing on costs. (I've seen the bills from Telecom.) [1] Equivalent Full Time Student -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~mpj17/
