Vindication

A while back I went with representatives from UMBC and EDUCAUSE to discuss ongoing legislation concerning college campuses and filesharing (Student Government Meets Federal Government). This recent article from Ars Technica vindicates my contentions to fellow students, campus administrators, and on Capitol Hill that the music business is changing. The solution to the "problem" is not to ask colleges to "develop a plan" to fight filesharing, nor is it to force colleges to "encourage the use of legal alternatives" by sinking money into abominable startups like Ruckus. Rather, it is the music industry's responsibility to embrace the digital era and eliminate filesharing not through force, but by providing a quality product.

This article is an excellent read and contains the numbers to back it up - numbers I am inclined to believe as opposed to some of the outrageous claims being haphazardly slung around by some.


A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008

Webmail (@UMBC.edu) - Follow Up

In response to my recent post about UMBC's webmail system, SGA President Jay Lagorio sent a copy to Collier Jones.

At the end of the correspondence I found out that it is, in fact, possible to enable HTML display by default for the webmail interface. From the main webmail page, follow these steps:

Options -> Display Preferences -> Show HTML Version by
Default

Thanks to those who helped give me this answer and I hope this information will be useful to others in the future.

Webmail (@UMBC.edu)

While on my own computer I have all of my email accounts configured through Outlook, I often find the need to access my UMBC.edu email account via the web-based interface. While for the most part this system works relatively well, one of my ongoing dissatisfactions with the setup is its lack of HTML support. Many of the newsletters UMBC sends out, along with mass emails from several organizations and newsletters to which I subscribe. While many emails do contain links to HTML versions that can be viewed in a browser, I have noticed that some of UMBC's emails do not include this feature, instead rendering only as a mass of links and bracketed HTML code.

This prompts me to ask the question, is it possible to add HTML support to our web-based email client? That being impossible, could we instead promote in-house the sending of plaintext option emails with links to view the formatted version outside of the webmail client?