Vassar Technology Today | Third parties offer alternatives to Vassar technology options

Matthew Leung Managing Editor

In 2002, Internet Explorer had a monopoly of 96 percent over the Web browser market before Firefox struggled to gain its current 10 percent share. This is one of countless stories in the technology market that show that there are always alternatives to better suit some user’s needs, no matter how dominant any one product or technology has become. This story creepily parallels the Vassar campus as outside companies progressively offer free advanced services that might just do a better job or serve as a complement to the technologies at Vassar that the community once solely used.

E-mail—still more reasons to use a backup

After October break of last semester, Computing and Information Services (CIS) lifted the restriction on the size of e-mail accounts so that there is no specific limit to the amount of data each e-mail account can hold. On the surface it looks like a boon to the many people who forward their Vassar e-mails to third-party accounts to create more storage space. Contrary to common expectations, this change actually creates more reasons for forwarding, because the more data a Vassar account holds, the slower it operates. An over-burdened account could strain the entire e-mail system if the account is many times larger than the average size of 150 megabytes (MB). CIS also contacts individual users when their e-mail accounts are significantly larger than the average 150 MB.

In addition to faster access, having a copy of all of your e-mails saved in a separate location serves as a backup for when Vassar’s e-mail does not work or is down for maintenance. Third-party services such as Gmail also offer more advanced options to sort, display and search through your messages if you do not use a client such as Outlook to archive and manage your messages. As for storage, Yahoo will start offering free unlimited e-mail storage in May.

Vspace faces tough competition

Vspace is an encrypted online storage space provided by CIS for file sharing. Unlike e-mail, there is a 650 MB restriction of total storage, which is about the size of a CD. With the increasing need to share large files like movies and albums that could easily fill several CDs, it seems like some competitive alternatives wouldn’t hurt. The Xdrive from America Online (AOL), for example, found at xdrive.com, offers five gigabytes (GB) of online storage for free, which is close to the storage space of eight CDs. Unlike Vspace’s cryptic interface, Xdrive offers user-intuitive interfaces for sharing different kinds of multimedia. And unlike Vspace, Xdrive is recommended to serve as a backup to your computer’s hard drive and includes software to automatically backup your computer. A similar service is MediaMax (mediamax.com), which offers 25 GB of free storage, or the storage space of about 39 CDs.

Alternatives to dorm telephones

With the popularity of cell phones, most students no longer use dorm phones. Yet, cell phones are not the only replacement for the traditional dorm telephone. The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) phone line at aimphoneline.com gives you a free local number that works like voicemail so you can listen to your messages via the Internet. It also offers software to receive calls from your computer with caller I.D. capabilities. To make outgoing calls from your computer or to listen to voicemail via telephone, it charges $14.95 a month. Giving out an AIM number might feel more secure than giving out your cell or dorm phone number. With Skype, which allows encrypted voice chats among computers, you can call regular telephones in the United States and Canada for $29.95 per year. Calls from your computer are encrypted until they reach the public-switched telephone network, at which point the call is as secure as any landline phone call.

Still better technology beyond Vassarland

Online third party solutions can not only handle your technology needs at Vassar, but also your fax (as with sites such as efax.com or myfax.com) and postal mail (remotecontrolmail.com)—almost for free. Technology analysts in eWeek and other publications report that Google is planning to provide a service called Gdrive that will be similar to Xdrive but provide unlimited storage. These free and rich offers from outside companies make it more and more tempting to shift dependence away from Vassar-provided technologies. For now, these offerings work well to complement what’s available at Vassar, but their developments hint at their ability to serve as replacements.