I was patiently waiting in line at the cafeteria today to get my lunch when I caught sight of the first page of my university monthly paper: "OIT bans WOrld of Warcraft." I usually do not pay attention to the paper, but I was somehow attracted to reading it because of its flashing title.
It turned out, they were some rather interesting news and theory in it.
Here is part of the article.
In response to multiple brief power interruption earlier in the semester, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) announced Friday that it will be enacting a campus-wide band World Of Warcraft (WoW). OIT is also exploring other options to prevent future power outages, but will enforce the Ban starting Monday April 9.
According to Director of infrastructure and Suppoert Michael Carlin, the outages were part of an elaborate domino effect set off by tremendous bandwidth usage in the residence halls and campus apartments. The end effect of these outages was hours of downtime to the school network services. All those are served by two Pentium III-based Compaq computers, one in the Public Policy building and the other in the Engineering Building.
On February 7 the first outage occurred when a squirrel that had run into the public policy building bit into the power cable of the 866MHz computer there, causing a short circuit tripping the breaker for the room. The momentary power disruption brought all campus network services to a halt. The squirrel was electrocuted and died instantly.
After replacing the damaged power cable, OIT assumed that the incident was a fluke. Two weeks later, though, a second squirrel darted into the Engineering building, chased frantically by OIT staff. Within seconds it chomped down on the power cable of the 1000MHz computer stationed there and a similar power disruption occurred.
Biology Department Chair Lasse Lindahl was speechless when confronted with the idea that heavy internet traffic had caused erratic behavior in UMBC's squirrel affected in bizarre ways by the magnetic. He commented, "I guess I can see how the high bandwidth use could cause a strong enough filed to emanate from underground wires and freak out th squirrels."
According to statistics compiled by Mark Cather, 90% of Bandwidth consumed by students can be traced to WoW usage.
This is where I stopped and thought to myself "Whoa, that is unbelievably s***ty! How is this even possible and the Chair of the Biology Department making such ridiculous statement?" And A Pentium III even if it is for network services...
I was baffled and I looked at the newspaper's date I saw "December 25, 2087"... They had had me.
But still, I am actually doing some research as to know why the squirrels at my school are acting so "erratically." Who knows, I might find that their behavior is related to the tremendous usage of Bandwidth due to Torrenting.
