Drink of the w eek: Absinthe minded A&E p. 3 I feel unsafe on campus Opinion p. 5
iPhone 4S Review Commentary
Serving San José State University since 1934
Tech p. 2
Tuesday October 1 8 , 2 0 1 1 Volume 1 3 7 , Issue 2 8
SPARTAN DAILY SpartanDaily.com
Bank f ee increase Down for the count boosts alternatives by Scott Semmler Staff Writer
SJSU formed a partnership with U.S. Bank in February 2011, and with it came the bank’s logo on the back of the card, access to a student bank account and no monthly fees. “The university contacted several banks with a request for information and U.S. Bank offered the best product for our students,” said SJSU Bursar Meg Deiss. She said the advantages of the new partnership for an SJSU student with a U.S. Bank account is no minimum balance and no maintenance fee. There are also two types of Tower Cards now, according to Deiss. “The Tower Card is the university’s ID card for students, faculty and staff,” she said. “And the Tower Card Maxx is also a university ID card for students, faculty and staff, but means that they have established a bank account, either checking or savings, with U.S. Bank and the card has the added feature of being a Visa debit card, which can be used for purchases both off and on campus.”
A look back at the legacy of Macs by Daniel Herberholz Copy editor
Twenty-two years ago today, the staff of the Spartan Daily saw a feat done under pressure come to fruition — with the power out and the campus closed because of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the SJSU newspaper was on the verge of missing a scheduled publication date for the first time in 55 years. “The newspaper across their masthead at that time said ‘We haven’t missed an issue since 1934,’” said Steve Sloan, who at the time worked in the Daily’s photography lab and is currently the Information Technology Consultant at SJSU. “It was and continues to be a very big deal. All of sudden the campus was closed … we can’t get to the systems, and we’re about to miss an issue.” Several writers and editors took the two Macintosh Pluses from the newsroom and traveled to a professor’s home in Willow Glen, Sloan said. “If it wouldn’t have been for the fact
Christopher King, a senior business major who recently switched to the Tower Card Maxx, said he is pleased with the features the card offers. “It has everything you need on one card,” he said. Recently, big banks like U.S. Bank have received attention by charging monthly fees for new checking accounts, which were free until earlier this year. “The economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations,” Bank of America stated in a press release. “We’ve decided to introduce a monthly fee for customers who use their debit cards for purchases.” The new regulations Bank of America cited are the restrictions Congress placed last year on how high banks’ debit fees could be raised. Many banks have responded by charging monthly fees for checking accounts. Less than half of all checking accounts do not carry a monthly fee, according to CNN.
SEE BAN K S PAGE 4 that they had a few (Macs) then, we wouldn’t have gotten the newspaper out,” he said. Journalism Professor William Tillinghast, who was then an adviser for the newspaper said the drive of the staffers was more at work than the computers. “They didn’t really care about the technology, just as long as they could get the paper out,” he said. However, the incident caused by an earthquake that, at a Richter-scale 6.9 magnitude had rocked the Bay Area and abruptly stopped Game Three of the World Series, was a precursor of the use of Apple computers for production — Sloan said it “became a proof of concept, because we proved that it could be done.” At the time, the newspaper staff did not rely on the Macintosh computers they had access to because they did not want to derail a successful workflow for production, Sloan said. Retired professor Clyde Lawrence, then the business adviser for the Spartan Daily, said because the newspaper staff was forced to produce the paper without it’s usual workflow, the situation was the nexus of what the newspaper would eventually do.
S J S U alumnus F erdinand L egaspi ( left) and K arl E spiritu grapple on the mats at the U .S . Open X V I Brazilian J iuJ itsu Tournament on S unday, Oct. 1 5 th at the E vent C enter.
SEE SPORTS PAGE 6
Committee discusses executive pay by Margaret Baum Staff Writer
J OBS’ I NFLUE NCE REACHES SJ SU “In those days it was photo typeset, and the front-end systems were all proprietary (so) you had terminals and a big brain to run the thing,” Lawrence said. “When Steve Jobs and the rest of them came up with the graphical interface, it really changed things.”
SEE MACS PAGE 4
J unior journalism major R afael Ochoa answers q uestions for Nancy E scobar, a junior public relations major, in the C lark Hall computer lab on W ednesday. Photo by Raphael Kluzniok / Contributing Photographer
Based on the outcome of their bout, L egaspi finished first in his weight division and skill level and E spiritu finished second. Photo by Nick Rivelli / Spartan Daily
A special committee created by the CSU Board of Trustees to look at the issue of executive compensation met to discuss the topic on Thursday, Oct. 13. According to Liz Chapin, spokeswoman for the California State University Chancellor’s Office, Chancellor Charles Reed and his staff created a list of institutions to compare the CSU system to. Since the California Postsecondary Education Commission, which was originally created by the state Legislature to aggregate data on higher education in California, no longer exists, the CSU has been working on the list of comparison institutions to be used in future reports that is more up-to-date and reflective of the CSU campuses, Chapin said. Reed presented this list to the Special Committee on Presidential Selection and Compensation at Thursday’s meeting, she said. Comparable schools in the document are grouped by region. Schools included in the western region in-
clude Arizona State University, University of Southern California, and University of Nevada, Reno, Reed College, and University of Colorado, Denver, according to the document. According to the board agenda for the meeting, it has been more than a decade since the trustees adopted a formal policy on executive compensation. “It is recommended that the trustees approve a policy of executive compensation for the record so that new members of The Board of Trustees, the CSU community, and state law and policy makers have a context for decisions about compensation by the Board of Trustees,” stated the report. According to the report, the CSU competes nationally to attract wellqualified candidates. “The compensation program, i.e., salaries and benefits, must be able to recruit, develop, and retain the highest quality workforce to serve the interests of the CSU in fulfilling its mission in the state, nationally, and globally,” read the report. According to Chapin, the document is not official, but it does lay a
foundation for discussion. The chancellor has sent the document to the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the state Department of Finance for review. “As CPEC no longer exists, a comparison list has not been updated recently for CSUs,” Chapin stated in an email. “To be more reflective of the size and scope of our 23 unique campuses, this list is broken down into groups based on budget, enrollment, research and other factors.”
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Spartan Daily
Serving San José State University since 1934 Volume 137 / Issue 28