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NEWS @ SYIX January 1, 1997 Vol 3 No. 1 HEY! Vol 3! RUMORS ------ But an interesting one... Telco's in the Internet Business are tracking usage, then selling the logs to marketing companies... Another rumor, PacBell Internet started with 51,000 accounts in their first quarter, wouldn't admit how many of them were free, and now won't admit to how many they actually have today... But there have been layoffs already, and the staff is down to less than 150 people... And another one (not really a RUMORS, this is fact) best.com, a SF based provider that has LOTS of customers in the bay area, uses a 25:1 modem ratio, and the users there get busy signals at 10:30am! Offering internet access at 19.95 x 25 people per line would almost double our income..... Then promptly ruin us. Or at least annoy the hell out of all of you! I would rather charge a bit more and keep the busy signals away and speed up. FUTURE SYIX HARDWARE -------------------- We are trying to get PacBell to provide us with a line called a PRI (Primary Rate Interface) that will allow us to purchase a "Livingston PM-3" which is a totally digital system to handle ISDN and dialup accounts with the same box, up to 46 of them in one chassis. Side benefit of all this is that they will also support the K56 protocol from Lucent, which is completely compatible with the 56k from Rockwell, both of which are NOT compatible with x2 from USR. This protocol is probably going to be the ITU-T approved one, and we will only support ITU-T approved protocols. The oldtimers around here remember the mess with V.FC and V.FAST and how neither won! V.34 became the standard, and there are a lot of V.FC and V.FAST modems still around that only work at 14.4.... We are not going to get into that mess at all. Of course, this all depends on PacBell being able to provide PRI here in Yuba City.... My recommendation, do NOT buy the x2 from USR until they guarantee that they will upgrade it to the ITU-T standard when its released. They had a proprietary protocol called HST for a long time, and I am afraid that is what they are trying to do now! A quote from Livingston.... And we are getting the PM-3 "If you are looking at the PM-3 for 56K start telling your users not to buy USR X2 units, but to wait for Rockwell or - better - Lucent modems. Lucent is claiming 45K uplinks, the others are 33.6K uplinks. So tell them the wait may get higher speeds. And since we're going with Lucent if they have Lucent there should be no problems. Rockwell modems should also work with us. But right now USR X2 will *not* work with the Lucent system. Eventually the ITU-T will produce a standard and we'll support that." (note, X2 has hit the advertising in a big way, small print on the bottom "X2 is only 52K max throughput due to FCC regulations." I still think we are in hurry up and wait mode for this product) DOMAIN NAMES ------------ Read an interesting quote, that makes perfect sense to me, and I wanted to share it with you. Its from PC Computing Magazine, and the article was discussing the "domain name" battles that have occurred and will occur. But the interesting point to it all was (talking about choosing a domain name)... "The key is to make it instantly identifiable--something that pedestrians would recognize in 3-foot letters on the side of a bus." Just how many domain names do you know of that would NEVER fit this? NET SLOW? --------- Yep, there are times when its downright annoying... Check out this quote, from the company that runs the "NAP's" where all this stuff gets moved in and out of. "MAE Congestion There have been problems at both MAE East and West recently with apparent packet loss on trunks between Gigaswitches. In both cases, the links themselves were not full, but the packets were being dropped on ingress to one of the Gigaswitches. The apparent reason is head-of-line blocking in that switch (Giga1 at MAE East, the Ames switch at MAE West) caused by one or more providers filling their FDDI access links. In both cases, we have been working with those providers to find ways to relieve pressure on their attachment ports, and have made some configuration changes to reduce the amount of packet drops." So the problems with "slow" response are being worked on, at a level WAY above us in the chain, but until its fixed, we will have "slow" access at times. Dropped packets are the cause of a slow connection, the system has to re-send the data until you actually get it. Just can't wait for 56k stuff, then we will REALLY see slow..... QUOTE ----- "We're only beginning to scratch the surface of the computer's capabilities. We do not know what lies around the next bend on the information superhighway. All we know for certain is that when we finally get there, we won't have enough RAM." Dave Berry from "Dave Berry in Cyberspace" MMF Dork of the Week -------------------- Since we all just love usenet Make Money Fast posts, this site highlights some of the more fun ones! Check it out.. You will enjoy this site if you HATE MMF posts as much as I do! http://www.clark.net/pub/rolf/mmf/mmfow.htm MS Internet Explorer -------------------- The NEW version of MS Internet Explorer for Win3.1x is AWESOME! Great news and mail handling, easy to use, and works! If you want to get a branded version from SYIX, just run to ftp.syix.com/pub/syix/iew31.exe and you will be GLAD you did! CLARINET -------- ClariNet news groups will be phased out this month, since only 1 or 2 of us are ever reading them, and Yahoo (news.yahoo.com) has better and faster info anyway, and it costs us over $300 a month to get Clarinet, its history.... WEBSITE MEMBERS!!! ------------------ I am re-designing the SYIX web site, it will be a new look (get a hint of it at the flood site) and as part of the upgrade I will be adding a scrolling/rotating banner ad at the top of the "members" page, and I want your banner! Please email me a 400x55 banner, no more than 256 colors, and I will put it in rotation with the others. Other than that, I will be putting the personal and commercial accounts on different pages, and just listing the text names, in columns, its too hard to find anyone on there now!!! SITE THIS MONTH --------------- Hey, I got 2 months worth of site to talk about!!! Gad, where to start.... GAMES! I know, you never play games on YOUR computer... But someone you know might! Check out this site, its Shockwave enhanced, so you will have to have the Shockwave plugin installed, but once you do, you will be amazed at what they have done to the net! Quite impressive, and no, you won't find me on the list of high scores, I never can find time to play games.... FILEZ! Hey, software! If you are just looking for the latest "TCP/IP" applications, you need only run to TUCOWS at http://www.tucows.com or http://tucows.tierranet.com/ BUT, if you are looking for ANY other piece of software out there, check out "FILEZ.COM", clean site, and it indexes LOTS of sites. Quite impressive, and not too hard to use. PATENTS This is cool, something REALLY useful on the Internet, or factual anyway. A place to do Patent searches! Including pictures. Quite fascinating, you can loose yourself for hours here, especially if you are like me and wonder just how those things really work.... Sponsored by IBM, and interesting! http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/ MAPS This is a cute site, by the US Census people, it allows you to create a map, almost any map, with lots and lots of options. Try some of them, you will be VERY surprised at how well it works! VIRUS SCARES We all see them, we share them back an forth with each other, and guess what, many of them are HOAXES! Really, the same stuff over and over again, with a new set of players each time. Check out the complete list of Virus and other hoaxes on the Internet, its a treat, and then next time someone tells you about the "Good Times Virus" you can laugh! http://kumite.com/myths/myths/ DICTIONARY Everyone needs a dictionary once in a while, and we all try to find that Websters to be sure we are right! Well, grab the CURRENT COMPLETE version from the source! Thats right, Websters is online! IS IT DOWN??? I know I have mentioned this before, but its a great site, answers the almighty question "Are you down?" the easy way! http://www.internetweather.com/ ENOUGH! Hey, I hope you enjoyed this bit of fluff, I am sorry about the delays in getting "Jan" out, now that its actually Feb 10.... I have to plead insanity, mine, since the flood problems and all the things around here have kept me WAY too busy lately, and then there is that procrastination thing.... Dave Overton dave@syix.com
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