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News Archive for May 18 to 24, 1997

 May 24

Gary Ross sent in a juicy tidbit:

 

Thought you might find this interesting:

 

At a Mac Users Group meeting I attended last night (5/20/97), a USR rep gave a talk about 56k modems and stated that if we purchased USR 56k modems now and the adopted 56k standard differed from what we were sold, we would be upgraded to the new standard for no cost.

 

This is juicy stuff, because U.S. Robotics hasn't officially stated their modems will be upgradeable to the final ITU standard. When contacted, U.S. Robotics public relations had no comment.

 

MacWEEK reports that Global Village has shipped its desktop Macintosh and Windows modems in separate K56flex and x2 versions. Global Village has a press release. Global Village has created place holder pages for future firmware updates, which I've added to the firmware updates page. MacWEEK also reports that Global Village is preparing K56flex PCMCIA cards. O'Grady's PowerPage has an advance press release.

 

SMART Modular Technologies and Ascend Communications are teaming up to produce a combination ISDN/56K PCMCIA card for laptops, according to Business Wire.

 

Logicode has extended their 56K upgrade offer through June 30, 1997. Details are on our upgrade page.

 

Telebit and ITK Telecommunications AG of Germany are merging. ITK has a press release.

 

 May 22

PC World has a story about 56K modems. In their lab tests, x2 modems were about 1.7 times faster than 28.8 modems when transmitting a variety of file types. Also of interest are the 56K plans for some of the nation's largest service providers.

 

Lucent Technologies, co-creator of K56flex, will have a booth at the New York PC Expo, June 17-19.

 

Dan Rodgers is looking for OS/2 drivers for use with his Motorola ModemSURFR 56K and IBM Dialup for TCP/IP. I currently don't have any info on OS/2 drivers. If anyone has advice for finding OS/2 modem drivers, Dan and I would love to hear about it.

 

The World Wide Web of Windows has declared 56K.COM its Hot Windows Site of the Week. The reviewer stated " This site is relatively new (and so are the modems) yet nonetheless has already made an excellent contribution to the public for helping understand and take advantage of this new technology." A warm welcome to Hot Windows Site of the Week readers!

 

 

 May 20

Macworld has a review of the U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything 56K.

 

I updated a number of pages this weekend. The drivers page is a third larger and the firmware updates page is twice as big.

 

Diamond Multimedia is offering trade-ins on older SupraExpress modems, but the economics are somewhat delicate. The good news is that Diamond pays the cost (up to $9.95) of shipping your old modem to the company, and provides free UPS ground shipping for your new modem. The bad news is that the meager trade-in values ranges from $20 for an internal 14.4 to $45 for an external 33.6. The offer is only good if you buy directly from Diamond Multimedia and pay full list price. In contrast, CDW has the external speakerphone version for $20 below list. Your choice may come down to deciding which is a bigger hassle: selling your old modem, or filling out the upgrade paperwork and shipping your old modem to Diamond. The offer is good in the U.S. and Canada only, and expires June 30, 1997.

 

That first Diamond probably didn't thrill you, but this one might. Diamond is giving away one SupraExpress 56i PC modem every day through May 22. (Why is it that I only find out about these giveaways when they're almost over? Furrfu!)

 

If you'd prefer a U.S. Robotics x2 modem, No Wonder is giving one away this month. Unlike Diamond Multimedia, No Wonder gives you the choice of internal or external, Mac or PC.

 

 May 19

56K.COM turns two tomorrow. Two weeks, to be exact. One of the questions my friends ask is "how many hits are you getting?" Every web author and webmaster wants to know the same thing about their site. Today I'd like to talk about web page statistics and announce public access to 56K.COM's stats.

 

You've probably noticed the counter on the front page. People will tell you that there are a lot of limitations to counters, and they're right. Image counters don't log access from people using text-based browsers like Lynx, they don't count accesses from Netscape and Internet Explorer users who have graphics turned off, and counters - like any other method of measuring web visitation - are partly defeated by browser caches and caching proxy servers.

 

The flip side is that having a counter is fun, and it gives me a quick glimpse at the number of readers who visit my site. 56K.COM has always had a counter, but the counter only shows accesses for the front page. I could put it on other pages, but it would affect page loading time and server load, which is another disadvantage of a counter.

 

The other way to get access statistics is to analyze the web server logs. Every time your browser interacts with a web server, the server logs that information to a text file. You'll have to contact the webmaster for your site to find out if you can access to your server logs. If you do, you have access to a treasure trove of information about visitation.

 

The counter showed me how many times the front page had been visited. I was curious to find out how often the other hundred plus pages on the site were visited. By analyzing the logs, I found that, on average, each visitor to the front page visits 2.5 other pages. So, I can multiply the front page counter by 3.5 to get a quick estimate of the total number of web page accesses since the page went live on May 6.

 

This weekend I made 56K.COM's web server statistics publicly available. You can view them on the stats page, along with an explanation of what each statistic means. The stats show that in 56K.COM's second week of existence, we served:

• 382 megabytes of data
• 30,000 HTML pages
• 50,000 total files

Those are impressive figures for a new site, and I find them very encouraging for the future success of 56K.COM. See you tomorrow! - Leslie

 

 

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