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Wired and PC WEEK report on Brent Townshend's lawsuit against Rockwell for patent infringement. The Wired story notes that Townshend presented the technology to Rockwell in 1995 under conditions of non-disclosure.
CNET
CNET has a feature piece with a good concept but specious reasoning. "10 technologies that don't stand a chance" tries to guess which hot technologies will be turning cold as ice. Sure, Push is a boner, and Java has a tough row to hoe, but how can CNET say that 56K and ISDN are lemons? Those two technologies have put millions more people on the net than ADSL and cable modems, which CNET fairly gushes over.
CNET's big beef with 56K is that most users won't actually achieve 56K. Well, duh. My Toyota won't go 150 miles per hour like it says on the speedometer, but it beats walking to work. CNET says that 43K was the top speed they saw in their tests, but those tests used phone line simulators instead of the real thing. I routinely get better results on my lines, and so do many of the readers in the 56K Modem Survey.
CNET has one thing right: television will never, ever catch on.
Logicode has extended their upgrade offer to December 30, 1997, and now offers K56flex modems as well as x2.
There's a new cable modem newsgroup, comp.dcom.modems.cable. It's a fairly new group, so some news servers won't yet carry it.
Shane Leland earns net.fame by finding the Jaton drivers and firmware updates at http://www.jaton.com/web/ddownl.htm#MODE.
Hayes firmware updates
Tan Hai Woo of Singapore asked me to remind everyone that the Hayes beta is for North America only:
I refer to your earlier report and the relevant posted web site by Hayes on the updater (to version 1.0xx) However, disappointly, like it says on the page, it's only for North America units only, not worldwide. And so I have found out, after updating it, the modem "refuses" to dial my ISP's 56K number (at all!), but fortunately I am able to surf at 33.6.
For North American residents, the latest Hayes beta firmware seems to be good. Matt Grim writes:
Thanks for a great web site. I was using the Hayes Accura external 56k 1.002 firmware beta code. Boy did it stink! I would get slow connections all the time. I found the news that there was a new release of the code up on the Hayes site from you.
I downloaded the 1.112 code and what a difference! I am enjoying 30+k downloads although I am having a little more trouble connecting to my ISP. They have Ascend routers and have been having 56k problems of their own...
Several readers noted Australian Hayes Accura V1.1 flash ROM upgrades at http://www.hayes.com/au/ (scroll down the page to find them). Note that these are intended for Australian users, and may not work correctly in other countries. See Tan Hai Woo's comments above about the problems of using North American firmware updates in Singapore.
56K.COM is written and maintained by Les Jones. Artwork by Mark Maxwell. Copyright 1997 Softwords.
