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Monday, August 10
Domains for sale
I'm clearing out some extra domains I've registered. All
of the domains are being brokered through BestDomains.
Here's how the bidding works: if you meet the asking price,
you automatically get the domain. If you bid less than the
asking price, I will either accept, reject, or counter the
bid.
Incidentally, I'm willing to take offers far below the
asking price for the last two, which are popular
misspellings of "chocolate."
News
Zoom
has updated K56flex to V.90 firmware dated August 5th for
the Zoom 2845, 2848, 2849, and 2849A. (Thanks, Jeff Clark!)
Margaret
Kane of PC Week reports that BellSouth has asked the FCC
to treat calls made over the Internet as interstate calls.
They are currently regulated as local calls.
Wednesday, August 12
Point-Topic
reports progress on the "digital case" extension to V.90
that would allow higher speeds when both the client and the
server have digital lines. The working name for the proposed
modulation is V.adm (for "all digital mode").
Panamsat
has completed an investigation into the failure of the
Galaxy IV satellite in May. The loss of the satellite in May
caused most North American pagers to stop working for
several days.
Bell
Atlantic employees returned to work after a 58-hour
walkout.
Xircom
has a new line of RealPort PCMCIA card modems.
John Childers noticed that Shark
Multimedia has new K56flex firmware and beta V.90
firmware.
New Portmaster V.90 code
Curtis Coleman and Doug McClure noticed that Lucent has
new
V.90 beta firmware for the U.S. and Canadian versions of
the Livingston Portmaster III. Previous versions didn't
interoperate with Rockwell V.90 client modems, though they
would still work at K56flex speeds with Rockwell clients.
According to the release
notes for the new ComOS 3.8b19, "Rockwell 1 MEG V.90
clients are now supported. Rockwell 2 MEG V.90 clients were
already supported." That second sentence is a little
confusing, since the earlier release notes on the FTP site
simply said that V.90 isn't supported with Rockwell clients.
At any rate, this is good news. I've amended the sections of
the V.90
Upgrade FAQ that mention the Portmasters.
More about domain names
Following Monday's news, several people emailed me to
find out more about registering domain names. The ultimate
authority is InterNIC.net,
the company in charge of domain name registration in the
U.S. (Don't confuse them with Internic.com, who are a bunch
of scammers who overcharge people for domain name
registration.) From InterNIC's page, you can use the whois
utility to see if a domain is already registered.
The biggest mistake beginners make is using URLs to
determine if a domain is taken. Sure, www.62k.com
doesn't have a DNS entry, and there's no web site there, but
the 62k.com domain is registered (to me, in fact). The whois
utility is the only reliable way to determine if a domain is
available.
A great new tool for researching domains is Namestake.
Besides using whois to determine if the domain is already
registered, Namestake will find similar domains. I was
surprised to discover that 56k.org and 56k.net have been
registered. When I searched for aodi.com, I found out that
someone else has ao-di.com.
Namestake also checks the domain against the U.S. Federal
trademark database. That's particularly useful, because
registering a name that infringes on a registered trademark
can create an expensive legal tangle. Namestake has a pretty
good domain
name primer. For even more information, visit igoldrush.
The information
category on their links page has some especially good
material.
August 14
MindSpring announced
the beginning of V.90 upgrades across their network, and
posted an upgrade
schedule.
Nicholas Negroponte weighs in with his thoughts on
bandwidth in the latest Wired.
A Diamond Multimedia press
release states that 1500 ISPs now support Diamond's
Shotgun technology for bonding
multiple phone lines together for speeds of up to 112K.
Excite
is covering the explosion of the U.S. Titan rocket. The
rocket's payload was an $800 million military spy satellite.
Lucent init strings
I had a list of commands in the V.90
Upgrade FAQ for controlling V.90 on Lucent modems, but I
discovered it was incomplete. What I didn't realize was that
different Lucent chipsets use different commands for
controlling V.90. This is the complete list for all Lucent
chipsets:
For host controller Lucent Apollo chipsets (LT Win Modem)
and Lucent Mars chipsets (LT PCI Win Modem), commonly used
in pre-installed OEM modems, and available as retail units:
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Enable V.90
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-V90=1
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Disable V.90
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-V90=0
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See current -V90 setting with explanation
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-V90? in a terminal
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For Lucent Venus chipsets, a full modem with controller,
used primary in standard retail modems, including internals,
externals and PCMCIA cards:
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K56flex only (V.90 disabled)
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S109=0
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K56flex or V.90*
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S109=1
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V.90 only (K56Flex disabled)
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S109=2
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* Which protocol will be used? Assuming that the ISP
supports both, it depends on the firmware. Some firmware
versions will prefer K56flex, others will prefer V.90.
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