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Tuesday, March 23
Cable giant ComCast
bought even bigger cable giant MediaOne in a US$60
billion deal.
Ascend is escalating the port density wars with the
Ascend
MAX TNT2. The upcoming unit will have interfaces for up
to three DS3s (T3s), for a total bandwidth of up to 135 Mbps
and the ability to service 2,000 56K or ISDN ports.
Boca Research has a Y2K patch for the Global
Village 56K Modem and Ethernet Card. The patch fixes a
date-related problem with the fax software.
Don Davenport writes:
Please note that [Hayes']
web site has shut down and fowarded to some
modem repair outfit. The FTP site is still up but hasn't
been updated lately. ftp://ftp.practinet.com.
I've got most of the drivers etc. from the ftp site
should you ever need them.
Technology escalation: "If you go to my web page, you
can send an email to my cell phone"
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I've been looking for ways to use the
alphanumeric paging ("short message service") of my
PCS phone lately. So far the best service I've
found is OmniBrowse.
Basic service is free, and includes weather, a
reminder service, lotto numbers, and up to ten
stock quotes. The premium service adds news,
sports, and horoscopes. OmniBrowse respects the
message length limits of your pager or cell phone,
and can either truncate long messages of split them
into multiple messages. The service relies on
email-to-pager
gateways, so you can have the same information
emailed to you even if you don't have one of these
devices.
Though PointCast-style push was a washout (when
was the last time you used PointCast?),
mobile push with small amounts of data may be a
viable idea. Just having weather data handy is
amazingly useful for planning walks, hikes, and
bike rides. Call it micropush or mobilepush, but
something is going to inhabit the stream of cell
phones, pagers, and PDAs that are walking out of
Best Buy and Office Depot. Paging companies are
already offering useful services in this area, and
may lead the way.
Have you found other ways to use alphanumeric
paging? Shoot me an email.
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Friday, March 26
As part of a larger reorganization, AOL
will layoff 700 to 1000 employees, with the layoffs
evenly split between the AOL and Netscape divisions. AOL has
about 12,000 employees.
As some of you know, I still work part time for U.S.
Internet. U.S. Internet and 16 other ISPs merged to
become OneMain. OneMain
went public yesterday on the Nasdaq, where it was the fifth
most-traded stock. Wired
and News.com
have coverage.
PC Magazine has an Internet
Explorer 5 First Look and a guided tour of the new
features.
Wired reports that Microsoft
fudged its previous figures for IE4 downloads.
Dana Baggett reports that the disconnect problems on his
Rev. A iMac were solved when he installed a new modem script
from xlr8yourmac.
Cell phones
Hooray! No more roaming charges in the Andes. The ITU is
working towards a global
cell phone standard.
Hooray for people who hate cell phones! An Israeli
company has come up with a device
to jam cell phone calls. The device has already been
outlawed in Australia, and existing U.S. laws apparently
forbid its use.
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