An impressive Who's Who of computer and telephone industry players recently gathered to endorse Universal ADSL, a lightning fast method of accessing the Internet that might cost only slightly more than regular phone service. In this double-sized issue, NetBITS publisher Adam Engst examines the technology behind the hype. We also look at the cable-modem based @Home Network, explore the inner workings of browsers' bookmark files, field more comments about Adobe Acrobat, and sadly announce a temporary NetBITS hiatus.
Contents:
Copyright 1998 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved. To subscribe to our weekly list, email < netbits-on@netbits.net >. Thanks to our sponsors for their financial support of NetBITS.
Hiatus -- Folks, it's been a fun ride, but we must reluctantly announce that NetBITS is taking a hiatus until April for two reasons.
The first of those is that we haven't established the kind of reach that we felt was necessary to attract advertisers and make the publication self-supporting. We have over 20,000 subscribers and several thousand more people read the publication on the Web site each week, but on today's Internet, those numbers are chicken feed. NetBITS is the result of about 25 hours of work per week of five people's time, plus our guest writers' efforts, and though we enjoy this, we simply can't afford to do it for what we've been able to earn.
The other reason is that yours truly - Glenn Fleishman, NetBITS editor in chief - has unfortunately been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, one of the most treatable forms of cancer. It's been caught at an early stage, so my prognosis is excellent and I'm extremely upbeat. However, the weekly toll of putting out NetBITS coupled with alternating weeks of chemotherapy will be a bit much in the short term. (I appreciate any support, but my ability to answer email in the next few weeks as I begin treatment will be limited, and another staffer will likely take over email responses in the near future.)
If you've liked NetBITS and have a desire to do something positive, consider a contribution to The Leukemia Society, which is working for cures for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's Disease, and myeloma. It also assists those with these diseases and their families with financial and moral support. I am not in need, but many are.
< http://www.leukemia.org/docs/fs_help.html >
We've enjoyed the last few months, and we look forward to a return in April. Existing subscribers will remain on our mailing list, and you'll receive any updates or new issues. New subscriptions will be accepted during the hiatus, and the Web site will continue online with the search capability noted in last week's issue. Finally, we hope you enjoy this double-sized issue!
Thanks again, and we'll see you in April. NetBITS and I will both be back, better than before. [GF]
by Adam C. Engst < ace@tidbits.com >
The big news in the Internet world the last few weeks was the announcement of the Universal ADSL Working Group (UAWG), a collection of the industry's largest and most powerful companies, including Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, GTE, all of the regional Bell telephone companies, and a slew of networking companies. The goal of the UAWG is to promote the cause of Universal ADSL, a variant of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) that's designed to provide high-speed Internet access for consumers at prices below $50 per month. If you were wondering, the "asymmetric " means that you see much higher throughputs coming in than going out, much like today's 56K modems.
At the Beginning -- Before anything else, let's look briefly at current Internet connections, and why ADSL is so attractive as a technology for providing high-speed Internet access. Right now, most people connect to the Internet via modems, which operate over standard analog telephone lines (or Plain Old Telephone Service - POTS). Modems essentially turn digital information into analog - the screams you hear if you pick up an extension while a modem is connected - and then back into digital form again on the receiving end.
Modems have several problems. First, they're slow. Although so-called "56K " modems can receive information from your ISP at speeds up to 56 Kbps, it's almost unheard-of to reach that speed. And, they can only send information out to the Internet at speeds up to 33.6 Kbps. It's unlikely that modems will ever provide much more throughput because of the relationship between frequency, distance, and signal strength. Current FCC limits and phone company standards allow only a certain frequency range to be transmitted at a given signal strength or voltage. This restricts POTS lines to the current top throughput because hardware vendors just can't squeeze any more information within those proscribed limits. ADSL, as we'll see, breaks out of those bounds entirely. (See "Speed Jockeys on the Internet: Flying at 56K " in NetBITS-008 .)
< http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04451 >
Modems are also an inefficient use of the telephone network. When you use the Internet, you're generally using it in a "bursty " fashion - you download a Web page and then read it. While you're reading, you aren't using the connection, but because your modem is hogging the line, it can't be used by anyone else. This liability comes because standard analog telephone linesare circuit-switched - when you make a call, you "own " the circuit for the duration of the call. Circuit-switching makes sense for uses like voice calls, where silence has meaning, but they're a complete waste for Internet use, where silence is just dead air.
Because modems must dial up your ISP, you have to wait every time you want to connect. People using modems don't realize how annoying this is until they've used a dedicated Internet connection, which makes the Internet constantly available without delay. As an analogy, think back to when televisions took some time to warm up - "instant on " features were a major advance when they started to appear.
All of these factors have conspired to produce a strange economic model. ISPs can order phone lines cheaply because ISP phone lines never make any outgoing calls. The telephone companies hate that. Even worse, the average voice call (in California) lasts about 4 minutes and most people use the telephone for 22 minutes per day. In contrast, most modem calls last 22 minutes on average for a total of 62 minutes per day of usage. The telephone network wasn't designed for this kind of use; in some places the additional burden placed on the telephone network has overloaded telephone company switches and resulted in a loss of dial tone for periods of time.
So what about ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network)? ISDN solves one of the problems faced by modems - it creates a true digital connection and thus can run at a higher throughput. Basic Rate Interface (BRI) ISDN, which is what an individual or small office would have, offers throughputs of 56 Kbps, 64 Kbps, 112 Kbps, and 128 Kbps, depending on whether you use one or two B (bearer) channels and where in the country you're located. (Some telephone companies limit ISDN throughputs to 56 Kbps per channel, because of equipment they installed at their switch.)
However, ISDN is still a dialup, circuit-switched technology, so ISDN Internet connections still waste bandwidth on the telephone network by taking up an entire connection even when no data is flowing over that connection. In addition, ISDN lines can be difficult to install and require a fair amount of work on everyone's part. ISDN doesn't necessarily come cheap, either, especially for home users with costs ranging from about $80 to $150 per month for the phone company and ISP charges combined. Finally, although ISDN lines dial out much more quickly than modems, no dialup technology will be as instantaneous as a connection that's always available (of course, an ISDN connection, like a modem connection, can be pegged up permanently, but that's more expensive on the ISP end and a tremendous waste of the voice network).
Enter ADSL -- ADSL solves all of these problems, and the Universal ADSL variant (also sometimes called DSL Lite) handles many of the problems that ADSL itself has faced over the years (assume I'm talking about Universal ADSL from now on, unless I explicitly say otherwise).
The Downside of ADSL -- Although ADSL sounds absolutely fabulous, there are some negatives.
The ADSL Economic Model -- I also fear that the economics of the bandwidth being promised simply don't work out in the long run. Anyone who provides Internet access must buy bandwidth (or build it, if we're talking about UUNET, MCI, or the like). In short, bandwidth costs money. ISPs take advantage of the fact that Internet usage is inherently bursty to sell more bandwidth than they buy - call this the "oversell ratio. " Although ISPs generally won't tell you what their oversell ratio is, it's likely to be in the 5:1 range for business customers and 10:1 or more for consumers.
Let's look at some of the numbers. T3 access at 45 Mbps to the Internet backbone from UUNET reportedly costs about $65,000 per month. That's $1,444 per Mbps per month. If you double that cost to account for ISP overhead, profit margin, and so on, you get $2,888 per Mbps per month as the amount the ISP must make selling that amount of bandwidth. Now, there's no question that even if someone has a 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection, they won't be able to use all that capacity all the time, so the ISP can sell that same bandwidth to multiple people, spreading out the cost.
Now comes the question of how much you're willing to spend for Internet access. From surveys I've seen done in public gatherings of computer users, almost no one is willing to pay more than $50 per month for Internet access. To drop the price to $50 per month, the ISP would have to sell the 1 Mbps of bandwidth in our example 58 times - a 58:1 ratio. At the more common charge of $20 per month, the oversell ratio would be 145:1.
The amount you're willing to spend very well may be tied to how fast the connection seems to run. Even if your ISP delivers full bandwidth (which they probably won't, since documentation from US West suggests that ISPs will want to oversell just the connectivity to the phone company at a 30:1 ratio), other bottlenecks on the Internet may conspire to reduce the effective throughput you see. And, if the oversell ratio is high, the amount of bandwidth you receive is also reduced. These factors may contribute to users refusing to pay much more for ADSL access to the Internet.
I've spoken with some representatives of the phone companies pushing Universal ADSL, and none have yet responded to this concern. I think it would be worthwhile asking both the telephone company and the ISP what level of aggregation is going on - what are the oversell ratios for both the ADSL connection and the ISP's Internet connection. They probably won't answer, and it would be handy to have some sort of performance monitoring software to determine how much bandwidth you're really getting.
It's entirely likely that the acceptance of ADSL will be the event that drives the Internet toward tiered usage pricing, where you pay for only the amount of data you send and receive. Then, if you wanted the full bandwidth of your connection, you could have it, but you'd have to pay for it. The pricing schemes for most of the existing ADSL implementations point toward tiered pricing, with different prices for two or three different levels of throughput.
There's already a type of service called frame relay in which you pay the phone company for a fat connection - like a full T1 - but you pay less if you agree to a smaller Committed Information Rate (CIR), the rate at which they guarantee you'll be able to transmit data. You can get the advantage of bursts when the network has bandwidth available, and the frame relay model may be the way the phone companies structure ADSL service.
Existing ADSL Uses -- Our previous notes about ADSL have drawn comments primarily from two sets of users, folks in Canada and people in Phoenix, where US West has limited DSL availability. We also heard about ADSL availability in California, and Ameritech is reportedly offering ADSL access in the Midwest as well.
<
http://www.dnai.com/services/adsl.html >
<
http://www.ameritech.com/products/data/adsl/ >
The current US West DSL offering is in fact quite different from Universal ADSL. First off, US West claims to be using HDSL (High-Speed Digital Subscriber Line), which is not asymmetric - it provides full throughput in both directions. The distance limit is 12,000feet from the central office, and US West has limited that further due to the heat in the summer in Phoenix. Unlike Universal ADSL, US West must "qualify " (check to make sure it works) your copper wires and they must install the service in your home or business (which costs $215). The pricing depends on the throughput you want, with 192 Kbps coming in at $40, 320 Kbps at $85, and 704 Kbps at $163. The pricing on the two higher bandwidth options can drop if you sign long-term contracts locking you in to a price. In addition, these prices are purely for US West; you must pay extra for Internet access from either an ISP or US West, though US West offers "unlimited " Internet access for $19.95 per month.
< http://www.interprise.com/dsl/connection.htm >
All that said, US West just announced that they would be installing ADSL in 40 cities in the 14-state area they serve. Although the details are still somewhat hazy, US West's press information claims that the service will be compatible with the Universal ADSL Working Group's final standards and that the service currently meets all the Universal ADSL goals, such as no installation, high-speed, simultaneous voice and data usage, and so on.
< http://www.uswest.com/com/insideusw/news/012998.html >
At the cheapest, though, US West's ADSL service will cost $60 per month for 256 Kbps. That's great for those of us who rely heavily on the Internet, but will average consumers be interested in paying $360 per year to be on the Internet, even at that speed?
Most of our letters poured in from Canada, though, where ADSL seems relatively widely deployed with prices in the US$50 range as well. Many of the letters referred to Sympatico, which is an Internet service created jointly by Bell Canada and the other Canadian phone companies. The specifics seem to vary from place to place, though, which may result in some standards or equipment confusions in the future.
<
http://adsl.sympatico.ca/adsl.html >
<
http://www.cadvision.com/cvservices/2000k/ >
<
http://www.telusplanet.net/hispeed/ >
The Competition -- There's no question that the sudden interest in ADSL from the phone companies comes in response to cable modems. Although cable modems have low penetration (reportedly about 100,000 customers so far), cable modems are the primary communications method that could unseat the telephone companies from their position of controlling telecommunications. A spokesman for Bell Atlantic, one of the regional Bell telephone companies, admitted quite frankly in a phone interview that they were targeting cable modems, particularly in terms of pricing.
< http://cabledatacomnews.com/cmic16.htm >
The main advantage the telephone companies have is that ADSL will probably reach more homes than cable modems (we, for instance, have two phone lines and a 56K frame relay connection, but can't get cable at all in our current location), and it will probably be cheaper for the telephone companies to upgrade their switches to support ADSL than it will for cable companies to upgrade their networks to support two-way traffic. As it stands, some cable modems work only incoming - the outgoing end of the connection is handled by a standard modem (thus wasting an entire voice circuit for even less traffic, which I'm sure irritates the phone companies to no end).
I don't know if the phone companies could be categorized as "running scared, " but if nothing else, the threat of cable modems offers significant incentive to the telephone companies to make sure ADSL is available soon, works well, and is inexpensive.
From the consumer angle, the main concern I've heard voiced is that neither cable companies nor telephone companies have particularly stellar - or even good - reputations for customer service. If this battle for high-speed Internet access results in the elimination of most smaller independent ISPs, we may suffer with the results.
by Andy Baird
First, a disclaimer: If the @Home network isn't available where you live, stop right here. Continuing to read could make you sick with envy. Go back to browsing the 56K modem ads, or dreaming about how much fun you'd have at 128K if you could only afford an ISDN line. But for the rest of you...
I'd been hearing about the wonders of the interconnected future for so many years that I was sick of it. Universal interconnectivity at super-high speeds, instant Internet access without dialup hassles, blah blah blah. Just around the corner - it's always been "just around the corner. " Tell me another one.
I turned that corner on July 25, 1997. Since then, I've enjoyed a 24-hour/7-day Internet connection that operates at throughputs between 500 Kbps and 2,000 Kbps - that's 10 to 30 times faster than any conventional modem, or five to ten times as fast as that ISDN connection you were dreaming about. To put it in concrete terms, last week I downloaded a 5 MB file from a Web site in 21 seconds. That's fast! In fact, it's just about T1 speed (1.544 Mbps). Ever priced a T1 connection for your home? As the saying goes, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. I know I can't. Yet for all practical purposes, that's what I have here.
How much am I paying for all this? Forty bucks a month. Included in that price is the round-the-clock, no-time-limits connection I described, plus a complete package of ISP services: email address, Web server space, and so forth. Installation was free, including a house call by two techs who set up all the hardware and software for me. The $40 price includes leasing the Motorola CyberSURFR cable modem and (if needed) an Ethernet card, so I didn't have to buy any hardware. Most ISPs charge $19.95 a month. I get 20 times the speed for only twice the price.
The connection is live as soon as I turn on my computer - no dialing in or logging on, and no busy signals - and so far it has been almost 100 percent reliable in heavy daily use. Almost? A few months ago a drunken driver took out a utility pole up the road from here. We lost electricity, phone, and cable service for six hours, but I can't blame @Home for that outage! Otherwise, it's been rock-solid and fast as greased lightning around the clock, something I can't say for any of the other ISPs I've tried over the years.
What Is @Home? @Home is a networking company owned by a consortium of cable TV providers: Cox, TCI, Comcast and a few others, plus Netscape. They use a 6 MHz slot - just one TV channel's worth - in their cable spectrum to send digital data back and forth to subscribers who pay for the @Home service. (You don't have to subscribe to cable TV to get @Home, but cable must be available in your area from one of the @Home partners.) The cable modem plugs into an Ethernet port on your Mac or PC, and you run a TCP/IP connection into the service.
You also get a fixed IP address (most ISPs assign you a different random IP address each time you dial in), which together with the fast round-the-clock connection makes running a server out of your home eminently possible.
All that Glitters Is Not Gold -- There must be a catch, right? Here are the major drawbacks as I see them.
<
http://www.home.net/home/availability.html >
<
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,12400,00.html >
<
http://www.home.net/corp/network.html >
Overall Opinion -- All in all, however, I love @Home. This is what a network connection is supposed to be like. I turn on my Mac and I'm online - I don't even have to think about it. Claris Emailer sits in the background all the time I'm working, so I don't have to log on to check mail. And everything I do on the Internet flies, unless a remote Web server is bogged down. This is exactly what I've all wanted all along. I love it!
by David Rugge < davidrugge@mindspring.com >
With the heated browser wars between Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you may find yourself switching from one to another to try out glitzy new features.
But switching browsers requires more than just downloading multi-megabyte files, running installers, and learning how to use the new features. If you are like me, you have dozens, even hundreds of bookmarks (called Favorites if you use Internet Explorer) that you want to keep using with your new browser with no hassles. Unfortunately, it is still unnecessarily difficult to move bookmarks from one browser to another, especially across platforms.
To get some insight into why browsers may not like each other's bookmarks, let's take a close look at how bookmarks are stored in Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
(For ease of use, we're going to call Netscape's browser Navigator, though it can be part of the Communicator suite. Also note that this article was written while using version 3 of Internet Explorer and Navigator on the Macintosh, and version 4 of both browsers under Windows 95.)
Bookmark Formats -- The Windows version of Internet Explorer stores bookmarks as separate files (more below), but in Navigator and the Mac version of Internet Explorer, bookmarks are stored in a single HTML file called Bookmarks.html (Navigator Mac), bookmark.htm (Navigator Windows), or Favorites.html (Internet Explorer Mac).
I suggest that you open up your bookmarks file in your favorite text editor and follow along as I explain how the file is put together. On a Mac, the Bookmarks.html or Favorites.html file is in the Preferences folder; browse inside the Netscape or Explorer folders located there. For Windows Navigator, look in the "Users " folder inside the Netscape program folder. The bookmark.htm file will be inside each user directory (for example, my bookmarks are located at
C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\davidrugge\bookmark.htm
The HTML file begins with some header information giving the document type and a warning not to tamper with the bookmark file.
Next comes a level one header tag <H1 >. In Navigator, this header denotes the name of the top-level folder within the Bookmarks window.
<H1 >Bookmarks for David Rugge </H1 >
Internet Explorer uses the level 1 header to describe the Favorites window itself. The header tag also contains additional attributes describing the location and size of the Favorites window, and whether it is open by default when Internet Explorer is launched.
<H1 WINDOW_POSITION= "20,65 " WINDOW_SIZE= "350,250 " WINDOW_OPEN= "TRUE " >Microsoft Internet Explorer </H1 >
If you have subscribed to any of your favorites, this header also contains global subscription settings in the following attributes:
Folders and Bookmarks -- Now come the bookmarks and bookmark folders. Folders and bookmarks are stored as a series of nested definition lists (the <DL > and </DL > tags).
Folders are level 3 headers in definition term tags:
<DT > <H3 FOLDED MENUHEADER NEWITEMHEADER ADD_DATE= "876146459 " >Movies </H3 >
Netscape has added a few attributes to the <H3 > tag to make it easier to work with bookmarks in the Bookmarks window. The FOLDED attribute is added when a folder is collapsed, and is removed if the folder is closed. ADD_DATE, not surprisingly, contains a serial number representing the date when the folder was created. MENUHEADER marks this folder as the folder to use as the top level of the bookmark menu. NEWITEMHEADER indicates that this folder is where new bookmarks will first appear when they are created.
Internet Explorer for the Macintosh uses different attributes, e.g.:
<DT > <H3 WINDOW_POSITION= "30,85 " WINDOW_SIZE= "350,250 " WINDOW_OPEN= "FALSE " >Movies </H3 >
The actual bookmarks are anchors in definition term tags:
<DT > <A HREF= "http://www.yahoo.com/ " ADD_DATE= "876146459 " LAST_VISIT= "882817020 " LAST_MODIFIED= "876230986 " >Yahoo </A >
Navigator has added its own attributes to the anchor tag <A > to keep track of various attributes of the bookmark. As you can see, these attributes are similar to the date attributes in the folder <H3 > tags.
Navigator also allows the user to create aliases to folders or bookmarks. When an alias to a bookmark is created, the attribute ALIASID is added, which contains a number. The alias itself looks like a bookmark, but contains the additional attribute ALIASOF, which (surprise!) is equal to the ALIASID of the original bookmark that it refers to. For example:
Original bookmark:
<DT > <A HREF= "http://www.netbits.net/ " ALIASID= "2 " ADD_DATE= "884557301 " LAST_VISIT= "884557291 " LAST_MODIFIED= "884557291 " > NetBITS </A >
Bookmark alias:
<DT > <A HREF= "http://www.netbits.net/ "ALIASOF= "2 "ADD_DATE= "884557301 " LAST_VISIT= "884557291 " LAST_MODIFIED= "884557291 " >NetBITS </A >
An alias will always have the same values for LAST_VISIT and LAST_MODIFIED as the original.
Internet Explorer uses the same general bookmark format (except it doesn't support aliases), but includes some different attributes to track the status and subscription information for each favorite:
Finally, dividers are delimited with the <HR > tag in Netscape, and with <DT > <A HREF= " " >- </A > in Internet Explorer.
File Under F for File System -- Microsoft, in its attempt to integrate the browser into the operating system, has chosen to use the Windows file system, rather than an HTML file, to store favorites for Internet Explorer. On the disk drive where the Windows system files reside, (usually C:\) examine the contents of the directory C:\Windows\Favorites. Inside you will find Internet shortcut (.URL) files and folders corresponding to the folders and favorites in the Favorites window (or sidebar, depending on your configuration and browser version). Internet shortcuts are a special kind of shortcut that send a URL to the default browser. If you take a look at any one of the files in Notepad or your favorite text editor, it will look something like this:
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.microsoft.com
The name of the Favorite corresponds to the file name of the Internet shortcut file. Internet Explorer uses the file attributes to find out the date the Favorite was created, the last time it was modified, and the last time it was used.
If you are using Internet Explorer 4, there will also be a Subscriptions folder in your Windows directory that contains one subscription file for each subscription. The Subscriptions folder is a special system folder, much like the Control Panels folder. You cannot open the subscription files in any program other than Internet Explorer, and trying to copy subscriptions out of the Subscriptions folder only creates an Internet shortcut to the subscription's URL. Double-click a subscription file, and it acts exactly like an Internet shortcut. Right-clicking on a subscription file lets you update it or open its Properties window, where you can make more changes to the subscription's settings. Windows will also let you add a subscription or change subscription settings if you right-click on an Internet shortcut.
Storage Methods -- Each method of storing bookmarks has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Of the two formats, Internet Explorer favorites on Windows are more intuitive because they provide a consistent representation of the file and folder structure of your Favorites whether you view it from within the browser, Windows Explorer, or from the Windows file system. However, a hierarchy of files and folders is more difficult to move from computer to computer than a single HTML file, and since Internet Explorer for Windows is the only browser to use this format, it is also a lot less portable across browsers and operating systems.
This portability problem is exacerbated by the lack of a Favorites importing or exporting feature in Internet Explorer for Windows, which forces the user to turn to third-party bookmark conversion utilities. Also, if you have a few hundred bookmarks in your Favorites directory, these files and folders take up considerably more space on your hard drive than if they were collected in a single HTML bookmark file, especially on one gigabyte or larger hard disks using the older FAT16 file system. [Editor's note: This problem is fixed by the Rev2 or OSR2 release of Windows 95, which is only available on machines sold in the last year and not as an upgrade. -Glenn]
To make matters worse, you can't move your favorites or subscription settings between Mac and Windows versions of Internet Explorer. Maybe this is why Microsoft tells the Justice Department that the Mac and Windows versions of Internet Explorer really are separate products!
The big advantage of Navigator's format is its portability. On a Macintosh, bookmark and favorite files can be used on either browser by simply renaming the file and putting it in the appropriate folder, or by using the import and export bookmarks options in Internet Explorer. Even if you decide to use a browser that does not support Netscape bookmarks, you can still open up the HTML file in your browser and follow the links. (The proprietary attributes that are added to the HTML tags should be ignored by any well-behaved browser.)
On the other hand, if you need to pass around groups of bookmarks, and do not know HTML, it is probably easier to attach a folder full of Favorites to an email message than to figure out which parts of the HTML bookmark file need to be pasted into the message. Also, the HTML bookmark format is less convenient to use than the individual favorites file format because you must use the bookmarks window within Navigator or an HTML editor to move, add, and delete bookmarks reliably. Unfortunately, Navigator does not provide an effective way of exporting its bookmark format into a Favorites folder.
Exchanging Information -- Although both Netscape and Microsoft have taken pains to improve their bookmarking systems, the improvements have come mostly in the areas of user interface and organization and less in the area of interoperability. It is a shame that Netscape and Microsoft have not allowed for conversion from one bookmark format to the other, especially since it is not difficult to implement. Microsoft made an especially problematic decision when they made subscriptions and favorites incompatible between the Mac and Windows versions of Internet Explorer. Until Netscape and Microsoft get their act together, the only solution is to rely on third-party conversion tools or browsers like Opera, which thoughtfully supports the importing of either bookmark format.
[David Rugge lives in the greater Atlanta area and works at SunGard Recovery Services researching and testing for their Year 2000 project.]
Question: Can I fax over an ISDN "modem "? Patrick Beart < patrick@webarchitecture.com > wonders if software exists that would let him send faxes using his ISDN device: "I use the Farallon Netopia for Mac, and love it. I have been keeping my old Global Village TelePort Gold modem around just for sending and receiving faxes. Seems silly to use a valuable serial port just for this - can I use my ISDN connection instead? "
Answer: Unfortunately, the answer is no. ISDN uses a special kind of phone line which is set up to handle purely digital signals from your ISDN device; fax signals, on the other hand, are entirely analog.At the central office (or CO) where your phone line enters the phone company's switching system, your phone line is plugged into one of several kinds of network cards, just like an office network. One kind, the most popular, is for regular analog phone service, called POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). Others are used for ISDN, and still others for ADSL. So you don't really have a dial tone as such on an ISDN line, and you can't place analog calls using an ISDN device.
Most ISDN devices, however, have analog ports in them. These analog ports are created by the equivalent of the network card that the phone company normally would have at its switch. So you can plug a phone line, normal modem, or fax machine into one of these analog ports and treat it just like POTS.
There's no obstacle we can see to an ISDN device having a cheap, fax-only chipset that would let you fax over one of these analog ports, but we haven't seen this feature in the $200 to $700 range of devices.
Another option could be to try out one of the Internet faxing services that have sprung up. Many of them are cheaper than the long-distance charges it would cost to send it yourself. Most require special software to be installed, typically Windows-based, to create and send the fax over the Internet to the service. Others enable you to receive faxes over the Internet, using either proprietary software or sending them as file attachments via email.
<
http://www.faxmission.com/ >
<
http://www.savetz.com/fax-faq.html >
One of the services that's received a lot of good press and attention is JFax; they also partner with a number of companies, including Qualcomm for Eudora. JFax provides facilities for sending and receiving faxes using the Internet and software they've written for the Mac OS, Windows (3.1, 95, and NT), and Unix. In the U.S., you pay $15 setup and $12.50 a month for a local phone number in one of a few dozen major cities for receiving faxes and voice mail messages. For that fee, you can receive up to 200 "units " comprising any combination of minutes of voice mail and fax pages; additional units are 20 cents each. Incoming messages are sent to you via email, and you use their software to view the fax or listen to the messages. (Contrast this with $30 to $50 per month for a second phone line plus the cost of a decent plain paper fax machine.)
JFax also has a software package for creating outgoing faxes very much like any of the software you would use for directly sending faxes through your modem. Instead, it transmits it over the Internet and sends the fax from their equipment. They charge 10 cents a minute for continental U.S. faxing, payable in advance; that's cheaper than almost all standard calling plans for home and business. They'll email you a delivery message so you know the fax was sent. And you don't need yet another line for faxing or to tie your system up for 20 minutes while it redials again and again.Given the ADSL options we discuss elsewhere in this issue, it might get to the point where as a home office user, you could have a single ADSL phone line, and do your faxing over the Internet at high speeds. [GF]
Feel the Buzz -- Joel Smith < joel@firstsoftware.co.uk > writes about an electrifying subject: using power transmission lines for data access.
For background, according to the November 1997 issue of The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing, European and Southeast Asian power grids have an advantage over the U.S. in their use of a higher voltage. In the U.S., 110-volt power distribution to individual homes is more granular; about 10 houses are served by each final transformer, requiring more equipment to reach the end user digitally and causing more attenuation which makes it harder to encode information. In the UK, however, hundreds of households can be served their 220 volts from a single distribution point.
Also of note is that European grids have fiber-optic lines running to most of the transformers, installed years ago for monitoring the network. This is not true in the U.S. Predictions on throughput range from 500 Kbps to 1 Mbps, or something close to ADSL and cable modem speeds.
Joel writes:
There is a consortium (which includes NorTel) that has developed technology to enable 1 Mbps connections to the Internet over the electricity network. Obviously all the cabling is in place, and the system is now in trials in the northwest of England. There will be no dial-up costs, so it will be like having a leased line into your home for a fraction of the cost. It appears poised to blow cable modems out of the water, especially in the UK where there is such low cable coverage.
< http://www.nortel.com/home/press/1997d/10_8_9797389_Norweb.html >
More on Cable Modems -- Johann Beda < j-beda@pobox.com > writes in regard to his cable modem connection:
I just got hooked up here in southwestern Ontario with The Wave through the local cable TV provider. I haven't done extensive speed testing, but it feels as fast as my desktop machine when I was working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Ethernet to my Mac. The cost was only $80 setup for my Mac with built-in Ethernet. Installation involved plugging the power in to the cable modem and connecting the Ethernet cable, then selecting DHCP in the TCP/IP control panel and telling it to look at wave.ca; the cost also included running a new bunch of cables to the house. The service costs $55 per month plus taxes, so overall, I think it's comparable to an ISP plus a dedicated phone line.
Cable Whiplash -- Kate Binder < nsnoise@tiac.net > complains that her cable modem connection isn't nearly what it's cracked up to be. Although we have no specific suggestions to pass along to Kate, if anyone out there has some ideas, please send them to Kate directly.
I noticed that you'll be covering cable modem issues next week. I hope you can address the fact that some Mac users - including me - are having tremendous trouble getting decent speeds.In the nine days since a cable modem was installed on my husband's Performa 5200CD via Ethernet, we have yet to achieve anything more than 30 Kbps download speeds consistently, despite the fact that other users of our service (MediaOne in Massachusetts) see speeds in the range of 120 to 150 Kbps. After four visits from tech people and several phone calls, we've established that the problem isn't the line or the modem, it's probably something in the Mac's system software, probably Open Transport. Open Transport Advanced Tuner hasn't helped, although I'm continuing to work with it, and neither has switching back to OT 1.1.2 and then to 1.1.1 and then downgrading my system to 7.5 from 8.0. The next step is to try the 8.1 update.
I'm nearly at my wits' end and would appreciate any suggestions. I know I'm not the only frustrated Mac user out here, because the MediaOne guy who spent four hours here yesterday trying to fix the problem said many other MediaOne Mac subscribers have just accepted that they won't get the advertised speeds and learned to live with it.
Why Make Netscape Source Available for Free? Jim Peters < jim@aguazul.demon.co.uk > offers a suggestion for why Netscape is making the source code for Communicator 5.0 available for free on the Internet, as we mentioned in NetBITS-016 :
< http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04676 >
Perhaps you don't understand the motivation behind the free software community. If I had the source code for Navigator on my machine, and in using the browser I found a bug, my first thought would be to fix it, and my second thought would be to pass the fix back to Netscape. Similarly, if I found some feature lacking, then I might consider putting it in, and if it seemed to be working OK, I would pass it on to others. There must be hundreds of programmers like me dying to get their hands on Netscape's source to iron out all those irritating problems.This is the driving force behind Linux and many other open-development software projects, and it has made Linux an incredibly stable and mature platform in just a few short years. If Netscape can make its browser the best ever through the work of unpaid enthusiasts around the world, then surely both sides can be satisfied.
PDF without a Font Net -- Chris Ruebeck < ruebeck@jhu.edu > adds to the discussion surrounding PDF on the Web, started by Mike Lee's article in NetBITS-014 :
< http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04637 >
I would like to add to the comments of Ray Davis on the subject of PDF's incongruities with the Web. My argument is that the "Portable " in PDF doesn't always deliver. That is, if the document was not saved with all its fonts, there is a chance that it won't print out correctly at all. I have had this problem downloading documents to my Mac, especially with documents containing equations or tables. I can print from a PC fine, but it seems that the Mac has a different default font set that foils my printing efforts.
< http://db.netbits.net/getbits.acgi?nbart=04681 >
Ray's message seems to come through clearly here, too. HTML is designed to deal with font difficulties by using tags that are resolved locally into available fonts. I don't know if HTML deals well with equations in all cases, but it seems to have done so on the many HTML documents with equations that I've seen up to now.I would recommend that instead of singing the praises of PDF, you let us know how to deal with PDF intelligently. It is a special challenge, I am sure, because the person who reads PDF can't change the fonts that were saved with the original document. And in my case, these aren't graphic folks who think about fonts all the time, but researchers who just want to make their ideas more widely available and have little idea the impact that fonts have on transmitting those ideas.
Acrobatic Dead Horses -- Michael J. Tardiff < mjt@westernstar.com > writes with one final comment about Acrobat:
Ray Davis's comments in NetBITS-016 brought to mind my past experiences in dealing with the "structure vs. presentation " issue. Back at the turn of the decade, I led a team developing what was then called an "online documentation tool. " The goal was to put the truckloads of software documentation my company produced onto CD-ROMs and read it using clients that looked a lot like today's browsers. In fact, the documents were coded using a subset of the then still-developing SGML standard. And our goal was to code for content, so as to be able to display on different screens, or even different media (we had a version of the reader that'd read the books out loud to the sight-impaired).But it wasn't long before technical writers started using tags to "fake out " the reader so that their book would "look right " online. I had an opportunity to raise the content-versus-presentation conundrum once with John Warnock, founder of Adobe, when we were looking at a preliminary version of what came to be Acrobat. John answered without hesitation, "Content is all well and good, but everyone we talk to wants their stuff to look the same onscreen as it does on paper. " And that's exactly what Acrobat did.
Recently, I had an opportunity to work for a year with a bunch of traditional advertising and marketing folks. They had clients who wanted to move into Web-based marketing, and I was to help the agency understand what was different and special about the Web. Again, I stressed content and flexibility, and the Web's ability to reach a huge range of platforms with well-coded content. Yet every client was most concerned about their online stuff looking just so, and both they and our designers were frustrated at not being able to place items in exactly the spot they wanted.
Given that paper has been the medium that's been used since the Middle Ages for presenting information, plus television's consistent standards (every screen in a 4:3 ratio, with very similar capabilities, at least in the U.S.), I think it's going to take a lot more than an abstract argument that it's the "right " thing to code for content to enable an infinite range of display possibilities. Instead of efforts to move Web authoring in that direction, we see style sheets and absolute placement. Even WebTV doesn't encourage coding for content, but coding for their version of a "page. "
Theory's a great thing, but it's safer to bet one's money on what the people want, and people want what they've known since they became sentient - control and conformity in presentation. Otherwise, wouldn't the saying be, "The man makes the clothes " instead of the other way around?
Still, it was nice to see my favorite dead horse beaten a few more times.
Non-profit, non-commercial publications and Web sites may reprint or link to articles if full credit is given. Others please contact us. We do not guarantee accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. NetBITS ISSN 1096-4908.