Robert Gutierrez <gutierre@oblio.arc.nasa.gov> (03/14/90)
brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes in Volume 10, Issue 155, Message 8 of 14: > In this month's bill for Southwestern Cable TV in San Diego there > arrived a number of glossy inserts. One is quite interesting: What happened to Cox Cable??? > A service called "X-PRESS" and one called "The Electric Toy Box" are > being offered starting April 1. The latter distributes IBM-PClone > games for children and others over the cable system, two per week. > According to the glossy, X-PRESS is a "constant stream of news and > information from around the world, plus sports, weather, > entertainment, and lifestyle reports. It's used in over 2,500 schools > nationwide as a classroom teaching aid." (and on and on) I had heard X-Press was outta business ... ah well, it's nice to spread rumors for a service that I thought was awful. X-press is a service transmitted out of Boulder, Colo. which takes various newswire stories and uplinks them onto a VC-II data channel on one of the pay services. The data feed is then received by the cable company via an addressable VC-II (Videocipher-II) data receiver, then re-modulated (FSK'd) on a spare frequency on the cable system (~70-75 mhz, or 108-118 mhz) and transmitted downstream in the cable. > It costs $149 for the "interface kit", which is a modem-sized plastic > box with an F-fitting for the cable RF and a DB-25 for the confuser > interface. My GUESS is it's a simple subcarrier modem, probably > picking up 4800 bps SCA data transmissions on one of the many FM-band > transmissions on the cable..... Bingo ... though try 9600 baud. FSK no less (talk about bandwidth hog). > It would seem that the above services are offered for $10 a month. > However, to attract the money-grubbing capitalists, for an additional > $20 a month, "X*PRESS Executive" offers stock market quotes and > analysis, apparently compatable with some of the popular PC > financial/get-rich-quick programs. When I was 'testing' the service at the cable company I worked for, this was actually part of the service, though it was a 'seperate' area you had to go to on the program (on your PC) to manually look them up. Now, they just added some fancy bells and whistles (ie: made a better program) and charged you (the sucker) for it. > Unless the "interface box" has a huge buffer, I'd expect you'd have to > leave the computer on all the time, for an additional $20 a month in > electricity (second highest electric rates in North America, yup). Yessiree. Buffer is only as big as your memory, and that was filled up in about 15 minutes or so. Oh, also, you can print out the articles you wanted to save, but no file saving was allowed (I got around that with a little nifty TSR called "LPTX" which redirected printer output to a file). > I haven't ordered the interface, and (presumably because the service > isn't being offered until April 1), I haven't been able to find it on > the cable whilst snooping around with my DC-to-light spy radio. Try the frequencies listed above. This service is a rip off because of one thing ... the 'stories' or 'articles' they used were the so-called _broadcast_ versions, or in other words, just summaries of the real articles you see on your local newspaper. Maybe about 1/4 - 1/3rd of the real newswire story. Might as well just get a subscription to my local kitty-litter liner. And with just 640k of buffer available, well, you may not get all the 'articles' you really want anyway. How long would 640k last for a Usenet feed?!? > As if 10MB/day of USENET wasn't enough incoming information overload > already. You know somebody has a 9600 baud Usenet feed on a SCPC channel on a couple of satellites? I'm still trying to get more info about that. One of the satellites is K-2 (Ku band). A 3 1/2 foot dish getting continuous Usenet articles ..... Usenet articles .... Usenet articles.....<TILT>. Robert Gutierrez NASA Science Internet Network Operations. Moffett Feild, California.
Bob Sutterfield <bob@morningstar.com> (03/16/90)
In article <5158@accuvax.nwu.edu> gutierre@oblio.arc.nasa.gov (Robert Gutierrez) writes: You know somebody has a 9600 baud Usenet feed on a SCPC channel on a couple of satellites? I'm still trying to get more info about that. Try contacting the folks at the Stargate project (mark@stargate.com) - they did (do?) news over spare bandwidth on Ted Turner's network. The economics tilted somewhat away from their scheme with the introduction of the Trailblazer and widespread use of NNTP, as well as the universal availablility of UUNET. I don't know whether the project is officially belly-up or still in business serving a smaller niche.
gsarff@cs.utah.edu (Gary Sarff) (03/21/90)
In article <5158@accuvax.nwu.edu>, gutierre@oblio.arc.nasa.gov (Robert Gutierrez) writes: >You know somebody has a 9600 baud Usenet feed on a SCPC channel on a >couple of satellites? I'm still trying to get more info about that. I have been hearing this for about the past two years, and have not been able to find out anything definitive either. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place? Anyone have any real information about this?
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (04/06/90)
> The only people I've ever seen with access to full-text versions is > either "Newsnet", which is a very good, and *very expensive* > commercial service ... I used to subscribe to Newsnet. Very expensive, yes. I wouldn't call it all that good, though (this was over 6 years ago)... it ran on PR1ME computers, and was really pretty clunky to use. You could also break out of the program into the Primos monitor really easily. Happened to me by accident all the time, and they never seemed much interested in fixing it. Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.uu.net>.