HIGH TECH CORNER: INTEL, THE INTERNET, Y2K AND THE RUSSIAN NUCLEAR ARSENAL

With the spirit of faster is a good thing in the air, you get the feeling of unbridled power. On July 26 Intel released the new 450Mhz Pentiums. The amazing fact is that this is just after the Justice Department started an investigation of Intel on taking over the domestic computer IC market. Why would Intel actually lower its intro price on 450MHZ Pentium to $665? In addition to this one-two punch, Intel is lowering the IC prices of the 400Mhz to the 233Mhz CPU's by more than $100 each. The problem to the Justice Department in all of this is whether a legal action of this size is worth it, on this type of alleged antitrust activities. The Justice Department has proven itself to really not be up to speed on the Microsoft case, so why should it try to take on Intel as well. The real question is (BOLD) "are all of these questionable legal issues worth more to us as consumers than really fast and cheep PC's?" (BOLD) Only time and our money will tell!

To help this feeling of slow summer heat is this year's new modem with 128K throughput. Now this is not just a fast 56K modem that you have to wait for your ISP to use. The SupraSonic II 128K unit from Diamond (BOLD) (WWW.SUPRA.COM) (UNBOLD) is rather different and also the same as the conventional modem. Specifically it is a single ISA card with two modems using two COM ports at the same time. Yes your Internet connection with (BOLD) Shotgun Technology (UNBLOD) splits its signals on two modems with only one login. The good news is that you only get the standard Internet bill you always have. This amazing technology will make your ISP have the upset tummy. This is because you the consumer can now have twice the bandwidth for the cost of only half. The modem splits the dial up over two phone lines. If someone calls in to your home, the modem will disconnect one side for voice line usage. The calling person never knows the difference. After the vocal telephone use, you can restart the stopped second channel to speed up the connection back to full tilt. If you only get 33.6K in your calling area, then you have boosted your throughput to 67.2K. This is a good deal.

But what if you already have a modem. Simply add a second one for twice the power. The new program from Ramp Networks called WebRamp PC will let you run multiple modems at the same time. Just like the dedicated diamond modem product that lets you to split your Internet connection on its card with two internal modems, this program lets you do it with your existing modems. This program works great under Windows 98. This program does not have the incoming call sensing the diamonds dedicated modem has; however, it's really cheep at $49. You can get it at (BOLD) WWW.RAMPNET.NET (UNBOLD) or at 888-461-7267. Of course all this technology is PC based only!

Now when the year 2000 day 1 gets here what do you plan to do? Well at least Americans understand the Year 2000 could cause problems. But what about countries like Russia? The cold war has been over for a while, so many of yesterday's rigid Russian soldiers have lately been selling off the arsenal from the former Soviet Union for cash flow. Well, you hear this in the news and feel no big deal. The problem with all this technology, gear such as computer guidance systems to launch vector analysis devices, uses IC's that are not year 2000 compliant. To fix this problem is not a simple pop in the floppy, and copy it to a drive. This is imbedded source codes in IC's that control whether a missile will be in our backdoor in a matter of moments. So the people to worry about is countries like Iran who just a couple of weeks ago launched a test rocket that had the potential of mass devastation if nuclear armed. These are the non-year 2000 compatible systems sold off by the Russians. The bigger Y2K situation may not simply be that the U.S. government had a major hiccup in financial transaction of day-to-day life. The real worry is that a rogue nation did not debug all its source codes for a real cheep Russian nuclear arsenal.

The number of source code errors and faults is mind boggling when realizing that the rest of the world's major nuclear powers are hiding from the Y2K bug.

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau. E-mail him at digital@ldd.net