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Sat-ND, 17.5.96

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Peter C. Klanowski, Fax +49-451-5820055, pck@LyNet.De

This issue is sponsored by TELE-satellite, Europe's Satellite Magazine 
Have a look at their homepage! >> http://www.TELE-satellit.com/ <<


Nachrichten vom 17. Mai 1996

NASA Sells TDRS 6 C Band
The situation on the geostationary belt between 40 and 45 degrees West is
a bit confusing. There is the INTELSAT oldie 502 on 40.2 degrees, to be
replaced by 512 this year, and there is NASA's TDRS 4 on 41 degrees.
INTELSAT has filed the position 40.5 degrees with the International
Telecommunication Union, but so far they haven't been able to use it to
full extent. The NASA satellite does not only provide Tracking and Data
Relay Services, it also has some C band capacity on board that was leased
by Columbia Communications, a commercial company. To avoid interference,
INTELSAT agreed to reduce its activity on 40.5 degrees until the end of
1997. After that, it seems likely that NASA will have to use one of its
other registered slots. Obviously, it has to be 46 degrees, currently
occupied by TDRS 6 (actual position: 45.7 degrees.) The official
announcement has arrived in the meantime, much to the dislike of
NETO/EDSAT, the National Education Telecommunications Organisation and
Education Satellite. "We are amazed at NASA's disregard for serving the
public interest, in general and for failing to take seriously the
importance distance education currently serves to bring science, math,
languages, teacher training, health care and other subjects to rural and
big city schools and other hard to reach populations," said NETO/EDSAT's
president, Shelly Weinstein. The organisation, acting on behalf of
speaking for K-12 schools, colleges, state agencies and education centers,
proposed to NASA using the currently unused C band capacity on TDRS 6 for
distance education purposes. Given the soaring costs for occasional use
and educational broadcasts, NETO/EDSAT now fears distance education will
become reduced to a few large industry program providers. 

Stim, Spiv, Stiv, Spim, Suck, Stuck? Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam!
The Internet is a strange, no – a very strange place. Its content can
roughly be divided into three parts: scientific services, personal hobby
pages – and the big players, who in contrast to the aforementioned, are
still in desperate search of any kind of content. The not so big players
are just happy to tell you who they are, what they offer and waste your
time by letting you download useless Java applets, should you be
unfortunate enough to use a Java enabled browser. (And very soon, they
*all* will be Java enabled.)
The big, big players, however, for some strange reason seem to think they
have to replace your newspaper, your radio and your TV set all at once.
(Which of course is ridiculous: You won't take our computer in bed with
you like a book or a magazine, and I wouldn't recommend it using in a
bath-tub either.) They're all starting so-called e-zines, electronic
magazines, of course with loads of so-called contents. Turner Broadcasting
was the first, now followed by the ailing online service Prodigy which was
sold by IBM and Sears to International Wireless and Prodigy managers a few
days ago. 
Their e-zines reside on sites with pretty funny addresses, like
www.stim.com and www.spiv.com. By the way, software giant Microsoft will
probably be the next major player to launch an e-zine. And they're all
going to be hot, cool or hip, you name it, while at the same time looking
good and providing nothing useful whatsoever. Financing is easy, as long
as advertisers believe in those pretty meaningless hit statistics. In
reality, they just provide some technical details about net (ab)use
instead of giving realistic figures about a certain site's accesses.
The Internet underground, producing e-zines that probably aren't really
read by anyone else but their authors, reacts to the establishment's
attack in a very special way. Suck (www.suck.com) stroke back by
registering subdomain names such as stiv.com and spim.com. Prodigy showed
some sense of humour by registering stuck.com. Oh, by the way: is spam.com
still up for grabs?


========================================================
Alle Angaben ohne Gewähr. Copyright 1996 by Peter C. Klanowski,
pck@LyNet.De. All rights reserved.
Einsender erklären sich mit Bearbeitung und Veröffentlichung
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