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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter V who wrote (25175)	11/12/1997 4:32:00 PM
From: Greg Cervelli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

I'm more than a bit worried. Gateway, Micron, and Compaq are using the Mpact! chip from Chromatics for DVD decoding, Lucent just released a chip for digital receiving, and Toshiba's single chip encoder. There is a lot competition out there for little cube. I don't think they can handle it. I may be out of this stock soon. Bought at 36.5 and will probably sell at 20. I love those 43.8% losses. I'm a shmuck for ever having believed in this company.

To: Peter V who wrote (25175)	11/12/1997 4:33:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

DirecDuo is not cheap.................................................. zdnet.com Dynamic Duo You've probably seen the ads for the DirecTV satellite television system and its related DirecPC satellite Internet access system. Until now, each service required a separate and different satellite receiver dish. Now, there's just one. The DirecDuo is a 21-inch elliptical dish that lets you access satellite television and provides a whopping 400 Kbps of downstream bandwidth (more than three times what an ISDN line delivers) for Internet access. But don't throw away your modem, yet. The satellite dish is a one-way conduit. You still need a conventional dial-in ISP account to send data. A 28.8K analog device suffices in most cases, since most upstream data for Web browsing consists of relatively small HTTP requests. On the other hand, if you want to do, say, videoconferencing or audio conferencing, which require high bandwidth both ways, you're better off with ISDN or even a 56K analog modem. As for costs, DirecDuo isn't cheap. You have to buy hardware--the dish, a receiver box for your TV, and an add-in card for your PC--which runs about $800. Then there's installation. It's a rather complicated affair, so instead of doing it yourself, you should consider paying the company $200 to do it for you. Then expect to pay separate monthly service charges for the digital TV and Net access, not to mention your separate dial-in ISP account, all of which easily tops $100 a month. There are other potential costs. To browse the Web on your TV, or watch digital TV on your PC's monitor, you need a graphics card with NTSC (television) input and output. One more thing--at press time the DirecDuo supports only Windows 95, though NT support is promised by the end of this month. --Joseph Moran