OT UB

July 29, 2002
Getting an Answer Is One Thing, Learning Is Another
By Peter Coffee


In the process of attempting to inform people via IT, it's ironic that we may be misinforming or disinforming them more than ever before. We're helping people find the most popular sources of what's often inaccurate or misleading data; we're answering people's questions, instead of questioning their implied assumptions. We're applying the ever-more-impressive technologies of Internet search and context-sensitive help toward counterproductive ends.

What got me thinking along these lines was an incident last week, when someone asked me how a computer actually stores pictures and sounds. I handed him a book on PCs (the one that I wrote in 1998, as it happens) and told him that the answers were in Chapter 8. In fact, that was the entire subject of that chapter. But he came back to me a few minutes later, frustrated, saying: "I don't understand why you said I should read this whole chapter. I just had one little question." (Honestly, it was less than 30 pages, with plenty of white space.)

I felt as if I were seeing, in that one brief exchange, the combined success and failure of our efforts over the years to devise interactive tools that answer the question the user is asking—and nothing more than that. Microsoft, with its Office Assistant and "Semantic Web" research efforts, is arguably the leader in giving people what they seem to think they want in this regard, but many others have also pursued these goals. Until now, I have thought that this was a completely good thing, but I'm starting to have my doubts.

The problem, I'm starting to suspect, is that people may have learned to resist the idea of absorbing a foundation of information before they start accumulating details. We've thrown so much complexity at people, during the past 20 years or so, that users have had to develop a defense mechanism: "Just tell me what I need to know!" But when we do this, we wind up with people who are merely following recipes that might as well be magic spells.

People used to have a chance to learn fundamentals, and maybe even see opportunities to do things in fundamentally different ways, before they were forced to buy in to the existing way of doing things, before they felt in danger of being hopelessly overtaken by minutiae. But look, for example, at the way we've changed our approach to the task of teaching people to write. We used to start children off with simple tools that did no more than they needed: When they were first learning to form letters, we gave them pencils. When they were ready for words and sentences, we gave them typewriters. When they were ready to start rereading and rewriting their own work, we gave them text editors.

Now, we're giving grade-school children desktop publishing tools, whose use exposes choices that they don't understand—and involves answers to questions that the kids have no idea of how, or why, to ask.

The problem also strikes in the opposite direction: Sometimes, it's not a question of knowing too little, but rather of "knowing" too much. If you only answer the question that a person chooses to ask, you give up any opportunity to influence the assumptions and beliefs behind that question.

For example, if someone asked you how to stop excessive bleeding from skin punctures, you could answer that question—and that person could happily go back to treating patients by bleeding them with leeches, now that you had "solved" his "problem." Would his patients appreciate your help?

We get angry when someone seems to be condescending to us by asking, "Are you sure that's really the question?" But we're done no favor when a tightly focused answer helps us keep doing the same irrelevant things, and lets us continue making "progress" in the wrong direction—instead of getting us out of our rut.

It's ironic that the vast worldwide knowledge base of the Web is actually helping us stay stupid and uninformed, merely because we can now find the answer that we don't know better than to want—instead of finding the easiest portal to knowledge through a door marked, "Let's begin at the beginning." There's the challenge: to build distance learning systems, knowledge-base search tools, and interactive help technologies that can help us find the trunk, and even the roots, as well as the leaves of the tree of knowledge.

How do you figure out what question is really the one most worth answering?

Shane

UB

Just a bunch of "OLD" smart guys ( gg )

shane

wahz

Yes had slow loading for about 10 min at 10.30

shane

I sent Matt an email, maybe he has a way of contacting Zeev.

shane

Zeev said monday that he would not be in tue morning.

anybody know / heard anything.

shane

Yankee

If legislation does not lower the drug costs, Canada will likely profit. Costs of drugs are 30 to 70 % lower in Canada.

shane

Where is the chief turnip. I thought he said he would be out "only" in the AM!!

shane

HeavyDuty

Has IDCC made the turn or is it still headed lower?

shane

wstera2

I show it down .21 @ 5:55 PM

shane

mjk

"sole supplier" is why 2nd source. Don't you think as a CEO you would be putting your funds to work to develop "a better mouse trap"- that is all I am saying.

shane

slopik

Scheduled for 5 PM ET

shane

wahz

All that aside, will they report to the upside for klac AH ?

shane

sylvester80

I agree

shane

wahz

My point was, if there isn't a 2nd source then there will be all out effort to " build a better mouse trap" & therefore in their best interest " to assist " the 2nd source.

This would keep profits up for years.

shane

wahz

"no choice" is the reason why.

shane

delete

Stock Focus
Bulls On The Inside
Andrew T. Gillies, 07.26.02, 8:30 AM ET

NEW YORK - Wall Street has taken BellSouth's stock to the shed lately. Since topping out at $43 in September, shares of the Atlanta-headquartered Baby Bell have lost nearly half their value.

Insider activity, however, tells a less grim tale. Over the past six months, insiders have scooped up 10,000 BellSouth (nyse: BLS - news - people ) shares. Amount of insider selling: none.

That's a drop in the bucket--BellSouth has nearly 1.9 billion shares outstanding--but it's an encouraging sign. Contrast that to another Baby Bell, SBC Communications (nyse: SBC - news - people ), where insiders have also bought 10,000 shares but dumped 211,000 during the same period.

Of course, the motives for insider selling aren't always ominous--an insider may be financing a kid's college education or building a new house. Still, a predominance of insider buying is at the very least reassuring, if not a positive reflection of the company's outlook.

Moreover, net insider buying often signals an undervalued stock. BellSouth, for example, goes for 1.8 times latest 12-month sales versus a five-year average price-to-sales (PSR) multiple of 3.3. And BellSouth shares sell for just ten times projected 2003 earnings.

We set our screens to find companies where insider stock purchases have outnumbered sales in the last six months. To tighten the list, we restricted our search to companies with market capitalizations greater than $500 million, latest 12-month price-to-earnings ratios of 25 or less, and PSRs beneath their five-year averages. Estimated next 12-month P/Es for this group average just 11.

Headquartered in Baton Rouge, La., Shaw Group (nyse: SGR - news - people ) is the top U.S. manufacturer of prefabricated piping systems for utilities and other customers in the power industry; the company is also a provider of related engineering and consulting services. In addition, Shaw has a significant presence abroad, such as its recent joint-venture agreement with Yangzi Petrochemical to build a pipe-fabrication facility in China.

Although some insiders at the Shaw Group sold off 20,000 shares in recent months, insider buying was stronger, with 142,000 shares purchased.

Shaw Group's stock, down 41% from its 52-week high, looks like a bargain. Analysts reporting to Thomson Financial/IBES predict that the company will earn $2.92 per share over the next 12 months, giving the stock a 12-month forward estimated P/E of just 7.

Based on that number, and a long-term earnings growth estimate of 20% (annualized), the stock's price-to-earnings growth ratio, or PEG, comes in at just 0.4. PEGs under 1 are generally deemed a sign of a cheap stock.

Stilwell Financial (nyse: SV - news - people ) owns 92% of Denver-based Janus Capital Management, the mutual-fund outfit known primarily as one of the leaders of the growth-investing charge of the late 1990s. With the tech wreck, Janus' asset base has taken a pounding, and Stilwell shareholders have suffered accordingly. The stock has lost more than 60% of its value since August 2001.

But Stilwell insiders have stood by the company. In the past six months, insiders didn't sell any shares and purchased 1,000. Although this is just a tiny fraction of Stilwell's outstanding shares, it could indicate that some of the firm's top executives haven't given up hope in the company or the stock market.

At ten times latest 12-month earnings per share, Stilwell compares favorably to some competitors. T. Rowe Price (nasdaq: TROW - news - people ), for example, has a trailing P/E of 16.

Net Insider Buying
Company Price Change From 52-Week High P/E, Next 12 Months Shares Bought By Insiders* Shares Sold By Insiders*
BellSouth (nyse: BLS - news - people ) $22.99 -46% 10 10,000 0
John Hancock Financial (nyse: JHF - news - people ) 31.24 -26 11 56,000 0
Home Depot (nyse: HD - news - people ) 28.85 -45 18 171,000 23,000
PepsiAmericas (nyse: PAS - news - people ) 13.69 -14 13 1,000 0
Shaw Group (nyse: SGR - news - people ) 21.26 -41 7 142,000 20,000
Stilwell Financial (nyse: SV - news - people ) 12.40 -61 9 1,000 0

Prices as of July 25. *Latest six months. Sources: FT Interactive Data, Market Guide, and Thomson Financial/IBES via FactSet Research Systems


http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/26/0726sf.html


shane

iHub

Changing here Florida. Slow then Fast

Did a tracert. It looked good

shane

alanfl

if you can be specific as to what problems you are having i will try to help you solve the problem.

State the oper sys,age of sys, what problem you want to solve & what type ISP.

we can go from there to see what the fix can be after hours.



shane

CNBC Struggles Even as Financial News Abounds
By JIM RUTENBERG


In many ways, this should be CNBC's moment to shine. The string of financial scandals and the extreme dips in the stock market this year have moved the news back to its turf after a long trip to Afghanistan and the Mideast.

But in what has become a curiosity of the television business, the network's ratings are flagging — its daily, average audience of 233,000 people in the second quarter was 25 percent smaller than it was during the corresponding period last year.

And while CNBC not so long ago was at the top of the cable news ratings race, it is now faced with questions about whether the network has been tainted by the now-discredited stock analysts and chief executives that it has been accused of turning into unlikely pop stars in the boom years.

CNBC executives say they are on the comeback trail and point to ratings upticks in the last couple of weeks that came in the wake of the WorldCom accounting scandal — news that CNBC's correspondent David Faber was the first to report — and the market's various climbs and descents.

Just the same, they said, they have shifted CNBC's coverage away from its previous formula of treating the trading day as a sports event — with daily pregame, halftime and postgame shows — by offering deeper economic analysis.


To view the rest of the story


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/business/media/29CNBC.html

shane

OT extelecom


http://www.bootdisk.com/utility.htm

sorry forgot to give you the site, then follow the directions.

shane

XP here also works great

Three computer, two older 350Mhz and one new HP

shane

XBrit

See your point

shane

XBrit

Try this site

http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

shane

'extelecom


I just solved that problem on my computer a while back.

Go into control panel and see if you have Java installed, if so then uninstall and install the one below.

When you get to the site drop down to Win XP general then
MS Ver and download & install.

That should fix you up, let me know.

shane

JLSegal

you might try un-installing your email then reinstall, sounds like something is messed up in there. Copy and save your messages.

shane

LG

Suggest that you keep WinXP Pro on another Partition from your other programs.

JMO

shane

augieboo

good, still looks like a connection/gain level on your line connection.

try the TRACERT see previous post, it will tell you where the problem is located.

shane

augieboo

msft or sun's version of java

shane

augieboo

Remove your present virus protection then go to search for your virus program ( what ever you use ) and then deleter what ever remains.

both below are free.

Here is a free virus protection, works great.

http://www.grisoft.com/html/us_index.htm

This one only does one thing protect you from virus, also would suggest ZoneAlarem

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/zap_za_grid.jsp

Suggest you install both.

shane

Augieboo

what operating sys are you using now

shane

I agree. I use ZoneAlarm as a firewall with it. Free also.

shane

You can get a Trial Version here:

http://www.visualware.com/visualroute/index.html

This should get you to the point that you can indentify wherevever the problem is located.

shane

FinnTroll

This will give you info:



Tracert (and ping)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Background Training: TCP/IP

Tracert (and ping) are both command line utilities that are built into Windows and most other computer systems. The basic tracert command syntax is "tracert hostname". For example, "tracert visualroute.com" and the output might look like:
Tracing route to visualroute.com [192.41.43.189]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 89 ms 87 ms 87 ms 199.70.3.58
2 90 ms 95 ms 90 ms 199.70.3.49
3 100 ms 90 ms 90 ms gbr5-p21.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.253.245]
4 90 ms 90 ms 90 ms gbr3-p90.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.5.114]
5 90 ms 90 ms 95 ms ggr1-p370.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.1.125]
6 110 ms 110 ms 115 ms att-gw.ny.verio.net [192.205.32.174]
7 115 ms 110 ms 115 ms p4-1-3-0.r01.chcgil01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.14]
8 125 ms 110 ms 110 ms p4-6-0.r00.chcgil01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.253]
9 135 ms 140 ms 135 ms p4-4-0.r00.dllstx01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.4.89]
10 140 ms 140 ms 165 ms p4-1-0-0.r01.dllstx01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.3.74]
11 200 ms 200 ms 200 ms p1-0-0-0.r01.oremut01.us.bb.verio.net [129.250.2.41]
12 204 ms 200 ms 200 ms pvu1.vwhpvu1.verio.net [129.250.29.202]
13 200 ms 195 ms 200 ms visualroute.com [192.41.43.189]

Trace complete.



Here is a similar trace route as it would appear in a VisualRoute table:

Discover the path: Tracert sends an ICMP echo packet, but it takes advantage of the fact that most Internet routers will send back an ICMP 'TTL expired in transit' message if the TTL field is ever decremented to zero by a router. Using this knowledge, we can discover the path taken by IP Packets.

How tracert works:Tracert sends out an ICMP echo packet to the named host, but with a TTL of 1; then with a TTL of 2; then with a TTL of 3 and so on. Tracert will then get 'TTL expired in transit' message back from routers until the desination host computer finally is reached and it responds with the standard ICMP 'echo reply' packet.

Try it yourself: To see this in action yourself, just use the '-i' option of ping, which allows you to set the TTL value of outgoing ping packets. For example, "ping -i 1 visualroute.com" and you will see "Reply from 199.70.3.58: TTL expired in transit" (where the router IP Address returned, 199.70.3.58, is specific to your Internet connection). Then again with "ping -i 2 visualroute.com", and get back "Reply from 199.70.3.49: TTL expired in transit", and so on. Finally at "ping -i 13 visualroute.com" you get "Reply from 192.41.43.189: bytes=32 time=198ms TTL=245", which is the destination host responding.

Round Trip Times: Each millisecond (ms) time in the table is the round-trip time that it took (to send the ICMP packet and to get the ICMP reply packet). The faster (smaller) the times the better. ms times of 0 mean that the reply was faster than the computers timer of 10 milliseconds, so the time is actually somewhere between 0 and 10 milliseconds.

Packet Loss: Packet loss kills throughput. So, having no packet loss is critical to having a connection to the Internet to responds well. A slower connection with zero packet loss can easily outperform a faster connection with some packet loss. Also, packet loss on the last hop, the desination, is what is most important. Sometimes routers in-between will not send ICMP "TTL expired in transit" messages, causing what looks to be high packet loss at a particular hop, but all it means is that the particular router is not responding to ICMP echo.


Ping
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The basic ping command syntax is "ping hostname". For example, "ping visualroute.com" and the output might look like:
Pinging visualroute.com [192.41.43.189] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.41.43.189: bytes=32 time=218ms TTL=245
Reply from 192.41.43.189: bytes=32 time=210ms TTL=245
Reply from 192.41.43.189: bytes=32 time=205ms TTL=245
Reply from 192.41.43.189: bytes=32 time=204ms TTL=245

Ping statistics for 192.41.43.189:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 204ms, Maximum = 218ms, Average = 209ms



TTL reply: Ping sends an ICMP echo packet (with the TTL value set to the host default) to the host listed on the ping command line. Ping expects back an ICMP 'echo reply' packet. The millisecond time displayed is the round trip time. The "TTL=245" above says that the incoming ICMP echo reply packet has its TTL field set to 245. Because this value was decremented by one at each hop on the way back, this tells us that visualroute.com is probably setting the initial TTL value to 255.

TTL Expired in Transit: Most computers today initialize the TTL value of outgoing IP Packets 128 or higher. If you ever see a reply above with a "TTL=5" (or some other low TTL number) this tells you that the computer being pinged should most likely have its default TTL value increased. Otherwise, anyone trying to communicate with the computer that is at a hop count higher than the TTL will not be able to communicate with the computer. For example, if you are 40 hops away from www.xyz.com, and www.xyz.com sets TTL fields in IP packets that it sends out to 32, the IP Packets will not reach you. They will 'expire in transmit' before they reach you.

Discover your TTL: To discover the default TTL value of your computer, 'ping localhost' and examine the TTL reply value. For older Windows machines this value is 32. For newer Windows machines, this value is 128.

shane

augieboo

Initially I had problems with my cable, slow, knocked-off ect.
I fought with TW over this because they said it was my set-up.

I then performed " tracert " copied those results and emailed those to the Tech's. Got their attention and have been very happy with cable for the last 5 yrs.

shane

Zeev

Thanks for the input. I have been out all morning, just got back. stopped out of both brcm merq

live to trade another day, looks like I missed the dip on zran also.

thanks again

shane

Thanks Zeev

Shane

Zeev

can you refresh your views brcm merq

shane

Zeev

I agree 100 % and not just in the stk mkt.

You are doing a great service to all ( most all ) on this board.

Keep up the " good " work and thanks

shane

Zeev

would you suggest tight stops for BRCM MERQ

shane