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August, 2001      Diablo Blue      Page 9

(Continued from page 7)

The Microsoft Publisher 2002 Update: June 21, 2001 provides the highest levels of security and stability available for your version of Publisher 2002. When creating and posting a Web page using Publisher 2002, the size of the Web page is larger than a similar Web page created using an earlier version of Publisher. This increase in size can cause slower uploading and downloading of the page. This download increases the performance of Publisher 2002 under these circumstances. This update is part of Microsoft's continued effort to provide the latest product updates to customers.

I immediately downloaded and installed the patch, and it did make a big difference. The overall size of the generated files is only around 800 KB (vs 1.8 MB, but still much larger than the 302 KB that Publisher 2000 generated). And there are still three times as many image files generated, and all of the rendering problems that were created by the unpatched version are still present in the web pages generated by the patched version.

I still recommend Office XP. And Publisher 2002, unless you're going to use it to generate Web sites from publications. If that's a major use you have for Microsoft Publisher, stick with Publisher 2000. What I'm doing is using Publisher 2002 to create a publication, saving it in Publisher 2000 format, then opening it using Publisher 2000 on my other PC and using it to generate the web pages.
And besides all of that, the dog ate my homework, too!

Get out your hankies, folks, I've got a sob story for you. This is an actual e-mail I received recently. I changed the name so I wouldn't get sued and [annotated the e-mail within the brackets with what the company was really thinking]. 
"It is with deep regret [but not lots of remorse] that we inform you that we will be discontinuing our verycool.com service effective March 28th, 2001 [Don't worry. You'll see us again. We're starting something just as dumb next month].
Due to current market conditions [actually we overspent like crazy], we have found it impossible to continue to offer this service ['cause our venture capitalists finally got wise].
While we will endeavor to keep the service operational [actually, one server, the slow one, and the only one even the creditors didn't want] and fully functional until late March [at least the front page of the Web site, just enough to fool the creditors], we can make no guarantees of up-time or performance [but guaranteed it's not going to be great].
Therefore, we strongly recommend that you retrieve any data that you desire [along with a zillion other people, slowing the site to a crawl] and transition to an alternative provider at the earliest possible date [like today, okay? `Cause we're not sure if our ISP will give us access to the servers much longer]."

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