WML is an obsolescent markup code that is part of the WAP family. It has been "replaced" by XHTML Mobile Profile in the sense that phone manufacturers recommend XHTML-MP as the forward path. It has not been replaced in many phones that are still in the active user base.
Many people suggest that current Web standards (XHTML + CSS) mean there is no need for specialized support of handheld devices. This opinion generally is held by people who (a) do not actually use phone-based wireless browsers and (b) have not read the XHTML-MP standard and have not yet discovered that it might be nice to, for example, click and dial a phone number.
Advertising on newspaper-operated local Web sites is up substantially. For example NYT Digital recently reported a 42.3 percent increase, compared with a 1 percent overall growth rate for the New York Times Company. Most major newspaper companies' digital divisions are in the black and some are turning operating margins in the 30 to 40 percent range. The ad-supported news model is a proven winner.
Paid access on newspaper sites has been an overall failure. The Wall Street Journal is an anomaly, with need-to-know business information sold to people who are on an expense account. The Borrell group has an extensive report on the subject and Neil Budde, former publisher of WSJ.com, will be happy to consult with any newspaper contemplating the paid-access route -- generally to counsel them against the idea. Paid content works only in some very specific niche situations, not for general local-interest newspapers.
Registration has nothing to do with paid access. Newspaper companies are deploying registration systems for analysis and ad targeting, not as a scheme to slip in a charge-for-access model. Registration data allows ads to be delivered based on geographic and demographic information. That's especially important to newspapers with major out-of-market traffic -- such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian (UK). When the Media Guardian institutes registration next month they'll be able to deliver ads that are intended for UK readers only to UK readers, and not waste advertisers' money delivering them to me.
If you think for just a minute about the questions being asked by the new Washington Post registration system you'll realize they're designed to facilitate targeted business advertising on the site, which traditionally has sold itself only to local DC advertisers.
This issue led to a battle between producers and the musicians union in New York last spring, which eventually resulted in a four-day strike ended by a new contract brokered by the mayor's office. The compromise preserves live orchestras, but reduces the required size. Most media coverage has expired (or moved into paid archives) but a simple Google search turns up:
The 3650 and other Nokia series 60 phones can sync with Outlook using PC Suite, but that's all. That works fine for me, as Outlook is dictated by our IT people at work.
However, at home we have XP and OpenOffice, and no Outlook, so my wife can't synch her 3650 with anything. In fact, in order to put new listings into her phone directory, the best way is for me to load it into my phone at work, then Bluetooth or MMS the item to her phone.
For Linux, the SyncML-based MultiSync, which supports Ximian Evolution, seems to be coming along (I have not tried it). But in general, SyncML is still long on promise and short on reality.
Actually, the hierarchy was NOT rigid. Any node on the tree could point to any Gopher address, so the navigational scheme could be a network and not merely a tree. However, text resources were by definition just text files, and were leaf nodes as a result. They couldn't point anywhere else.
The big breakthroughs of the Web were the ability to embed a hypertext link at any abitrary location in text, and the ability to embed images (introduced by Mosaic).
The Gopher model was excellent for a narrowband world. It was a tremendous breakthrough in a darkness where we all had to "just know" Telnet addresses like nyx.du.edu and FTP addresses like tsx-11.mit.edu. It worked great on a plain-text terminal. And it pioneered a lot of things that later made the Web usable, such as link-integrated search engines (Archie, which searched FTP archives, and Veronica, which searched Gopherspace).
If the cellphone companies weren't so self-destructively larcenous, they would have used Gopher instead of creating that awful WAP/WML mess.
In the long run, no one wins in this pissing match between photographers and publishers. Regardless of how this issue ultimately is settled by the courts, the real outcome is that both publishers and photographers will have to spend more time and more resources on bookkeeping, recordkeeping, contract negotiation, and other energy-sapping details of business that have nothing to do with the making of great photography and great publications.
The photographers are trying to take advantage of the historically loose business relationship with their customers (the publishers). For a long time, many newspapers and magazines bought freelance content without any sort of formal contract. This messy situation wasn't a problem until new media started dangling (mostly imaginary) riches in front of the freelancers, who responded by launching a series of legal maneuvers aimed at their customers (the publishers). No rights to republish on CD? Oops, gotcha. But playing oops-gotcha with your customers is no way to build a healthy business.
The fighting over residual rights that has emerged in the last couple of decades has had only one real, long-term effect: most publishers now require signed contracts that specifically grant open-ended rights to future/to-be-invented media so this ugly situation doesn't occur again.
But there are costs, for lawyers, for recordkeeping systems, for tracking down authors and photographers and negotiating new agreements, and not one cent of that money makes for better photography or better publications. It's a massive inefficiency and it's energy lost forever.
Netscape is used by many major media companies because it can be deployed on a secure (Unix) platform and because they like its multithreaded, non-forking model. Apache 2 supports that model, but it's a recent product and switching costs deter major installations from using it. (In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Our company (Morris Communications) hosts more than 30 newspaper sites and thousands of customer sites. We use Netscape for our newspapers and generally use Apache 1.x for small sites. We use Apache 2.x behind the scenes for application servers.
Here is a quick survey of major news sites:
Netscape is used by CNN, NYTimes, LATimes, WashingtonPost, ChicagoTribune, and the Telegraph (UK).
Apache is used by IHT, Guardian (UK), CBSNews, all the KnightRidder newspapers, NWSource (Seattle), SFGate, StarTribune, Chron (Houston), Detnews and Freep (Detroit), and Internet Broadcasting (local TV stations).
IIS is used by MSNBC, USAToday and WorldNow (local TV stations).
Newsbot is part of MSN's UK, French, Spanish and Italian services, but not part of its US service. It may be that Microsoft's contract with NBC prohibits its launching Newsbot in the United States. I don't know details of that contract, but I have been told in the past that the relationship between MS and NBC is very complex and includes contractual restrictions on each entity.
Re:Bluejacking : a growing problem in taxis ...
on
Spammed by Bluetooth
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not sure what you mean by "On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question."
On my Nokia 3650, Bluetooth is turned off by default, and even when it is on, vcards are NOT inserted into the address book automatically. Incoming objects are saved to a folder, but I have to open the card and explicitly save the data in order to place it in my address book.
Generally I don't ascribe to malice anything that can adequately be ascribed to stupidity, but Microsoft has so thoroughly screwed up Bluetooth that it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.
I've been using a Bluetooth-enabled phone (Nokia 3650) for a month or so, and I've tried to get it working with three different Windows-based computers (98, XP Home, and XP Professional). It's absolutely a crapshoot and the dice are loaded against you.
Phone-to-phone Bluetooth is great. Phone-to-Mac Bluetooth apparently is superb. Phone-to-PC... well, on the rare occasions I can get it working at all, I know it's succeeded when I get an error message telling me it's failed. That's how putzed up it is.
Before commenting on participatory journalism you should find out what it is. I know that's not necessarily in the Slashdot tradition, but it's a good practice.:-)
Participatory journalism is journalism in which consumers of information have an opportunity to participate in the process -- if they have anything to contribute.
In other words, producers and consumers can share -- or even switch -- roles.
One of the most important characteristics of the Internet is that it democratizes publishing by lowing the capital requirements. Message boards and blogs (which we used to call "personal Web sites") are within the reach of just about anyone.
I spoke about this several years ago at the NetMedia conference in London and called it "People's Journalism." That has a vaguely Berkeleyesque ring, and I have grown to prefer the contemporary term "Participatory Journalism."
My friend Dan Gillmor is writing a book on the subject.
The availability of any so-called "free" media Web site is predicated on the functionality of the advertising it carries. Break the advertising, you break the site.
Flash isn't just for animation any more. It's an interactive UI delivery platform.
Write a generalized interactive graphing tool in Flash. Then have it fetch a simple data file (delimited text or XML) via HTTP.
You can update the data dynamically and transmit the results with extremely low overhead.
Flash kicks Java's butt when it comes to availability, reliability, predictability and performance. Flash on Linux is absolutely the same as Flash on Windows or the Mac. It just works.
We have used Flash's ability to fetch dynamic data via HTTP to build "live" traffic and weather maps and perform other integration of constantly changing information.
Boeing and Intel have been working with several airlines on installation of paid-access WiFi on commercial airliners.
As for cell access... even if it is determined that there is no safety threat (and there probably is not), cellphones aren't designed to work at 550 miles per hour and 40,000 feet in the air. They're flaky enough on the ground. They may work on approach or takeoff, but airliners don't waste any time getting to altitude, where engines operate more efficiently in the extremely cold air.
We're not exactly "non-techie," but we have been happy with OpenOffice in a Web design/development workgroup as a crossplatform substitute for MS tools. Our designers and developers aren't heavy users of word processing and spreadsheet documents, but they do have to correspond with the outside world, and OpenOffice has allowed us to save quite a bit on licensing fees.
So, regarding 1, 2, and 3 - the advantage to me as a consumer is what?
Relevancy of information. Think about it for a minute. Advertising that is not useful is noise. Advertising that is useful isn't noise. Targeting replaces the noise with utility.
If you're looking for a house, informative advertising from mortgage lenders (real lenders, not the scam artists who clog your email box) is useful. If you're hungry, you might find targeted pizza coupons from the pizza joint around the corner to be useful. And so forth.
You also might consider that making the Web site profitable ensures its survival, which ought to be an advantage to you, assuming that you care to use it.
NYT doesn't spam. And the percentage of net.morons who register using cartoon names is remarkably low.
I don't work for the New York Times, but for another media company, and I'm in a position to understand the reasons for registration:
1. Metrics. Registration supports the generation of accurate data on demographics and usage (reach, frequency) in a crosstabulated view. This is important in analytical processes to support site management and design as well as in the sale of advertising, which provides the revenue that makes the site possible.
2. Ad targeting. Run-of-site, untargeted Internet advertising is nearly worthless on the open market (supply/demand), but advertising that is highly targeted remains highly valuable. When combined with proper analytical software and usage data, registration data can -- for example -- let me target 25- to 34-year-olds in a particular ZIP code who have been looking at real estate listings. And I can deliver that advertising anywhere on my site, such as on sports pages that otherwise would contain "junk" ad inventory. This is (measurably!) much more efficient and effective, and I can charge fairly high CPM prices. Importantly, this can be accomplished without providing any personal data to the advertiser, protecting the anonymity of the user.
3. Reduction in traffic. Reduction is actually desirable in many cases. Not all customers are good customers, and not all traffic is good traffic.
On the Google issue: I used robots.txt to block Google from indexing the AP content on our 27 newspaper sites, because I have no desire to be the unpaid provider of wire stories for Google News so that they can be read by users outside our markets. Additionally, I have used a router block to prevent several commercial Web clipping services from having access of any sort to any of our sites.
Furthermore, the French sustained MORE losses than the (obviously much larger) United States in World War II, on the heels of devastating losses in World War I (in which the U.S. suffered relatively few casualties as a latecomer). And that doesn't count hundreds of thousands of civilian losses. Anyone who thinks the French folded easily and without losses is an ignoramus.
In short -- only rich businessmen (and technophiles who always buy the latest gadgets).
Translation: People with jobs.
Where am I basing my personal observations? A computer science department at a university, of all places.
Translation: Never-never land.
At the media company where I work for a living, PDAs are ubiquitous among management, among people who participate in meetings, and among outside salespeople. The most popular PDAs are integrated with cellphones -- the inexpensive Kyocera, the Samsung i300, Treo Handspring, RIM Blackberry.
This isn't simply technophilic self-indulgence. This is a matter of needing complete, current contact lists integrated with the phone. It's a matter of needing to be at irregularly scheduled meetings on time. It's cheaper to buy the phones than to miss business opportunities.
I suppose we could all carry Daytimers and Rolodexes. They don't fit in pockets and have a bad habit of not being around when they're needed. And they don't beep five minutes before it's time to be someplace.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be some confusion about what WAP is (including in some modded-up postings).
WAP is a family of protocols, documented here.
WML is an obsolescent markup code that is part of the WAP family. It has been "replaced" by XHTML Mobile Profile in the sense that phone manufacturers recommend XHTML-MP as the forward path. It has not been replaced in many phones that are still in the active user base.
Many people suggest that current Web standards (XHTML + CSS) mean there is no need for specialized support of handheld devices. This opinion generally is held by people who (a) do not actually use phone-based wireless browsers and (b) have not read the XHTML-MP standard and have not yet discovered that it might be nice to, for example, click and dial a phone number.
Nonsense. You're making stuff up.
The facts are these:
Advertising on newspaper-operated local Web sites is up substantially. For example NYT Digital recently reported a 42.3 percent increase, compared with a 1 percent overall growth rate for the New York Times Company. Most major newspaper companies' digital divisions are in the black and some are turning operating margins in the 30 to 40 percent range. The ad-supported news model is a proven winner.
Paid access on newspaper sites has been an overall failure. The Wall Street Journal is an anomaly, with need-to-know business information sold to people who are on an expense account. The Borrell group has an extensive report on the subject and Neil Budde, former publisher of WSJ.com, will be happy to consult with any newspaper contemplating the paid-access route -- generally to counsel them against the idea. Paid content works only in some very specific niche situations, not for general local-interest newspapers.
Registration has nothing to do with paid access. Newspaper companies are deploying registration systems for analysis and ad targeting, not as a scheme to slip in a charge-for-access model. Registration data allows ads to be delivered based on geographic and demographic information. That's especially important to newspapers with major out-of-market traffic -- such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian (UK). When the Media Guardian institutes registration next month they'll be able to deliver ads that are intended for UK readers only to UK readers, and not waste advertisers' money delivering them to me.
If you think for just a minute about the questions being asked by the new Washington Post registration system you'll realize they're designed to facilitate targeted business advertising on the site, which traditionally has sold itself only to local DC advertisers.
Well, it's a good thing Gopher is dead, or we'd all be fighting over Archie, Veronica, and Jughead.
This issue led to a battle between producers and the musicians union in New York last spring, which eventually resulted in a four-day strike ended by a new contract brokered by the mayor's office. The compromise preserves live orchestras, but reduces the required size. Most media coverage has expired (or moved into paid archives) but a simple Google search turns up:
Anti-synthesizer advocacy site.
Sinfonia article.
Settlement story.
Yah, it's not like technology CHANGES or anything.
The 3650 and other Nokia series 60 phones can sync with Outlook using PC Suite, but that's all. That works fine for me, as Outlook is dictated by our IT people at work.
However, at home we have XP and OpenOffice, and no Outlook, so my wife can't synch her 3650 with anything. In fact, in order to put new listings into her phone directory, the best way is for me to load it into my phone at work, then Bluetooth or MMS the item to her phone.
For Linux, the SyncML-based MultiSync, which supports Ximian Evolution, seems to be coming along (I have not tried it). But in general, SyncML is still long on promise and short on reality.
Actually, the hierarchy was NOT rigid. Any node on the tree could point to any Gopher address, so the navigational scheme could be a network and not merely a tree. However, text resources were by definition just text files, and were leaf nodes as a result. They couldn't point anywhere else.
The big breakthroughs of the Web were the ability to embed a hypertext link at any abitrary location in text, and the ability to embed images (introduced by Mosaic).
The Gopher model was excellent for a narrowband world. It was a tremendous breakthrough in a darkness where we all had to "just know" Telnet addresses like nyx.du.edu and FTP addresses like tsx-11.mit.edu. It worked great on a plain-text terminal. And it pioneered a lot of things that later made the Web usable, such as link-integrated search engines (Archie, which searched FTP archives, and Veronica, which searched Gopherspace).
If the cellphone companies weren't so self-destructively larcenous, they would have used Gopher instead of creating that awful WAP/WML mess.
You mean links like these? Is this close enough to spam for you?
* Vexira ALERT *
This version of Vexira MailArmor is licensed and full featured.
Vexira has detected the following in a mail from your address:
Worm/MyDoom.A2 virus
The mail was not delivered.
Your computer may be infected with a virus! Please visit
Central Command at http://www.centralcommand.com and obtain a copy
of Vexira AntiVirus now.
In the long run, no one wins in this pissing match between photographers and publishers. Regardless of how this issue ultimately is settled by the courts, the real outcome is that both publishers and photographers will have to spend more time and more resources on bookkeeping, recordkeeping, contract negotiation, and other energy-sapping details of business that have nothing to do with the making of great photography and great publications.
The photographers are trying to take advantage of the historically loose business relationship with their customers (the publishers). For a long time, many newspapers and magazines bought freelance content without any sort of formal contract. This messy situation wasn't a problem until new media started dangling (mostly imaginary) riches in front of the freelancers, who responded by launching a series of legal maneuvers aimed at their customers (the publishers). No rights to republish on CD? Oops, gotcha. But playing oops-gotcha with your customers is no way to build a healthy business.
The fighting over residual rights that has emerged in the last couple of decades has had only one real, long-term effect: most publishers now require signed contracts that specifically grant open-ended rights to future/to-be-invented media so this ugly situation doesn't occur again.
But there are costs, for lawyers, for recordkeeping systems, for tracking down authors and photographers and negotiating new agreements, and not one cent of that money makes for better photography or better publications. It's a massive inefficiency and it's energy lost forever.
Netscape is used by many major media companies because it can be deployed on a secure (Unix) platform and because they like its multithreaded, non-forking model. Apache 2 supports that model, but it's a recent product and switching costs deter major installations from using it. (In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Our company (Morris Communications) hosts more than 30 newspaper sites and thousands of customer sites. We use Netscape for our newspapers and generally use Apache 1.x for small sites. We use Apache 2.x behind the scenes for application servers.
Here is a quick survey of major news sites:
Netscape is used by CNN, NYTimes, LATimes, WashingtonPost, ChicagoTribune, and the Telegraph (UK).
Apache is used by IHT, Guardian (UK), CBSNews, all the KnightRidder newspapers, NWSource (Seattle), SFGate, StarTribune, Chron (Houston), Detnews and Freep (Detroit), and Internet Broadcasting (local TV stations).
IIS is used by MSNBC, USAToday and WorldNow (local TV stations).
Newsbot is part of MSN's UK, French, Spanish and Italian services, but not part of its US service. It may be that Microsoft's contract with NBC prohibits its launching Newsbot in the United States. I don't know details of that contract, but I have been told in the past that the relationship between MS and NBC is very complex and includes contractual restrictions on each entity.
Not sure what you mean by "On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question."
On my Nokia 3650, Bluetooth is turned off by default, and even when it is on, vcards are NOT inserted into the address book automatically. Incoming objects are saved to a folder, but I have to open the card and explicitly save the data in order to place it in my address book.
Mod up the parent.
... well, on the rare occasions I can get it working at all, I know it's succeeded when I get an error message telling me it's failed. That's how putzed up it is.
Generally I don't ascribe to malice anything that can adequately be ascribed to stupidity, but Microsoft has so thoroughly screwed up Bluetooth that it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.
I've been using a Bluetooth-enabled phone (Nokia 3650) for a month or so, and I've tried to get it working with three different Windows-based computers (98, XP Home, and XP Professional). It's absolutely a crapshoot and the dice are loaded against you.
Phone-to-phone Bluetooth is great. Phone-to-Mac Bluetooth apparently is superb. Phone-to-PC
If you have issues with it, here's how to submit a letter to the editor or a longer op-ed piece:
http://www.sltrib.com/help/forum.asp
Owners of smart phones running Symbian OS can install call-blocking software:
5 0_ software.htm
http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/software/nokia_36
There may be similar software for other phones.
Or you could install one of those Microsoft phones and be free of all incoming calls.
Before commenting on participatory journalism you should find out what it is. I know that's not necessarily in the Slashdot tradition, but it's a good practice. :-)
Participatory journalism is journalism in which consumers of information have an opportunity to participate in the process -- if they have anything to contribute.
In other words, producers and consumers can share -- or even switch -- roles.
One of the most important characteristics of the Internet is that it democratizes publishing by lowing the capital requirements. Message boards and blogs (which we used to call "personal Web sites") are within the reach of just about anyone.
I spoke about this several years ago at the NetMedia conference in London and called it "People's Journalism." That has a vaguely Berkeleyesque ring, and I have grown to prefer the contemporary term "Participatory Journalism."
My friend Dan Gillmor is writing a book on the subject.
http://www.jdlasica.com/aboutjd.html
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=lasica
The availability of any so-called "free" media Web site is predicated on the functionality of the advertising it carries. Break the advertising, you break the site.
Flash isn't just for animation any more. It's an interactive UI delivery platform.
Write a generalized interactive graphing tool in Flash. Then have it fetch a simple data file (delimited text or XML) via HTTP.
You can update the data dynamically and transmit the results with extremely low overhead.
Flash kicks Java's butt when it comes to availability, reliability, predictability and performance. Flash on Linux is absolutely the same as Flash on Windows or the Mac. It just works.
We have used Flash's ability to fetch dynamic data via HTTP to build "live" traffic and weather maps and perform other integration of constantly changing information.
Boeing and Intel have been working with several airlines on installation of paid-access WiFi on commercial airliners. As for cell access ... even if it is determined that there is no safety threat (and there probably is not), cellphones aren't designed to work at 550 miles per hour and 40,000 feet in the air. They're flaky enough on the ground. They may work on approach or takeoff, but airliners don't waste any time getting to altitude, where engines operate more efficiently in the extremely cold air.
We're not exactly "non-techie," but we have been happy with OpenOffice in a Web design/development workgroup as a crossplatform substitute for MS tools. Our designers and developers aren't heavy users of word processing and spreadsheet documents, but they do have to correspond with the outside world, and OpenOffice has allowed us to save quite a bit on licensing fees.
IT support manhours: Zero.
So, regarding 1, 2, and 3 - the advantage to me as a consumer is what?
Relevancy of information. Think about it for a minute. Advertising that is not useful is noise. Advertising that is useful isn't noise. Targeting replaces the noise with utility.
If you're looking for a house, informative advertising from mortgage lenders (real lenders, not the scam artists who clog your email box) is useful. If you're hungry, you might find targeted pizza coupons from the pizza joint around the corner to be useful. And so forth.
You also might consider that making the Web site profitable ensures its survival, which ought to be an advantage to you, assuming that you care to use it.
NYT doesn't spam. And the percentage of net.morons who register using cartoon names is remarkably low.
I don't work for the New York Times, but for another media company, and I'm in a position to understand the reasons for registration:
1. Metrics. Registration supports the generation of accurate data on demographics and usage (reach, frequency) in a crosstabulated view. This is important in analytical processes to support site management and design as well as in the sale of advertising, which provides the revenue that makes the site possible.
2. Ad targeting. Run-of-site, untargeted Internet advertising is nearly worthless on the open market (supply/demand), but advertising that is highly targeted remains highly valuable. When combined with proper analytical software and usage data, registration data can -- for example -- let me target 25- to 34-year-olds in a particular ZIP code who have been looking at real estate listings. And I can deliver that advertising anywhere on my site, such as on sports pages that otherwise would contain "junk" ad inventory. This is (measurably!) much more efficient and effective, and I can charge fairly high CPM prices. Importantly, this can be accomplished without providing any personal data to the advertiser, protecting the anonymity of the user.
3. Reduction in traffic. Reduction is actually desirable in many cases. Not all customers are good customers, and not all traffic is good traffic.
On the Google issue: I used robots.txt to block Google from indexing the AP content on our 27 newspaper sites, because I have no desire to be the unpaid provider of wire stories for Google News so that they can be read by users outside our markets. Additionally, I have used a router block to prevent several commercial Web clipping services from having access of any sort to any of our sites.
Furthermore, the French sustained MORE losses than the (obviously much larger) United States in World War II, on the heels of devastating losses in World War I (in which the U.S. suffered relatively few casualties as a latecomer). And that doesn't count hundreds of thousands of civilian losses. Anyone who thinks the French folded easily and without losses is an ignoramus.
In short -- only rich businessmen (and technophiles who always buy the latest gadgets).
Translation: People with jobs.
Where am I basing my personal observations? A computer science department at a university, of all places.
Translation: Never-never land.
At the media company where I work for a living, PDAs are ubiquitous among management, among people who participate in meetings, and among outside salespeople. The most popular PDAs are integrated with cellphones -- the inexpensive Kyocera, the Samsung i300, Treo Handspring, RIM Blackberry.
This isn't simply technophilic self-indulgence. This is a matter of needing complete, current contact lists integrated with the phone. It's a matter of needing to be at irregularly scheduled meetings on time. It's cheaper to buy the phones than to miss business opportunities.
I suppose we could all carry Daytimers and Rolodexes. They don't fit in pockets and have a bad habit of not being around when they're needed. And they don't beep five minutes before it's time to be someplace.