At 8:44 -0800 11/13/03, John Burke wrote:

>Patrick Thibodeau continues the quote game:

.........   Long URL snipped

>John Burke

Thanks for the tip, John.  To avoid eye strain, try the equivalent
http://tinyurl.com/uw7z

BTW, I just sent a few words about "tiny URL" to a friend:

It is a great concept (and implementation).  For info: http://tinyurl.com

They provide a useful service and, in the process, they do some (subtle)
marketing of their products.  They seem to be "cool" people (check their
suggested links to other pages & sites).

The basic idea is that they "hash" (just as IMAGE does) a [potentially]
VERY long string into a "number" that uses a reasonably large number base
(let's say 36, to start with, to be able to use 26 letters plus 10 decimal
digits as the "base-36 digits"). Their "hash" algorithm appears to be
very simple (so far).  "Simple", of course, does mean "useless" -- on the
contrary!

You can represent a gigantic number in base-36 with just a few "digits".
They probably just increment their "current number" by one and they
assign the new number permanently to whatever URL you submit.  When
you click on the "tiny" URL (which goes through their web site), they
simply redirect the link to the original link, which they promise to
keep forever.  I wonder what kinds of statistical analysis (and user
correlation) they do.

But that's another subject :-)

  _______________
 |               |
 |               |
 |            r  |  Alfredo                  http://www.adager.com
 |          e    |
 |        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego
 |      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs
 |    d          |  Adager Corporation
 |  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
 |               |
 |_______________|

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