So, what do you do?

We&ve all heard it or asked it before. Maybe it is the person sitting next to you on a plane or at an event or just standing in line somewhere. More often than not, the answer is a long-winded sales pitch no one asked for. Or it is what has long been called your elevator pitch. However, I like to point out, elevators are really fast these days. You need to have a short answer to make any sort of impact.

If you really want to get someoneattention and interest, learn to answer this question with three simple words.

Create rock stars.

You want it to be three words that just beg the questions, &What does that mean? What do you do?& Or even better, &Tell me more!& The three words are just enough to pique their interest and ask for just a bit more and, just like that, you have opened the door a bit.

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Microsoft on Tuesday extended support by six months for more products, telling customers that SharePoint Server 2010 will now receive updates until April 13, 2021 and that Windows 10 1809 will get security fixes until Nov. 10, 2020.

"In response to the COVID-19 crisis and an increase in customer requests, we have decided to revise support for SharePoint Server 2010 products and technologies,' Mark Kashman, senior product manager on the SharePoint team, wrote in an April 14 post to a company blog.

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On Sept. 23, 1999, a NASA satellite reached Mars, where it was supposed to begin orbiting the planet. Instead, the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet. Why? A data integration error between two software programs caused the spacecraft to navigate too close to the planet, where it was likely destroyed in the atmosphere.

Thatan extreme example of what can happen when systems don&t work together. But it does illustrate the complex and unexpected issues that can come with a business-wide software upgrade. Itessential that applications mesh to ease data sharing and collaboration.

Thateasier said than done in todaycomplex IT environment. Ita safe bet that applications reside in many different locations across your business, both onsite and in the cloud. If they aren&t tightly integrated, employees will be hard-pressed to easily share information & which means they&ll default to more laborious methods such as manual copy/paste or sending documents via email.

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That NASA intends to collect a sample from Mars and return it to Earth is well known — they&ve said so many times. But how would they go about scooping up soil from the surface of a distant planet and getting it back here? With a plan that sounds straight out of sci-fi.

Described by the projectlead scientist in a virtual meeting reported by Nature, NASA and the European Space Agencyproposed Mars sample retrieval program is perhaps the most ambitious interplanetary mission ever devised. (I&ve asked NASA for more details and will update this post if I hear back.)

The first part of the plan is already public: It relies on the Mars Perseverance rover, which is currently being prepared, despite the pandemic, for its launch in July. Perseverance will perform sampling using a drill and soil scoop, filling 30 small tubes with the results of its Martian delvings and storing them on board.

The next step is where things start to get wild.

A second spacecraft will travel to Mars, launching in 2026 and arriving in 2028, and land near Perseverance in Jezero crater. It will deploy a second rover, which will roll over to Perseverance, collect the sample tubes, and deposit them in the &Mars ascent vehicle& that also came with it. This small rocket will launch itself and the samples into orbit — the first time a spacecraft will have taken off from the surface of Mars.

At this point, a third spacecraft waiting nearby will synchronize its orbit with the sample retrieval craft, collect it, and return to Earth with it, where it will make its — controlled, one hopes — reentry in 2031.

&This is by no means a simple task,& said head of NASAMars exploration program Jim Watzin in the meeting, uttering perhaps the greatest understatement of the 21st century so far. &But we have kept it as simple as possible.&

Indeed, it is hard to think of a simpler process given the restrictions of travel to Mars. Naturally Perseverance can&t shoot the samples back on a ballistic trajectory itself for a variety of reasons. That necessitates a second surface vehicle. And engineering that vehicle to fill the roles of outbound spacecraft, lander, rover, ascent vehicle, and return spacecraft may simply be impossible. So a third spacecraft is needed as well.

Keep in mind that this is the mission profile, but the actual spacecraft don&t exist yet, and likely won&t for years to come. Still, ita mind-blowing plan that NASA has just revealed.

This IT pilot fish is asked to set up a new sheet-feed scanner at a state agency so that a secretary can take a multi-page printed document from another state agency, scan it, OCR it and save it to a Word document so it can be indexed on a network drive.

Everything works great for months, but then fish gets a call from the secretary — the scanner is not working. By which she means the Word documents are full of junk text.

And she emails fish a copy of the latest document so he can see for himself: complete gibberish.

Fish starts troubleshooting: Has the documentform changed in any way? Has anyone changed settings on her computer? Is she doing anything at all different this week?

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Uber is walking back its annual guidance for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Update: This article was corrected to reflect that the guidance was for 2020, not an update that would include the fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA profitability target. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said earlier this year that the company planned to make an operating profit by the final quarter of 2020. That shouldn&t be confused with annual guidance.

Uber said Thursday it was withdrawing its 2020 guidance for gross bookings, adjusted net revenue and adjusted EBITDA, which were provided on February 6, 2020 during the companyearnings call. The companyprevious 2020 guidance was gross bookings between $75 billion and $80 billion, adjusted net revenue $16 billion to $17 billion and an adjusted EBITDA loss of between $1.45 billion and $1.25 billion. Uber did not provide new guidance for 2020.

&Given the evolving nature of COVID-19 and the uncertainty it has caused for every industry in every part of the world, it is impossible to predict with precision the pandemiccumulative impact on our future financial results,& Uber said in a statement.

Uber also warned that it expected an impairment charge of between $1.9 billion and $2.2 billion because of declines in value on some of its minority equity investments. Uber has minority stakes in Didi, Grab, Yandex.Taxi and Zomato, according to its latest annual report. The one-time charge is not expected to impact Uberfirst-quarter adjusted net revenue, adjusted EBITDA, cash and cash equivalents or short-term investments, the company said.

Uber also used Thursdaychange in guidance to highlight initiatives it launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including a financial assistance program for drivers and delivery people.

Uber said it plans to account for this program as Contra Revenue, which will likely reduce GAAP revenue by an estimated $17 million to $22 million in the first quarter and an estimated $60 million to $80 million in the second quarter. Uber will exclude the impact of certain COVID-19-specific expenses from Adjusted Net Revenue and from Adjusted EBITDA to &help investors assess the impact of COVID-19 on our financial position.&

The company has scheduled its first quarter earnings call for 1:30 pm PT May 7.