Top 10 Reasons to Learn CSS

Nick also linked to Christopher Schmitt's 10 reasons to learn CSS

1. Build from the ground up to replace traditional Web design methods.
   
2. Faster download times. (No more FONT tags )
   
3. Shorter development time. (No more FONT tags, cleaner pages, easier to change when the !@%! client decides they what blue no red no green text)
   
4. Greater control over the typography in a Web page. (About as good as its going to get on the web)
   
5. It's easy to write. (No more FONT tags)
   
6. Improvements in accessibility.
   
7. Print designs as well as Web page designs
   
8. Better control over the placement of elements in Web page. (About as good as its going to get on the web)
   
9. The design of Web pages is separated from the content. (No more FONT tags)
   
10. Better search engine rankings.
    

Optimizing your RSS feed , minimizing your readers pain.

Nick ansers in relation to his Feed News Reader, but it is good advice for any and all feeds you acutal what someone to use/read. (He just gets more questions than me!)

Nick Bradbury: "Optimizing your RSS feed for FeedDemon

1. Include each item's publication date, either with <pubDate> or with <dc:date>.A large number of feeds don't include the publication date of each news item, which means that News Readers can only show when an item was received (downloaded).
2. Use a short, descriptive <title> for each news item. If you don't have useful titles, readers may not know whether they want to read what you have to say.
3. Don't skip the <description>. Some feeds contain only titles, forcing people to visit their sites if they want to read an item. This also hampers
   offline reading, which is a major annoyance for some people.
4. Avoid excessive HTML formatting in your descriptions. If you want people to see your design skills, point them to your site rather than unnecessarily bloating your RSS feed.

Experiments in the UnWired Future

VentureBlog: Ubiquity Breeds Utility

In the late 1980s, Dartmouth College was the most wired campus on the planet, running 10GB Ethernet into every dorm room. Today, Dartmouth is the most unwired campus on the planet, with 560 access points covering 200 acres....If you wanted to know where wired communications were headed in the late 1980s, all you had to do was go to the Dartmouth campus and look at their homegrown email application, Blitzmail. As any regular user of Blitzmail will tell you, it included a server-side address book and remote private and public folders before almost any other email application. Watching a regular user of Blitzmail, you could have predicted the rise of LDAP, IMAP, and most importantly Instant Messenger

So what is the future of unWired look like ? They have gained wireless ubiquity, and are completely re-thinking how they use cellphones, PDAs, computers, newspapers, instant messenger, printers, power outlets, and most importantly, their time. Here a summary with breif commets :

• Instant Messenger for voice (Think a Star Trek like com badge); Portable & Connected devices dominate ( "Daddy, what's a desktop computer?")
• Voice is just an app (VOIP); Location based services emerge (Calendar applications that alert them of their next appointment based on their current location and estimated travel time; "Print" means print at the nearest printer)
• What is the Value Add for Newspapers (Laptop + Wifi + Goggle News + Blogs; Does professional news reporting surive without adversiting?)
• Low battery life becomes a real drag (Allways connected means allways on batttery, the last wire is the power cord!)
• People power (wi-fi adoption to date has been dominantly in the home, which bodes poorly for most of the recent crop of wi-fi startups, who are all aimed at the enterprise.)
• People can multi-task too (Students check email and have analytical conversations about live news while playing frisbee!)
• Prepare to be Googled! (With wireless PDAs people will Google-scan each other in realtime, as they meet them. Not only your corporate Bio's and blog postings, but everthing you every posted to usenet groups.)
• Bandwidth matters! (People have allways found ways to fill up the available bandwidth. just wait for TV over IP. )

They say " "The Future is here, but unevenly distributed" and now I know where my share is going.

Red Hat Takes Another Step Toward The Data Center

Enterprise Linux 3 improves the operating system's performance when running apps with multiple threads operating at once.

(Eweek has a review as well : http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1228480,00.asp
although it seems to mostly focus on it as a Desktop OS not as a Server OS [ Stupid Rabbit!]

CRN has a review of the Server OS side of things

Enterprise Linux 3 offers enhanced scalability and performance characteristics that narrow the gap between the company's Linux operating system and rival Unix operating system..

Addtional Links : News.com and the The Big Hat themseleves Here

)

By Larry Greenemeier, InformationWeek
Oct. 22, 2003
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15500430

Now that Linux is comfortably entrenched in clustered high-performance computing environments and along the periphery of enterprise systems, running Web as well as file and print servers, the world's leading Linux distributor wants to take the operating system to the next level. Red Hat Inc. took another step further into the data center Wednesday with the release of its Enterprise Linux 3 open-source operating system.

Red Hat's stated goals through next year are to continue improving its enterprise operating system to run on high-end servers and to consolidate its operating systems onto a consistent architecture. Enterprise Linux 3 includes Native Posix Threading Library, which improves the operating system's performance when running applications with multiple threads operating at once. It also features scalability improvements, including support for larger symmetric multiprocessing memory and input/output configurations. These improvements take into account the fact that many Linux systems are run as part of clusters, says Brian Stevens, Red Hat's VP of operating system development. "This requires improved management, since you may have more systems once you move to a Linux cluster."

Enterprise Linux 3 is also written to a single code base, which improves code stability, maintainability, and security, Stevens says. The new version also supports a wider variety of hardware platforms, including those running Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s 64-bit-compatible Opteron processor and IBM's iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, and S/390 servers. Enterprise Linux continues to support Intel x86 and Itanium platforms as well.

With Enterprise Linux 3, Red Hat has also expanded its basic operating-system offerings to include file-clustering software and developer tools. The file-clustering software supplements the basic clustering capabilities already built into Linux.

Red Hat is doing a lot to remove things that have been an impediment to Linux in the past, IDC research director Al Gillen says. "Customers are going to want off-the-shelf applications that are commercially supported," he says. "And it's really nice to get these from the same company that you get the operating-system software."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is available now as part of an annual subscription that includes Red Hat Network and services. Current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers can upgrade now via Red Hat Network, while customers buying through Red Hat partners will be able to get version 3 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, ES, or WS on preconfigured hardware platforms before year's end. AS is designed for servers with more than two processors and that run databases or large enterprise apps. ES is tuned for single- or dual-processor configurations running Web or file and print servers. WS is the operating system for single- or dual-processor workstations.

Pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS starts at $1,499 annually on an x86 platform and runs as high as $18,000 annually on an IBM mainframe. Pricing for ES and WS on an x86 platform starts at $349 and $179, respectively. Standard pricing for WS on an Itanium-based or AMD Opteron-based workstation is $792.

Red Hat is doing what it needs to do in order to expand relationships with customers and find new ways to generate revenue. "The pieces are falling into place," Gillen says. That's not to say Linux is ready to replace the existing critical systems in which companies already have a large investment. Adds Gillen, "We don't see Linux being used as a high-end replacement for large Unix servers."

podLob and Dynamic Drive : DHTML to go

Travis Beckham's podLob features 56 experiments in Flash and 19 in Javascript/DHTML. Go to it!

also Dynamic Drive : DHTML scripts for the real world