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14 May 2001

Douglas Adams
1952-2001

Douglas Adams, literary genius and author of the one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, died suddenly following a heart attack on 11 May.

Douglas is survived by his wife, Jane Belson Adams, his six-year-old daughter, Polly Adams, and his mother, Jan Thrift. He was 49.

While I never met Douglas in person, I enjoyed his myriad writings, both in the fiction realm and without, and I can honestly say that he was one with-it dude who always knew where his towel was.

We will miss him.

10 May 2001

Beleagured Dell going out of business?
Well, not likely, but with the goings-on in the computer industry in the last month, media bias against Apple shows through quite clearly.

Last month, Dell bashed Apple in an interview with Business Week, where is quoted as saying "We know how the movie ends. It's just a question of what happens in the middle. Apple has a very little customer base. If you look at the economics, it has been extremely hard for Apple to get a return on its R&D with a shrinking volume base. It's not to say that Apple's products aren't innovative or cool, but the economic factors here are so overwhelming, it's very hard for them to swim against that tide."

What's amusing is since that interview, Apple has announced a $43 million profit without any layoffs or restructuring, while Dell has announced it will cut up to 4,000 jobs just so it can meet revenue earnings and expectations.

Also in this short time frame, Apple has released a new kick-butt iBook, and even accepted an order for 23,000 iBooks by a single school district.

Dell, meanwhile, in addition to its layoff problems, has recalled 284,000 batteries, which could catch fire (why isn't this getting more attention in the press?), which is a follow-up to the same issue they had last October. With all the fuss they industry press made about the two -- count'em, two -- batteries that caught fire in Apple's testing labs (and never made it into public hands) back when the PowerBook 5300 came out, one would think that there would be more of a fuss about Dell's battery problem. -- Thanks, PowerBook Zone!

March Archived
March's news has been dumped into the archives.

1 May 2001

So last month, I made this announcement:

On April 15th, the new digitalpembroke.com will debut.
(No, I could not think of a more rapidly approaching ironic date...)

Outwardly, it will appear as if the site has undergone only a slight redesign. But like an iceberg, it will be what you cannot see that counts.

The site will transition to a completely standards-based layout, which means extensive use of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets for the uninitiated.

What this means for you, dear visitor, is that to see this site in all of its splendor, you will need to ensure that you are using an up-to-date, standards-compliant browser that supports the CSS-1 standard. This pretty much negates the 4.x browsers and below. IE 5.5/Win, IE5/Mac, Netscape 6, and Opera 5 are all browsers which meet this criteria.

Why should you upgrade your browser?

Because the focus for so long, at least from the perspective of the browser-builders, has been one of non-standards. In their ongoing competition, Netscape and Microsoft sought to out-do one another by incorporating features that would make their browser the one of choice. What this meant for web designers was that they had to put in a lot of extra work to ensure that their site looked the same to everyone, no matter what browser or platform the end user was using.

Well, no more. The call to separate style from content has gone out, and web designers everywhere, from ultra-professionals to run-of-the-mills like myself are declaring for the side of standards.

You, as an end user, can help by upgrading your browser to one of the aforementioned browsers. More information can be found at WaSP's Browser Upgrade page.

No Redesign Yet
Things haven't quite worked out the way I would like, so for right now, the site redesign is on hold. You should still upgrade your browser, though, as I am not the only site that is working to adhere to web standards.

Regular updates will resume very shortly, and I will get this stuff from March cleared off to the archives.

 

 

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