CSS files for larger sites can become pretty large themselves. Gzipping or compressing these files has shown to provide a reduction in the neighboorhood of 70-80% of the original file size, a fairly significant 'weight loss'.

The Definitive Post on Gzipping your CSS

One common view among programmers is that the GPL should say nothing at all about DRM, because DRM is a technical problem, and can be solved by technical means. This was true five years ago -- all DRM was ultimately software, all software is data, and all data is mutable. So, DRM could always be circumvented. In other words, these people are perfectly happy to have DRM so long as it is toothless.

I should note that this view is somewhat elitist. Of course programmers can break software-based DRM. But non-programmers have to wait until a programmer does the work, and then have to figure out whatever tools the programmer wrote. That's not always easy -- DeCSS was written in 1998, but it was not until 2001 that user-friendly DVD ripping software became available.

But even if it were acceptable to have DRM from which programmers could free themselves, that's not the DRM we have in 2006

FSF - Reaction to the DRM clause in GPLv3

After spending a few hours getting comfortable with Yahoo!’s new Event utility that was recently released along with many other sweet tools via YUIBlog, I became convinced that it is the dopest, sweetest, most tight, most sexiest event utility on the planet. With a little crunching and some gZipping I was able to get this puppy down to meezily weezily 2k.

Furthermore, when I say forget addEvent, I mean any and every version of addEvent you can think of. This goes for Scott Andrew’s original addEvent function, every entry from the addEvent recoding contest, even Prototype’s Event observer and its many properties and extensions. I even had a stab at it myself and was pretty impressed with the outcome.

Interesting blog design, too. Nice use of style sheets and navigation hints.

Forget addEvent, use Yahoo!’s Event Utility

There is a perfectly good chance that at the present time, your site is sending pages in an uncompressed form to users. That is perfectly normal - in fact it is pretty much standard - but there is a better way to send your data. Some browsers (not all, but some) can accept "gz-encoded" data, which means the data is compressed.

PHP includes functions for sending pages in a "gz-encoded" form. However, this can be a pain to add to large files. There is a much easier way to add gzip functionality to your site than editing every page on it.

PHP, Gzip and htaccess - PHP - ILoveJackDaniels.com

Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson (umm, that's me) and Mark Wubben. Through this extensive work, we, along with a invaluable stable of beta testers, supporters, and educators like Stephanie Sullivan and Danilo Celic of Community MX, have completely rebuilt a DOM replacement method originally conceived by Shaun Inman into a typography solution for the masses. It is this technology which provides the nice looking custom type headlines you see on sites like this one, Nike, ABCNews, Aston Martin, and others. We've released sIFR to the world as open source, under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge.

Mike Davidson -- sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

So what’s up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It’s mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it. Here are the various crimes this one line of code commits:
...
By invalidating my entire site with this one line of code, I ensure that I am made aware the instant it matters. The instant this stuff starts to break anything in the real world, I will know. If I only had a few small errors on a few random pages around my site, I could easily miss the day when “the big switchover” happens and wind up with broken pages I don’t know about. And since this code is in the form of a server-side include, I can freely remove it with a few clicks.

It’s kind of like carrying a canary down a mine shaft with you. As long as the canary is alive and chirping, you know you’re okay for air. Actually, I guess it’s not really like that.

Clever.

Mike Davidson: March to Your Own Standard

Newsvine combines the best features of a number of companies and products like Digg and Google News with great features like chat and blogging-style comments. The result is a perfect news site (note that new competitors, like spotback (mentioned here) are aiming to overthrow Newsvine already, however).

The result is a really wonderful social news experience.

Memestreams sinks lower...

TechCrunch � Newsvine is Perfect

"If a healthy person murmurs to himself, he knows that he is hearing his own voice," Flanagan said. "Now imagine that the person has a deficit in the predictive mechanism. He murmurs and then suddenly hears murmuring but cannot label it as himself. As he tries to make sense of the alien voice, the explanation for it could be quite bizarre, such as thinking it is coming from a wall or the pavement."

He is not certain whether some schizophrenics can tickle themselves, but since their falsely alien sensations often are accompanied by feelings of fear and paranoia, it is likely that the experience would not be pleasurable.

Discovery Channel :: News :: Study Shows Why We Can't Tickle Ourselves

Unlike the record companies who go after their customers in court, I doubt the VC’s will sue the startups for not taking their money, but I wonder if they’ll actively try to fight the changes being brought on by lower startup costs, a limited set of exist strategies and lower overall ROI investments.

I’m CEO of a startup that’s about10 months old and about 6 or so months into development with a product that’s in beta and about to go 1.0. I’ve been talking to VC’s, but I haven’t been really pursuing it. We run cheap. Our monthly burn rate is 4 figures (yea.. four). Co-lo charges for our servers and enough to pay rent for some of our younger/less solvent guys is all it really takes to keep the doors open, at least for now.

The main reason we’re looking at potential VC money is because there are bunch of guys behind us who, with big cash infusions from VC’s, could leapfrog us.

We’re not sure we want VC money, but we’re reasonably sure we’re going to need it.

Why?

Because of the threat of VC money in other people’s (competitors) hands. Kinda circular isn’t it?

Fixing the VC Industry: An Industry Ready to be Disrupted at Disruptive Thoughts

I've yet to write the apparently obligatory 'Top 10' list for VCs or entrepreneurs. My one abortive attempt in that direction did yield a slogan that seems apropos here. Let's call it Tim's Tautology:

"If you can get venture capital, you'd better take it."

Like all slogans, it's oversimplified. It tries to capture one essential issue: If you're creating a business in a market that fits the VC model, one of your competitors will take the money. And use it against you.

Due Diligence: VC Disruption? Part Two.