At the risk of being an anti-populist (and worse), I'll be up front: I don't agree with universal suffrage. There, I've said it. Go ahead, call me names. I'm a bad bad man. But there's a reason for my view on this. I don't believe that those who don't contribute to the treasury should be allowed to dictate what is done with that treasury to those who do. Calor writes in "Why the left hates Bush" that Gore should have been President. If only a few voters in Florida had man...
What is a skin site? A skin site is a kind of file download site. The world's most popular download site, Download.com, is ranked 47th in the world by Alexa. The kind of bandwidth it must take to run that site is astronomical. Last week, the most popular file on Download.com received over 2.3 million downloads (Kazaa). WinZip, the most popular ZIP manager, received 426,000 downloads. Skin sites don't get anywhere near that kind of traffic. It specializes in files that are used to c...
I regularly get asked "So what exactly is WindowBlinds?" or "Why would I use WindowBlinds?" So here's the marketing stuff all together. Info & Requirements Developed by: Stardock Corp. (www.stardock.com) Price: Trial version is free for unlimited time. Enhanced version is $19.95. Can also be purchased as part of Object Desktop suite ($49.95). OS Requirements: Windows XP or Windows 2000. Windows 98 Draginol versions coming soon. Home Page: http://www....
The Rant: Skinning on Windows XP, the truth vs. marketing I'm in a ranting mood today. So here on my blog, I'm going to talk about the whole msstyles, uxtheme, thing on Windows XP. Windows XP allows you to change the look and feel of its GUI between "Blue", "Silver", and "Green". It does this by applying what is called a visual style. It comes in a format called .msstyles. But only Microsoft can make MS digitally signed msstyles and Microsoft's engine, by defa...
Our company deals a lot with consumers. Which means, inevitably, there is a certain percentage of people who think we're a bunch of crooks. I take that really personally. I know I shouldn't, it's the nature of doing business on the Internet. But people just have no idea how dirty the business world is. It's the start of a new quarter which means Stardock is paying out its royalties to those developers who are paid in that manner. We've never missed a payment. Ever. Even in 1998 when ...
A user asks: > > However one minor thing missing I think. How did you come up with the > > name Stardock exactly? That's actually a funny story... So it's 1991 which is when I founded Stardock Systems (DBA, Not incorporated at this point). I got ahold of a whole sale PC parts catalog which, back then, was a pretty big deal. I called up the place to start ordering parts for a PC and the guy on the phone says "What company is this for?" Being a stupid 20 year old, I panic'd thinking ...
Introduction October 2003 marks the 10 year anniversary from when Stardock was first incorporated. It's really hard to believe that it's been that long. Age creeps silently upon us and as I've looked at recent photos, I can tell that I'm no longer the "kid" I was when this all began. I founded Stardock while I was attending Western Michigan University. It was supposed to be a temporary thing. I'd run out of money to pay for school and was already working 3 other jobs and sta...
I recently wrote about this topic here . But I wanted to write a more succinct version of it since some people thought I was advocating something akin to Internet Product Activation to thwart piracy. Let me first Bottom line this: CD based copy protection does more harm than good. Let me then add: There is no magic bullet that will stop piracy. Game developers need to quit trying to solve piracy via some sort of mechanism and instead design a policy that discourages piracy. Game develope...
Imagine if World War II were covered like Iraq is being covered. Most people today seem to think that after D-Day the Americans just stormed into Germany and the war was over. Far from it. Instead, for the first couple of months the Americans and British got stuck in "Hedgerow" country in northern France. A stalemate was largely the result as it took considerable time for the Americans to break out. But imagine if CNN were covering that. You'd have interviews with nominal A...
Those who say there isn't a liberal bias in the media should take a closer look at what the media chooses to report on. It doesn't even take long to discover that the issues that get reported tend to be ones dear to liberal causes. Let me give you a good example: Today the news covered how any millions of people are not covered by medical insurance. It was reported repeatedly on NPR, CNN, ABC News, and CBS evening news (didn't see NBC but I bet it was reported there). Is that real...
There was a report, repeated often on the news today, that there are now 44 million Americans without health insurance. So what? No, seriously. What exactly does that mean? Does it mean you can't get medical care? No. What it means is that if you need medical care that you are responsible for paying for it yourself. In other words, there are 44 million Americans whose health care isn't pay for by someone else (i.e. such as their employer as part of their compensation package). Unt...
A new version of DesktopX is out. We've been working like crazy to get out the little buglets and make it more useful in a very apparent way. The big thing in the gamma can be summed up in stability, performance meter support, system info support, and multi-monitor support. 1.99 GAMMA Worked on multimonitor support. Now IX works with multiworkarea so it can place icons on all monitors and behave correctly even when changing monitors dispositions, workarea, resolutions etc. Add...
So the 3 year old is crying. He's been crying for awhile. His big brother is outside playing and he's not. Why? Because he wouldn't eat his dinner. And by eat I mean, he wouldn't even eat a single bite. Salmon. I remember when I was a kid objecting (but still eating) foods like spam. Is spam actually a food or are they using that now for insulation? So it's hard to take the 3 year old's crying very seriously for not taking a single bite of salmon. But he looks at me like I'm tor...
Saw the first episode of Futurama again today. My wife noticed something very interesting that snuck passed me but given the attention to detail this show has, I wonder what it could mean.. During the show, they do two New Years Eve countdowns (10...9...8...etc.). The first one, taking place in 1999, goes to various parts of the World. They show the Eiffel tower and the people say 9 in French. Similarly, every other part of the world says their number in their native language. However, in...
Michael Moore and I share two things in common. We're both from Michigan and we're both grew up in the midst of Big Three blue collar workers. But that's where the similarities end and the different readings on what the "majority" of Americans think about things. Michael Moore seems to have two basic beliefs: (1) The majority of Americans have liberal opinions. (2) Conservatives are all about "me me me me". To extrapolate on that, he essentially feels that m...