Stardock has released IconPackager 3.2. IconPackager is a program that can change all the icons on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista by applying entire icon sets called "icon packages".

IconPackager 3.2 adds support for Windows Vista including the new "live folders" feature of Windows Vista making it the first (and only) program to support changing the new icons on Windows Vista.

IconPackager 3.2 also supports changing individual icons from a new "change icon" context menu for documents and most other files (EXE's can even have their icon changed from their properties dialog -- see this article for more details).

IconPackager is a free download. The full version costs $14.95 or can be purchased as part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite which includes WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, DeskScapes, ObjectBar, and more.

View: IconPackager in action
View: Making an icon package
Download: IconPackager 3.2

If you were to name the 3 most popular skinning platforms -- that is, applications and/or skinning formats in terms of number of people using and number of people making skins for, what would they be?

My 3 would be WindowBlinds, uxtheme (msstyles), and Winamp. What would yours be?

Many people may not be aware of this but WindowBlinds has a reasonably powerful wallpaper management feature. Users can have WindowBlinds change wallpapers automatically and create a virtual library of wallpapers from a lot of different sources.

Island Dog has a very good article and video demo showing off this feature. Check it out.

Our resident "Colonel" is always advocating increases in the federal income tax rate.  What he doesn't realize is that federal income tax rates hurt the very people that he wants to help.

The government gets its money through a variety of sources. But mostly it comes from income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate taxes.

But income taxes have multiple types within them: WAGES & CAPITAL GAINS.

Wages are taxed anywhere from 10% to 35% depending on how much you make.

But capital gains are a flat tax at 15% as long as you hold on to the stock for a year. Interest income works this way too.

And it is in the world of capital gains that the mega wealthy are able to make a lot of money but pay pay far less in taxes.  Congress has continued to tighten the laws to make it harder for individuals to get around paying at the wages rate (for instance, dividends aren't tax deductable for corporations and corporations have a higher tax rate than individuals now).

But the super-wealthy have tax attorneys who can play all kinds of games with the tax code.  Below are some common techniques that the super-wealthy use:

Low Interest Loans

As Warren Buffet pointed out recently, he could have lived quite comfortably without paying any taxes simply by having one of his companies give him loans each year. A loan isn't income.

Corporation Mania!

Open up enough LLCs to take care of your various needs, make sure they deduct effectively and you can end up with a bunch of companies with minimal "profit". The corporate tax rate on profits of less than $50,000 is 15%.  This kind of shell game can get pretty complicated and isn't worth playing unless you have immense amounts of money where saving even 10% in taxes can be helpful. 

One thing that many of these strategies try to avoid is medicare taxes. They're not capped (they should be IMO).  Medicare is 2.9% of a person's income. Hence, if you have $1 million in taxable wages, you would end up paying $29,000 in medicare which can get pretty obnoxious.  Hence, someone earning $10 million in income may find it makes more sense to distribute that income amongst corporations or find a way to pay it in dividends.

I'm not tax accountant or expert by any means.  But what I do know is that those who want "the rich" to pay more need to understand that the super rich aren't making most of their income through wages but through other sources such as capital gains and through corporations. 

Increasing the federal personal income tax rate definitely affects small business owners (a lot) as well as other economic drivers which in turn can have an adverse affect on the rest of society (small business owners create the majority of the jobs, take away their capital and they hire fewer people). 

One part of the "AI" isn't really AI.  A lot of people think of the trade screen in the game as being "AI".  But it's not. It's basically just a dialog full of weighted values.

The real AI may, for instance, call up the trade screen. But the actual valuing of items in the trade screen (money, techs, ships, planets, etc.) isn't in my area (the AI) but is instead just a table of values to weight everything.

Which means, of course, that it's exploitable. 

Creating a negotiation screen like this is non-trivial. 

For instance, in GalCiv, you can research diplomacy techs and get the super ability Diplomacy which gives you a huge advantage in negotiations.  But at the same time, we can't let people trade say 100BC for 101BC or else they can really exploit the game.  And that's the kind of thing that is more difficult to keep from happening than one might think.

In Civilization 4, the solution was to pretty much make it so that you could only trade apples for apples (techs for techs for instance).  That way, players couldn't easily exploit the AI.

In GalCiv, we slog through with trying to let people trade ships, techs, money, treaties, war proposals, etc. for any combination of those things. 

But the downside is that some people will find exploits.  There is no practical solution other than to remind people that it is a single player game and if they want to cheese the computer opponents, that's really their busines. 

We also try to do updates to the trade screen "AI" so that it is better in negotiating.  But there are just so many variables to take into account. 

If you have a particular "stupid" trade screen behavior, post below and I'll take a look at it.

Windows Vista has some awesome looking icons.  Microsoft went way out of its way to try to give Windows Vista a truly polished look.  They did this by giving most icons a 256x256 icon.  Think about how large that really is. Each Windows Vista icon has an image of that resolution.

But as good as they are, what if you want to change them? How do you do it?  Windows Vista maintains the ability to change the icons of individual short-cuts and folders though in very inconsistent ways.

The best, easiest, and to my knowledge only way to change Windows Vista icons all at once is with Stardock IconPackager. With it, users can change individual icons or change all their icons at once by applying a "package" of icons to their Windows Vista system.  IconPackager even supports the new "live" folder previews.

Individual Icon Changing

IconPackager adds a context menu called "change icon" for most types of files that looks like this:

Changing individual icons with IconPackager installed

Once IconPackager is installed, this functionality is natively added to Windows Vista. It's totally seamless.

Any icon that doesn't have a 256x256 image gets a smaller version that doesn't look as good as it could

One issue on Windows Vista is how icons are displayed. Most icons are 32x32 pixels in size. Some programs have a higher resolution 48x48 version.  But on Windows Vista, unless there's a 256x256 version, the lower resolution version is displayed in it native size which can look strange (especially on your desktop). 

Users of Windows Vista will no doubt soon notice that as they install programs that add short-cuts to their desktops that many of those icons look smaller and strange compared to the default icons on the desktop.

IconPackager supports changing program icons as well.  To do it (once you have IconPackager installed) right-click on the icon you want to change and choose properties.

Program icons can be changed with IconPackager installed as well.

Packages of Icons

The entire set of Windows icons can be changed in a single click by using an icon package. There are thousands out there. Most do not yet support the 256x256 resolution of native Vista icons yet (Stardock is working on a way to up-convert on the fly if there's a sufficiently high resolution version available).  But all the icon packages that come with IconPackager include full Windows Vista support.

The IconPackager application

Changing your icons is a pretty straight forward process -- choose the icon package you want, load it, and hit apply. Within a few seconds, nearly all your icons will be changed.

More Screenshots

Getting IconPackager

IconPackager is a free download. You can get it at www.iconzone.com (or https://www.stardock.com/products/iconpackager).

Nokia has announced that its next-generation cell phones are going to have full support for Web 2.0. Web 2.0 opens the door to sophisticated web applications that have widget-like capability. Sounds great right?

Andrew Orlowski at The Register is skeptical about the move. In his view, turning cell phones into "multimedia computers" is the worst of both worlds -- the lack of security seen on the desktop combined with the impracticality of using a cell phone as a serious computing device.

JavaScript worms are a popular delivery mechanism for Malware on the PC, but as the J in AJAX, they've recently been adopted to take advantage of Web 2.0: causing havoc on MySpace, Yahoo! and, er... MySpace again.

Nokia says it will initially restrict the functionality of the JavaScript worms, before opening the floodgates. Ovum analyst Tony Cripps has glimpsed the horror that awaits us, but can't quite bring himself to step out of line, and say what's begging to be said:

"Scripting-based security exploits are commonplace on the desktop," he writes in a research note, "and we believe countermeasures need to be employed early to avoid such issues arising on mobile phones."

Needless to say, The Register has doubts whether the kind of security cell phone users expect from their mobile phones can be maintained.

Andrew Orlowski argues that Nokia should focus on their core strengths. Nokia was, after all, once THE cell phone maker of choice (remember "The Matrix"?).  But from making game machines to other digital gadgets, Nokia has expanded far beyond that and Andrew Orlowski believes the results have been less than ideal.

When one looks at the prime assets of the Nokia of five years ago, it's alarming to see how many have been discarded. At the turn of the decade, the Finnish giant boasted a formidable reputation for reliability, security and ease of use. Now it's thrown all three out of the window, with security being the last to go.

Do users want to run Google gadgets (and other Web 2.0 gadgets) on their mobile phones? Or would users prefer to see content that was designed explicitly for their cell phones? Can using an open platform such as "Web 2.0" (which is more of a marketing term than any specific technical concept) benefit cell phone users without diminishing security?

Read the whole article below at www.TheRegister.co.uk.

Using Google Images it's amazing what you can find on the net.

Here are some:

Cartoon version of Brad Wardell from PC Magazine

Photo picture of Brad Wardell from Detroit News

Another picture of Brad Wardell from the Detroit News

Brad Wardell at office

(I'm using my name in the captions to get these better indexed for the future)

Up north our cottage is nearly done. It should be totally done by the first of June.  We're pretty excited.  Here are some pictures of the latest progress:

Beach in front of cottage	Unifnished great room and fireplace	Upstairs cat walk
Wintery outside	A view from the dining room.	A view from the upstairs window

Apolyton.net, the civilization community site, has released their review of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar.  The review, written by Solver, is amongst the most detailed out there.

It includes a great deal of positive feedback as well as constructive criticism with the final score being a 9.2 out of 10.

Even if you already have the game, it's worth checking out to get another point of view on the game.