Prologue

What is a game of Galactic Civilizations II v1.1 like? What has really changed for the regular player over what was in the original retail box? And why did we make it?

v1.1 of Galactic Civilizations II isn't a "patch". It's not designed to "fix" things. In the course of making it, was certainly "fixed" bugs that we found and tweaked things that players didn't like, but the point of it was to listen to what players liked and didn't like and add those features to the game. 

Key to the success of this strategy is that the retail boxed version of the game has won Editor's Choice Awards already from Gamespot, GameSpy, UGO, IGN, Computer Games Magazine, Firing Squad and many other publications. G4's "XPlay" just gave it a 5 out of 5 (something they rarely do).  So players don't need to worry that the retail version of the game "wasn't finished". The point of 1.1 and subsequent updates is to keep the game new, fresh, and make it better.

The things that players will likely notice the most in v1.1 include (as a partial list):

• A bunch of new game setup options such as random intelligences, random opponent selections, random galaxy selection. In essence, the game can now be set up so that the player really has no idea what the galaxy has in store for them. Previously players had total control (and still can have total control if they want) of the startup conditions but that could take away some of the mystery.
• The ship designer, which has emerged as an incredibly popular feature, has been improved a great deal.
• The computer opponents are far more intelligent than what initially came with the game. They're not "harder" as much as they're simply better. More clever. More intelligent.  The computer AI was considered one of the strengths of the retail box. I'm pleased to say that what's in 1.1 is at least twice as good as that. Having a month of playing the released game and listening to other people's strategies makes a big difference.
• The economics of the game are much transparent. Player abilities, bonuses, and other things are just more balanced, more streamlined, and make more sense. It's never going to be a "simple" system. But it's more transparent now on how things work.
• The User interface has been tweaked and touched up to make it easier to work with and manage units.
• The costs of buildings, ships, components, etc. have been tweaked.

That's just a tiny part of what will be in 1.1.  The number of changes, big and small, amount to an overall improvement in the game.

And, 1.1 is a free download for all players. Soon we'll start on 1.2..

Note: I'm playing this at 1920x1200 (wide screen).

For this game-play example, I'm going to tell it as a story..

Introduction

The initial colony rush of 2178 (Earth time) has slowed down. But the recently discovered Epsilon quadrant has brought the major powers together again in the year 2225.  This takes place just prior to the "Dread Lord" incident...

For this game, I'm setting up a custom map called Drama (which I'll upload to the Library). I've turned on blind exploration and disabled minor races.

I'm playing as the Terran Alliance:

For my political party, I've chosen the Technologists as I want that 20% research bonus.

I'm going to play against them all but it's going to randomly pick the races and I'm going to randomize their intelligence. What this means is that I pick "Tough" as the difficulty and the game will tweak their intelligence up and down a bit to add some variety. These are new features in 1.1.

...The Gathering Begins...

The Terran Alliance has a colony called Promethion.  We have been assigned to build up this colony and take control of this quadrant (or at least make sure our friends along with us control the quadrant).  All the powers have similar missions no doubt.

I start out by quick building research centers to get a good start on tech.

I then set my spending to 100% and put it all on research:

Your factories and labs produce base on what % of your overall capacity you want to use and then what % of that capacity is going to go into military, social, or research. In this way, I have to make tough choices on what I want to do.  Right now, I'm putting it all in research.

My first colony ship, the TAS Lucky Star will make sure we claim some extra worlds. It has a base movement of 3 parsecs per turn. So it's faster than the standard colony ship but has less range.

For this game, I'm going to focus purely on propulsion techs. Go right to Warp Drive so that my ships are very very fast.

Unfortunately, I make my first mistake pretty early. I colony rushed. A lot of people think that the early game of GalCiv II is purely about cranking out colony ships. GalCiv 1 was that way. But in GalCiv II, that's not the case and 1.1 emphasizes that. My population doesn't increase very high and you are rewarded for having higher populations in the form of tax income.  So I've fallen a bit behind.

The Iconians have scouted far.  I need to get my act together soon.  The galaxy is already getting established.  So note to others, don't go right for warp drive.

The first thing I'm going to do is get some military power here. Not much, just enough to take the "conquer me!" sign off my back. The Short Lance is nothing impressive, but it should do the job.

Meanwhile, I still only know about the my tiny corner of the quadrant. The Altarians have claimed some of the area around my borders but other than that, the quadrant (the map) is a mystery.

Since I'm relatively far behind, I decide to get Xeno Ethics. Why? Because then I can choose my alignment:

By choosing good, the other civilizations, particularly the powerful Altarians, are much more likely to have good relations with me which I'm going to need.

I'm going to go for a political victory this time around. So what I'm going to do is try to stay out of war and build up my infrastructure and rely on the powerul Altarians to protect me. Because by the end of 2227, the Drath are already gone (wiped out by the Drengin) which means there's bad things out there.

And the Torians are now out too. They're dropping like flies. The Drengin are a real menace.  And in 1.0, the Drengin would be free to waste everyone.

But this isn't 1.0..

The Arceans, who are powerful, have decided to stand up against the Drengin Empire.  My job then will be to help bankroll these guys.

I am in an interesting position. The Drengin Empire do not know about me yet.  If I venture out into the galaxy, they will become aware of me.  So I am going to stick in my corner for now and build up.

Speaking of another reason not to be evil -- even though it's easy to choose evil because of all the little benefits, nobody is going to help you out.

The titans are now at each other's throats. The Drengin, who in 1.0 would have just wiped everyone out, are now in a position where people are ganging up on them to avoid being wiped out in turn.  Perhaps the Drengin should have researched more diplomacy techs. But if they had, they wouldn't be Drengin would they?

I set rally points by pressing the button on the lower left of my screen. Then I can send ships to that rally point. I'm going to build up an impressive starbase network to make me a powerhouse in the long run.

Two words: Screw you.

Ut-oh.  The Korx are mad at me. Time to look at updating my ships.

To help combat predators, I need to build up my defenses. One way to do that is in the form of military starbases that assist my ships. 

In time the Korx not only make peace with me, but the the conquering Drengin force them to give me their worlds.

The problem is, now the Drengin are aware..

One feature of GalCiv II that doesn't get discussed but I think is a really important feature is that the game remembers your ship designs between games. That means, the longer you play the game, the more ships you have to choose from.  

	The F10 Hornet was a radical departure for the Terran Alliance and designed specifically for the Epsilon quadrant. The "stinger" in front is the designed to provide superior guidance for its Singularity canons and help ensure that it gets the first killer shot in a battle.
	Name: F10 Hornet Length: 32.5 meters Span: 45.5 meters Mass: 72 metric tons Weapons: 3 Westinghouse G1 Singularity Cannons.

The Drengin have pretty much everyone at war with them, and  yet are holding their own. My military isn't even worth speaking of at this point. But I suspect I'm going to have to do something about that soon.

The Drengin just want to conquer everyone apparently. They're in for a surprise...

	The Avalon class attack cruiser is probably one of the most powerful  ships of its class in the galaxy -- not just this quadrant.  With an attack rating of 12 (though no defenses), it packs a mighty punch. Its advanced sensor array also would allow it to spot enemies from a great distance.
	Name: Avalon class Attack Cruiser Length: 135 meters Span: 140 meters Mass: 605 metric tons Weapons: 6 Westinghouse G5 Singularity Cannons.

As proud as I am of the Avalon. The Drengin have something monstrous on their ships...Psyonic Shredders.

A Drengin fleet of 5 ships has over 200 attack power.  All on mass-drivers.  So it was time to research armor to counter it.  Defenses on a ship use less space but cost more. I have lots of money though.

The text says it all.

A tweak my Avalons to make use of my new armor technologies and to use the Nano-Ripper technology my scientists have discovered.

The Drengin Dreadnoughts however are now out.

My ships each die with 1 hit. ONE hit!

A mop up fleet comes into the sector where the Korx once lived and I send in my flag fleet. 9 of my Avalon class ships. The fruits of many months  of labor.

That's right. It's MY turn. My flag fleet takes out several of his fleets. With allied help, we pave the way to the Drengin core worlds.

The Drengin capital world ("Torment") in this quadrant is now open for invasion.

The Drengin do have some very good ships. The mark 6 Drengin battle ship is bristling with weapons.

The most exciting battle so far has been this one where my fleet took on 2 Dreadnoughts.

Only 3 of my ships survived. By the backbone of the Drengin navy was snapped.

But the galaxy was about to get a lot more interesting...

The Galaxy is on fire...

The Altarian Republic and the Iconian Refuge are the two powerhouses of the galaxy. Their alliance, and I mean a real treaty alliance, helped make the galaxy safe from the Drengin who would have otherwise conquered all. 

The Drengin are defeated but not destroyed and the Iconians and Altarians are now at each other's throats.

It was now time for me to bring out my own Dreadnought.

	The Sentinel Class dreadnought is a monster. Well, at least by Terran standards. It is huge.  Armed with nearly a dozen guns and covered in armor, it is meant to survive the kinds of battles that would destroy entire navies. It is a one-ship navy with a cost of 1.3 TRILLION credits.
	Name: Sentinel capital ship Length: 950 meters Span: 220 meters Mass: 20.2 million metric tons Weapons: 38 attack (Durion Corp. Mark II Graviton drivers) and 10 defense (Fivel LTD. Kanvium Armor)

Just to give you an idea of scale, here are some ships (courtesy of Starship dimensions) to compare the Sentinel class dreadnought to.

With my monitor class scouts, I keep an eye on the Iconian/Altarian war.

The Arceans launch a sneak attack on me!

It's insane. The instability caused by the Iconian/Altarian war has made everyone reasses their relative positions.

With some negotiation, I am able to call the Arceans off so that we can finish off the Drengin. But I won't forget their sneak attack.

Meanwhile, the fat lady is warming up to sing about the end of the Drengin Empire in this quadrant.

That's right. All mine. Goodbye Kona.  And as the Drengin fade, the Iconian Altarian war comes to an end as well. Now it is time to wrap up my strategy and win a diplomatic victory.

I am now in an alliance with both the Altarians and the Iconians.  Time to wipe out the Yor.  No one will miss them.

Ah, the Yor's rnadom intelligence set them too dumb to do anything about this.  Heh.

Because...you know, they were right.

Unfortunately, by a cosmic coincidence, my favorite weapon type is the same the Drengin were focusing on. So everyone else has really good defenses against mine. So I lose the first battle.

Dreadnought vs. Dreadnought. I outnumber them. But they have a lot of fleets and I'm at the heart of their territory.

A Sentinel falls.

And the Arceans are now back in the war. 

Everyone is at war now!

End Game

But the Yor are no match for me now. Soon everyone is after the Yor.

With the Arceans, they recognize my military might.

The Drengin did well but they got in over their heads.

And so the quadrant's destiny is settled by political treaty saving billions in lives!

Lessons learned

1. The alien opponents don't build enough transports. (tweaking)

2. The aliens need to decide what to build more based on how much their colony is producing. Dreadnoughts are great but if you can't build them very fast, better to stick to an easier ship (they already do this somewhat but apparently need to do it more).

3. Aggressive civs need to be more aware of the potential consequences of aggressive behavior.

Last week I wrote about whether strategy games need multiplayer.  There are definitely strong feelings on the matter.

In the article, I referred to blogs written by top reviewers Bruce Geryk and Troy Goodfellow.  I want people to understand something specifically -- I referred to them because they are top reviewers in their field. They did not take any points off of GalCiv II because it lacked multiplayer. They were putting forth the reason why many people are passionate about multiplayer in strategy games.

For the people who have a group of friends that they play multiplayer with, then a multiplayer feature in GalCiv II would be ideal.  And for those people, having multiplayer allows the game to have a much longer lifespan on their hard drives.  My favorite PC game of all time is Total Annihilation. But if it didn't have multiplayer, it wouldn't have survived very long on my hard drive. It was its multiplayer that made it so popular.

In many respects, what I'm writing about and what multiplayer advocates are writing about go right past each other.  My argument is that multiplayer advocates have plenty of options to choose from.  Not only have most strategy games of the past 5 years put a lot of energy into multiplayer (Age of Empire 3, Civilization 4, Rise of Nations, etc.) but even this year there will be turn based games with significant multiplayer components such as Space Empires V, Sword of the Stars, HOMM 5.  The developers of Sword of the Stars argue that putting in multiplayer has no negative impact on the single player experience.  I'll have to disagree.  In having either designed, developed or been heavily involved in Entrepreneur, Trials of Battle, Stellar Frontier (a multiplayer space game with the Drengin, Arceans and Terran Alliance btw), The Corporate Machine, and The Political Machine, (GalCiv being the only game I've done that isn't multiplayer btw), I think I have some experience in being able to say that yes, having multiplayer changes the way the game is designed.  When I designed The Political Machine, I imagined how it would be played multiplayer first and then wrote the AI as a simulated on-line opponent.  I think The Political Machine turned out pretty well as a single player game still, but it's a very different game than it would have been had it only been a single player game. I would have made it so that top players would have a lot more data and information to put together far more sophisticated strategies.

Making GalCiv II have multiplayer as a checkbox is pretty easy. You could just send the saved game back and forth between players. But would people be satisfied with that?  Some would.  But even doing that adds time to the development schedule. It still adds budget, and you still have a bunch of other things that could make the experience non-ideal.  I'd rather a game decide what it wants to be. If you're going to have multiplayer, do it right.  And in my experience, doing it right means having multiplayer be part of the design.  In GalCiv II, we put in the piping so that we could do multiplayer later on.  But in terms of time and energy, we wanted to focus everything on making the single player experience satisfying.

The point on multiplayer isn't whether a strategy game should have it or not as much as what priority it should have in the development of a game.  Heck, if I had more development resources, I'd take the GalCiv II engine and make an RTS version of it. I'd love to see my designed ships up against someone else's in battle.

Over the past several months we've been hiring a lot of people.  So this weekend I decided to put together a little orientation power point that our HR people can eventually use to help introduce new people to the company.

One of the things I wanted to put in there (and did) was our overall philosophy. "The Stardock Way" if you will. I've posted about it before but I've modified it as I've learned more on business and life in general.

Here's the 10 rules we use to guide ourselves by:

1. Nice Guys Finish First.
2. Our customers are part of our team.
3. Perfect is the enemy of good
4. Win people over through kindness.
5. Success is based on having lots of other people wanting you to succeed.
6. Loyalty matters.
7. Ideas are cheap.
8. Do not create work for other people.
9. Don’t sweat what “other people” are doing.
10. Learn from your competitors

Nice Guys Finish First...

I mean that. People who are ruthless and mean and take no prisoners don't end up doing well in general. It's hard enough to succeed as-is, it's even harder if you end up with people against you.  The whole "Godfather" style strategies I sometimes see people forget ignore the fact that the lead character in that inherited his empire. If you're pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, you should be cultivating friends and the best way to do that is to be an honest, decent human being.

Our customers are part of our team

I like to make software where I get real-time feedback from the people who would buy it. All our betas allow customers to give feedback. We do not usually have "free" betas. We almost always require the person to pre-order because we want to hear from people who are interested in the game enough to be a customer.

Perfect is the enemy of good

This is really the most important rule in many respects. The # of people who fail because they don't know when to stop working on something is immense.  Even as I made my power point, I saw the temptation to start tweaking the order of the slides, the layout, and other things that would have added little to the presentation but increased the effort significantly.  What happens is that people who strive only for perfection either never finish or -- far more commonly -- never try because they know how much work something is.

Win people through kindness

This is a hard one for me personally. My instinct is to vigorously defend my positions. I can be pretty aggressive on-line.  But in general, it's far better to try to win people over by being a decent person than to beat them down with a superior argument or through force.

Success..

This is really a crucial one. To be successful, you really need other people to want you to be successful. The best way to do that is to set things up so that other people do well when you do well. Make every situation a win-win situation so that as you benefit, they benefit. And therefore they have a vested interest in you benefiting.

Loyalty Matters

Being loyal to people and companies usually pays off in the long run.  Not always, but it's come up often enough that I'm a big believer in being loyal which is my natural inclination anyway.

Ideas are cheap

One of my biggest pet peeves are people who think ideas are somehow hard to come up with. I regularly get submissions for product ideas, game ideas, etc. in which they just need our company to "build it".  "OH really? Thanks! Wow, all we have to do is take your 10 page idea and spend the next 2 years of our lives making it and you'll share any revenue 50/50?" 

Everyone has ideas. Many people have good ideas. Ideas are meaningless. It's the people who can make an idea into a reality that matter. That's where the value comes in.

Do not create work for others

I have to be careful about how I present this. Managers should always make sure that those who work with them (i.e. answer to them) have plenty of work.  That's not what I'm talking about.  What I am talking about are people who come up with ideas or commit someone else who doesn't answer to them to work.  In big companies, sales people are notorious for this kind of thing as they promise a customer features that they don't have to work on.

What we always frown on are people who come up with "ideas" and then try to aggressively get someone else to actually do the work to make it happen when those people don't work for them.

Another way of putting this is -- nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it.

Don't sweat what other people are doing

One of the quickest ways to kill any joy out of the workplace is to get a few people who worry about "fairness" in the workplace.  They poke and nose around to see if anyone else is getting some perk or getting anything more than they think they deserve. Those people are poison and I make it my business to try to look for that sort of thing where I work and eliminate it when found.

It doesn't hurt you if someone else's monitor is a little bigger. Or if someon else gets to work at home on Tuesdays. Or if someone else's PC is 10% faster than yours. Or if someone else has a nicer car.

If you're worried about fairness too much then you're doomed and should just get used to being a bitter person. Unless your management is clueless (of course, people who worry about fairness all the time always think management is blind) you can be pretty sure that they are making sure that there is a general equity going on.

We reward people who work hard and get more done. And we don't reward people who are doing the bear minimum. If John is coming in sometimes at 11am it may be because John was working until 3am the night before from home and that management is aware of it. If Sally is working home on Tuesday it may mean they are taking a slight salary hit for it or their job isn't affected by location as much or that they're not in any sort of crunch time.  There's a lot of reasons and as soon as you start sweating what other people are doing, you create an atmosphere where you have "rules" that make everyone have to abide by the lowest common denominator.

Learn from your competitors

I generally assume my competitors know more than I do.  I try to see what others are doing and see if I can learn something from them. Sometimes I don't but often I do.  Never assume that your competitors are stupid or don't know what they're doing. If they're successful, there's probably a good reason for it.

In the world of skinning, the # of creators to consumers has, over time gotten to the point where it's nearly all consumers and almost nobody is creating the content.

I'm seeing a little of this in blogging.

Joeuser's traffic has been improving at a pretty good pace as the servers have gotten faster again and the reliability has improved. But there's fewer new blogs to read through.  Of course, weather is getting nicer and we don't promote JoeUser for new bloggers, but it's still an interesting trend.

If you don't know Kam VedBrat, you should. To a large extent, he is the one who helping make sure that Windows Vista is going to be customizable by users in a real way.  At Microsoft, Kam is responsible for a lot of the UI work on Windows Vista.  And he is constantly under pressure from well-meaning users who argue that Microsoft should "build in" advanced "customization" features.  The problem that those users don't realize is that if Microsoft were to put in too many customization features it would essentially kill off third-party customization and Microsoft is never going to put in the kind of customization that third parties are willing to dedicate themselves to.

Let's explore it though for a moment. Let's put aside the branding issues (the more Microsoft supports customization as part of the OS, the weaker the Windows brand becomes) and let's put aside all the support issues that would rise as users downloaded third party "skins" that weren't compatible with this or that app and called up Microsoft.  Ignoring those two issues (which in themselves are show stoppers), the problem is that the really cool customization apps we've seen over the past few years would never have come out if something even half as good were part of the OS.

The vast - VAST majority of users are happy with Windows as is.  95% of users of Windows XP are using the plain blue "Luna" UI and most of them are probably using whatever wallpaper came with the computer.  Of that remaining 5% all but a small percent are content with changing to the silver or green (okay silver) Luna.  That leaves about 1% of the user base who wants more.  How much should the other 99% be charged so that the 1% can be made happy with customization when there's a proven market of third party developers who are able and willing to devote resources to create something far more advanced than what Microsoft could ever justify?  Whether you use a feature of the OS or not, you're paying for it.  And if only 1% of the userbase would use a feature, why should the other 99% be charged for it?  Sure, in absolute numbers, 1% is huge. But in terms of percentages it's trivial.

But let's say Microsoft bowed in and put in say skinning and custom shells and super-duper icon tweaking and countless other things. What would happen? The third party developers would go off and do something else. There'd be no market left other than maybe some freeware developers tweaking on the outer edges. And would the vocal minority who demanded these features in the first place be satisfied? Probably not. Because they would then be joined by the much larger group of people who didn't see a big deal paying 10 or 20 bucks for a utility that did a bunch of really cool things that aren't being updated or made anymore.  Microsoft would be stuck with the "responsibility" of supporting and placating those users. And for what? What's the business case? Would those vocal users not have bought Windows? Not have upgraded? Of course they would. 

From Microsoft's perspective, going around adding tons of tweaking features or skinning features to the OS is a lose-lose proposition. They weaken their brand. Increase their support costs. Kill off the ISV market where a lot of innovation on Windows comes from. And they don't sell a single copy more than they would have anyway.

So all users who like customizing the way Windows looks and feels in interesting ways should be glad that Kam VedBrat is the Lead Program Manager for the Windows Client Platform Team.

The ultimate verdict on a game is when someone is willing to recommend the game to others. We took a poll to see how many people here would recommend the game to other people. Over 1,500 people responded and over 96% of people said yes. I have to admit, I was surprised (and happy) about the result. Sometimes you read the forums and it sounds like a walking disaster zone in there of people who are mad or wish it was more like some other game or whatever.  For those 4% that aren't satisfied, hopefully 1.1 and future updates will win them over.

Our next poll  will ask, would you purchase a $20 multiplayer only expansion pack. Since development resources are finite, we have to decide whether it makes sense to put them on a future expansion pack that is mainly about multiplayer or mainly about adding other features and content to the game.

If you don't know Kam VedBrat, you should. To a large extent, he is the one who helping make sure that Windows Vista is going to be customizable by users in a real way.  At Microsoft, Kam is responsible for a lot of the UI work on Windows Vista.  And he is constantly under pressure from well-meaning users who argue that Microsoft should "build in" advanced "customization" features. 

The problem that those users don't realize is that if Microsoft were to put in too many customization features it would essentially kill off third-party customization and Microsoft is never going to put in the kind of customization that third parties would dedicate themselves to as long as there's a market. Put too much in the OS and the amount of work third parties have to put in to reach the threshold in which a user would pay for it would become too high and those developers would find something else to do.

But let's explore it though for a moment. Let's put aside the branding issues (the more Microsoft supports customization as part of the OS, the weaker the Windows brand becomes) and let's put aside all the support issues that would rise as users downloaded third party "skins" that weren't compatible with this or that app and called up Microsoft.  Ignoring those two issues (which in themselves are show stoppers), the problem is that the really cool customization apps we've seen over the past few years would never have come out if something even half as good were part of the OS.

The vast - VAST majority of users are happy with Windows as is.  95% of users of Windows XP are using the plain blue "Luna" UI and most of them are probably using whatever wallpaper came with the computer.  Of that remaining 5% all but a small percent are content with changing to the silver or green (okay silver) Luna.  That leaves about 1% of the user base who wants more.  How much should the other 99% be charged so that the 1% can be made happy with customization when there's a proven market of third party developers who are able and willing to devote resources to create something far more advanced than what Microsoft could ever justify? 

Whether you use a feature of the OS or not, you're paying for it.  And if only 1% of the userbase would use a feature, why should the other 99% be charged for it?  Sure, in absolute numbers, 1% is huge. But in terms of percentages it's trivial.

But let's say Microsoft bowed in and put in say skinning and custom shells and super-duper icon tweaking and countless other things. What would happen? The third party developers would go off and do something else. Anyone who thinks that developers would roll up their sleaves and come up with something super fancy still is kidding themselves. Anything really sophisticated takes a lot of time and that eventually means the developer needs to be compensated. If the "low hanging" fruit features are all part of the OS, then those developers will find some other niche (some other type of utility, another OS - the MacOS market is getting interesting after all <g>), etc.  The net result is that you just wouldn't have the kinds of customization options. You'd end up with fewer choices rather than more.

There'd be no market left other than maybe some freeware developers tweaking on the outer edges. And would the vocal minority who demanded these features in the first place be satisfied? Probably not. Because they would then be joined by the much larger group of people who didn't see a big deal paying 10 or 20 bucks for a utility that did a bunch of really cool things that aren't being updated or made anymore.  Microsoft would be stuck with the "responsibility" of supporting and placating those users. And for what? What's the business case? Would those vocal users not have bought Windows? Not have upgraded? Of course they would. 

From Microsoft's perspective, going around adding tons of tweaking features or skinning features to the OS is a lose-lose proposition. They weaken their brand. Increase their support costs. Kill off the ISV market where a lot of innovation on Windows comes from. And they don't sell a single copy more than they would have anyway.

So all users who like customizing the way Windows looks and feels in interesting ways should be glad that Kam VedBrat is the Lead Program Manager for the Windows Client Platform Team.

How much spam do you get?  A lot? Let me give you an idea of how much my email account ([email protected]) gets.

Now, you may say, what the hell are you thinking? Why are you putting your email address out there? Am I an idiot? Well yes but that's a different issue entirely. I don't do the [email protected] type thing because as Darth Vader said in Return of the Jedi -- "It's too late for me..."

Long before spam became a real problem, I was on Usenet and zillions of other sites. I used my email address in the clear (like lots of other people).  This year marks the 10th year of my email address.  In that time, I've gotten on every spam list known to mankind. I've had people purposely sign me up for stuff (flamers - don't bother, I'm already signed up to receive it). 

To give you a statistic, yesterday I received 3,914 emails. A typical day.  Previously the spam catchers on our server would get about 90% of the spam. Pretty good right? But I'm still stuck with about 400 email per day.  Of that 400 email per day, about half of it is spam. Of the remaining 200, about half of it is not spam but are lists and notifications or promotions that are legitimate (i.e. junk mail but not spam).   So of the nearly 4000 emails I get, about 100 of it is from people who want a response, presumably that day.  Since I've only got about an hour or two per day to dedicate to checking email, that means I don't get to a lot of people. And I apologize.

But that's getting a little better.  We just purchased the Barracuda. It's a hardware device that sits in front of your mail server to weed out spam. So far, the results are pretty satisfying.  I still get spam, but far far less.  Same with everyone else.  It's about 3pm today so we're about half way done.  So far, our server has received 10,449 emails total. That's everyone.  Barracuda has blocked 8,419 of them because they're spam. 1,378 were blocked because they contain virii. 217 were allowed in but were tagged as probably being spam but it wasn't sure.  That leaves 418 that it thinks are legitimate (and about 25% of them are still probably spam).

For you numbers fans, that means 96% of the email we get is either spam or virii that is can tell is spam or virii. The remaining 4% still has some spam in it, but it's still more effective (so far) than anything I've used before.

Most people into customizing their PCs are also gadget freaks. Okay, maybe not you but I am.

CNET has a story about the way TV is changing now that HD DVDs are starting to come out, BluRay is on the horizon and PVRs are taking over.

With Tuesday's launch of two HD DVD players from Toshiba, the public got its chance to decide whether that format or its rival, Blu-ray, is the rightful heir to the DVD. In the public-relations battle between the warring technologies, HD DVD scored a victory by getting to market first. Toshiba's HD-A1 ($500) and higher-end HD-XA1 ($800) players hit store shelves this week, two months before the first Blu-ray player is scheduled to go on sale.

Meanwhile, to combat the rise of PVRs, Philips has patented a technology that would allow TV stations to prevent remote controls from working during a commercial. I'm serious. When a commercial runs, your fast forward or channel changing buttons would be disabled during the duration of the commercial.

And you thought banner ads were bad.

A new episode of PowerUser.TV is now up and available.  This week, we discuss the Webby Awards (no WinCustomize on there). Along with free Internet TV, and much more.

Check it out!