Steve Jobs announced today that over the next year, Apple is going to move its Macintosh line over to have Intel Inside.  According to Jobs, Apple has been leading a "secret life" for the past 5 years -- each version of MacOS X has had an Intel version and many of its popular internally developed programs have had versions compiled for an Intel version.

For users who purchase Intel-based Macintoshs starting mid-next year, they will need to either get upgraded MacOS X software that has been recompiled for MacOS X for Intel or run it through a compatibility layer that will run software via emulation.  It won't be as fast as it would have been natively but with most high end applications expected to be ported over, it will mean that most software for MacOS X should run acceptably no matter what.

I'm not sure where the myth began. But somewhere down the line, a false belief has turned into pseudo-fact amongst some people that customization software uses a lot of memory.  That's never been the case. Not even in the beginning.

At the dawn of Windows customization, software had to run on Windows 95 which only had 128K (that's kilobytes) of GDI resources. Customization software ate up a lot of those GDI resources since they were reserved for the user interface.  But even in 1995, 16K of memory was trivial. It's just that early versions of Windows were so limited in their GDI resources that it was a problem.

But Windows 2000 and Windows XP have never had any such problem.  And yet, we still see some uninformed, but vocal, user claim that <Program X> is "bloated" and uses a "ton" of memory.  Those people come in two forms:  The guy who really has no idea what he's talking about and the guy who thinks 10 megabytes of memory is a "ton" of memory.

The former guy is annoying because he matches his ignorance with his prolific posting.  The latter guy makes you wonder if their source of income is mom's allowance or something.  I can buy a 256 meg stick of memory for my PC for around $20. 

So let's get this out of the way: Desktop customization programs do NOT use much memory.

Here's WindowBlinds wbload.exe process use:

That's 576K.

Here's DesktopX:

That's only a couple megabytes of memory and it's running a useful object in this instance.

I could go on through a variety of programs both made by Stardock and made by third parties. None of them are "memory hogs".  You can certainly load up enough stuff with something like DesktopX to make it use a ton of memory.  Graphics, animation, etc. has to be stored somewhere.  But that's not the desktop customization's fault any more than it's Photoshop's fault if the user loaded a gigabyte sized image.

So next time someone tries to claim that some desktop customization program is "bloated" or something, point them here.

One of the coolest features (I think) of Stardock.net sites are the referral links.

Some sites have "track back" but it's a long, painful, manual process.  On Stardock.net sites like JoeUser or WinCustomize or GalCiv.com ro whatever, if you link to a particular article, you can see your link and how many people came to it from your link via referrals. It's very cool.

Under nearly every post here, you can see a referral field that tells how many sites are referring to an article.  For fun, let's see how many places we can get to link to this article.

Link to this URL and you'll see the referral appear below.

So you're a kid. La-di-la-la.  One day you're 19. At college. Trying to get through your classes. And then one day you wake up and you're 33, married with two children.

The good news: Your acne cleared up.  The bad news, your hair may be thinning. The zits are gone, but now I swear my hair is thinning. I'm not sure, it used to be too painful to comb it. But I swear it was thicker before! I hear that propecia can fix it but on the one hand, I'm married. Who gives a crap how I look? My wife's happy as long as I bathe and even then she's okay as long as I'm not stinking up the place.  On the other hand, where's that small window between zits and thinning hair? That's not fair!

Not that I'm losing hair universally.  My eye brows seem to be getting thicker! And I think there's a hair growing out the side of my nose! What the hell happened?

And the other day, some pathetic dweeb on Neowin called me "Old man" (apparently those who don't live in mom's basement qualify as "old man".)  I'm too old to be able to hang out with college students but I'm still young enough to outrage the stuffy old guys who still don't get this on-line thing where CEOs of software companeis can write "Kiss my ass" to obnoxious "customers" who think because they've paid $20 that you have to kiss their ass and thus should be able to say the most horrible, hurtful, nasty things about you. It's that middling period.

I'm old enough to worry that my 8 year old son won't be tough enough but young enough to realize that I still need my dad to come with me on my trip to the mountains because I can't quite "figure out" how to put up a tent or work a "gas" powered stove.  I'm old enough to worry that my sons are too pampered but young enough to not consider that my new S-Type R Jaguar may send the wrong message to people around me.

The good news is that I'm old enough to afford any drinks I want to get.  The bad news is that I'm also too old to really care about "Scoring" (sorry ladies, I haven't napped today and besides, my wife doesn't like me bringing strange women home, she's really..possessive).

I'm young enough to get annoyed at some geekling European (sorry, but they're always from Europe) who gets pissed off on some web forum because I actually like to talk about the stuff we make but old enough not to really give a crap that they're pissed off because if some 19 year old geekling isn't pissed off that I'm talking about what we make they'd be pissed off that I make a living off of it.  Don't worry, I don't mean to leave out the 49 year old fat, balding, single tech type who likes to start every conversation with "I've been in IT for 20 years and I...<insert dubious claim of how someone else's stuff confuses him which shows how bad it is because he's been in IT for 20 years>".  Yes we get it, Wise and Installshield installs confuse and intimdiate certain 52 year old IT guys with 20 years of experience and have attended user groups since the original Altair or whatever it was called.  Don't worry, I'll soon be joining your ranks as I recount my days of typing "load *, 8, 1" and complaining that I can't figure out how to use my next-gen cell phone.

Speaking of which, why can't I take a picture with my cell phone while I'm talking to the person? Hello??

Advice for parents: Don't rush your kids through school. If I could get away having my 8 year old son in first grade, I would.  Better to be older than everyone else than younger.  Man, if I could go to college now with what I know now. I'd rule. I already know all the Pac-man patterns for instance.

Advice for people who object that I write articles on non-Stardock products that compete with our stuff: Write your own damn articles. I'm not the government. No one is stopping you from writing the greatest msstyles vs windowBlinds or DesktopX vs. Konfabulator or ObjectBar vs. whatever article out there.  Go for it. I'll highlight it if it's legible.  Type Skin Primer into Google and THIS comes up. Boo hoo, write your own if you don't like mine.  Guess what, if the article appears on a site owned by Stardock it is probably going to favor Stardock or at least not trash it.  Here's another secret: If you read a Linux vs. Windows article on Microsoft.com, odds are it's not going to favor Linux.  That tip is for free.

In the advice to loose canons on the net: If you're an individual, don't screw with companies. Evil corporations will almost always crush the idiot blowhard in legal proceedings unless there is personal physical injury.  It's the Internet. If you're a blowhard, know your limits.  If I'm pissed off at Microsoft or Apple, well, that's fine but if I start making legal threats against them, they'll crush me like a bug. Only if I can find a way to get that iMac to burn me or something would I have any sort of shot at "Getting back".  So shut-up and suck it up. Take it from a guy who knows, unless it's personal injury the bigger company always wins.

Speaking of small companies, Style XP 3.04 adds support for letting you change your screen savers.  So apparently for people who don't know how to change their screen saver from the display properties here's another way to do it and it'll only cost you $20 to do it.  Good for them.  Those people who bash Stardock for charing a whopping $20 to actually create a full blown skinning engine might want to look around a bit.  one can imagine v3.1 -- now can change wallpapers (oh wait, does that already, my bad).

Did I mention you get cranky when you're becoming less young?  We all promise not to do what our parents did to us.  My son is in little league and when he plays second base in practice he doesn't run over to cover second when the ball goes to short-stop.  But I remember my mom marching onto the diamond to grab me and walk me over to cover second if I forgot to cover second when the ball was hit to short. Withhold food for fielding errors? Yes. Walk on field in practice? No. You have to have boundaries.

Part of getting less young is forgetting things. There used to be a skinning site dedicated to talking about "customization" stuff from everyone except us (because we're evil where evil is defined by those who make a living doing it).  Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the site or I'd tell you.

Other advice to young software developers: Don't waste your summers working overtime. You can't get them back.  We actually schedule summers at Stardock to be free of major milestones so that no one is working overtime.  Fall may be harsh but summer is nice.  Sorry, no big releases this summer.

Okay, that's about all for now.

..Once upon a time I wanted to be an electrical engineer.  I would design the next generation computer CPUs. A job at Intel or Motorolla.

But somewhere along the way I ended up writing some game for OS/2. I didn't even know how to program at the time. I bought "Teach Yourself C in 21 days" and a couple OS/2 programming books and wrote a game.  I didn't get actually paid for that game because the publisher ripped me off. Took the money and ran. So fine, I would write software and publish it and also publish the software for other software developers so that they didn't have to go through what I went through.

But to do that I would need to bring in other people to help with that.  Marketers, sales people, managers, relationship managers (what the hell is that?), an dother people. And of course, OS/2 died off (unless you're one of the freaks who hangs out on comp.os.os2.advocacy still) so then we had to move to Windows so I had to become a financial management guy too as we migrated.

Over time, I slowly found myself not writing very much code but managing these dozens of people.  Next week, I am going to schedule some time to write some code for one of our products.  I may get to spend a total of 16 hours next week writing code! The rest of my time I'll be grumpy old man walking around the office cranking at people for not doing what they do as fast or as well as they should.

The moral of the story is that electrical engineering is not a good background for managing people. Though it will teach you how to design the perfect electrical whip...

I have a new home made drink that I will share with you. Learned the secret from a local pub.

You take some vanilla vodka and mix it with chocolate gadiva chocolate liquor and some white chocolate gadiva chocolate liquor.  Mmm. Very nice.