For those of you on IRC, you can visit us on IRC at irc.stardock.com. You'll need an IRC client such as mIRC.

Active channels:
#stardock
#neowin
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example: irc://irc.stardock.com#wincustomize

What a week it's been.  We have guests from Europe this week and I'm one of those guys who normally sleeps in until 10am.  But i've been having to get up at 8:30am. Yea yea I know poor baby. But I'm tired..

And now I'm hungry..

What is it with people who throw a fit and delete all their stuff in a given on-line community? Who do they think they're punishing? Just themselves. It's a classic "cut your nose to spite your face" scenario.

Happens on WinCustomize.com all the time. Some skinner will get mad because some guy ticked them off in the forums and so they go and delete all their stuff in a huff.  Typically, a few weeks later, they come back and ask us to restore their stuff for them.

The same thing happens with blogs. Every week or so, somebody gets mad at someone else and deletes their entire blog. Once in awhile, the person throwing the fit will be someone who's pretty popular so it gets more noticed.

From talking to the drama kings/queens over the years who do this, the explaination I get is almost always the same: "I want to make a statement".  They don't really know what the statement is.  The more intellectual ones will say something like "I don't want to support a community that would have members such as <insert user X here> who poison everything with his/her vile behavior."

The thing is, they are the ones losing out. Vile nasty people lurk in every community. But they burn out. The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.  And toxic users burn very very bright and last very briefly.  I've been participating non-stop in on-line communities for the past 20 years. From 300 baud BBSes to what we have today.  People who are nasty and ill-willed towards others always flame out.

But before they flame out, they usually manage to take out one or two drama king/queens with them. The key is not to be one of them. 

Like I said, ultimately, the person taking themselves out isn't really making a statement. A user who leaves a community inevitably only makes their absence felt for a very short amount of time.  There were users here who were prolific in their day, who got mad, deleted their blogs in a huff and within a few months, the regulars of the day barely remembered them.

It's even worse with skinners who leave because the fanbase has such a short attention span.  I've known skinners who got mad at us at WinCustomize.com, deleted their skins and were convinced that their leaving would spark some sort of mass exodus -- or at the very least deal a fatal blow to the "community".  And inevitably, they are shocked -- and hurt -- to learn that while there is usually some short term sorrow at their leaving, within a few weeks, it's as if they had never existed.

And that's the thing about on-line communities that people need to understand. Being a drama king/queen is the fast track to misery. Even I, who have spent years building communities would be largely forgotten within months by most people. The hole that my absence would make would be filled by others. I never mistake my popularity for more than it really is.

And so to the potential net personality reading this - that is my advice to you - don't look to any sort of on-line community as being some sort of sentient being. It's not. It's just a mass.  Do what you do because you enjoy it. Make your wallpaper, skin, theme, article, blog, whatever because it's what you want to do.  And if it ceases being fun - and it will from time to time -- take a break. Don't eliminate yourself by removing everything you've built up. The effect on the community will be negligible and may only bring you regret later on.

Quite regularly we get submitted a design document or prototype of some game or software idea or web concept from some ambitious young  person.  The proposal is usually quite vague but they insist it's a revolutionary idea that, once made, will make millions of dollars.

They are quite..generous as well in their proposal offering to split the proceeds that their revolutionary product would make 50/50.  Others generously offer to sell us the concept for a reasonable cost.  "All" we have to do is make the program and presumably wait for the money to roll in.

Ah if it only it were that easy.  In the real world, ideas are cheap. In fact, I'd almost say ideas are worthless in themselves.  Most people have neat ideas for products, services, whatever that they believe will make big bucks if they could get it made.  But that's the thing, making something is worth a lot more than the idea.

Making a successful product or service is really a multi-step project:

1st: You have the idea. That's the easy part.

2nd: You have to then develop the idea. If it's a game, or other piece of software that means you have to probably pay software developers to actually make the thing or if you're a programmer yourself taking the time to make the thing in such a way that people would want to use.

3rd: You have to put together a way to distribute your product or service. That's a lot of work too.

4th: You have to then spread the word about your product or service. I.e. you have to put together the marketing. This is a whole different discipline that involves a lot of hard, tedious work.

Usually, people in a position to actually do step 2 have lots of ideas they'd like to do themselves.  So when some guy sends me vague game design about doing "realistic surgery" offering to pay us a 50% royalty for each copy sold (after we make the game, then get it into distribution and handle the market) the answer is always "thanks but no thanks".  We have lots of ideas too.

So if you have some revolutionary idea, your best bet is to find a way to make your idea come true yourself. Because it's not the idea that matters, it's the follow-through.

If you haven't used Feedster, it's worth checking out for searching blogs. www.feedster.com.  

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

For those of you who are looking for an attorney in Michigan, we use Jerry Bagazinski who acts as our general counsel.

He practice areas are estate planning, real estate, business planning, probate, powers of attorney, and business law.

If you ever need to contact him his email address is [email protected] or call him at 734-522-2247. Tell him we sent ya.

I don't mean to offend Linux users, but I think some of them are so interested in winning an advocacy debate than actually providing a solution.

That is, in my experience many Linux users are very quick to point to some poorly implemented half-solution that they don't use just so that they can say things like "See, you can already do this with Linux".

It's not just Linux users, OS/2 advocates (myself included) were the same way.  Technology demos or things that don't do the job seamlessly are not real world solutions.  For instance, some BeOS advocate can't just say "Well BeOS had this advanced file system that could do most of what you wanted.." Well true, it did some of this. But not most of what I'm talking about. 

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. In my article on 5 features OSes need I talked about operating systems needing distributed computing, distributed file systems, universal accounts, along with a component based design. And in response, I got Linux users who argued Linux has "had these features for 10 years". Sorry, bullshit. I've played the OS advocacy game too and some half-assed, cryptic, partial solution is not a feature. 

There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are the dominant desktop OSes. And it's not because Windows users are "sheep" or that Mac users have all drank the kool-aid. It is because they are better at being desktop operating systems. 

And everytime I've debated with a Linux user about some missing feature it's the same as arguing with any other OS advocate - if they lack the feature or the feature is poorly implemented then either you didn't need the feature in the first place, that their OS isn't for "stupid people", or they'll change the conversation.

Example: The problem with using Linux is that many pages I need have ActiveX controls.

Response: You don't need ActiveX controls, they'll just virus/spyware disasters waiting to happen. Those pages should just use JAVA.

Well, that's nice except that that doesn't really solve the person's problem, does it?  Sometimes a feature is available -- almost -- but costs $10,000.  That's not a practical solution for users is it?  Or instead of costing $10,000 it requires an immense level of technical skill to get it up and running.  I remember several years ago trying to get VNC Server running on my Linux box. I got it working but it was unnecessarily complicated.

This week, we released Multiplicity. A program that lets you control multiple local (as in computers in the same room as you with monitors still connected to them) with a single keyboard and mouse that's on the primary computer. The idea being that you can use them together as a single computing platform.

It didn't take long for Linux or open source zealots to come in and start talking about Synergy. "It's frreeee!" they'd snear.  Sure, its clipboard support is bare bones, its connection is flakey, it is a huge pain to setup and use (forget using it on a DHCP based network), and it lacks tons of usability featurs.  But if you want to be able to use a couple of computers together you can do it. I'd invite anyone to try both programs if they really have any doubt that Multiplicity isn't light years ahead.  It's like the guy who says MS Outlook is pointless because there's some free, open source text based email client.

In short, a half-solution is not a solution at all.

For instance, getting back to the article I had written, A distributed file system could keep copies of my documents on many machines. Disk space is cheap. Let me access my stuff from anywhere and don't make me sweat too much about the physical location of the files. As long as they're secure (encrypted) what do I care? I shouldn't have to manually back up files in this day and age. I shouldn't have to go hunting through directories or LAN drives looking for a file.

6 months from now if I want to update the MS Word version of this article, I shouldn't have to run around to my various machines wondering which machine has it and which drive / directory I put it on. I should be able to logon to a machine, any machine, it would go to a global user account manager and I would be able to open up a "documents" folder that I made and all my documents should be there. A filtering system should be part of the folder view where I could type a couple keywords (this component created by a third party possibly and plugged in) and my article would come up.  The article might be located on the other side of the world. Who cares? I then open it up, edit it, and save it and it's saved back to a machine I have priviledged access to.

When some user says "Just use NFS" or whatever I just shake my head. Linux isn't mainstream precisely because so many of its advocates (and developers) never really finish their software. There are notable exceptions but by and large, Linux developers just put enough in there so that they can say "Aha, I did it!"

So it doesn't matter if there's some cryptic, hard to set up program that can kind of do distributed computing that you can download and spend hours to set up. It's not an OS feature.  A distributed computing feature in the OS would basically be silent. It just works.  Same for all these feature suggestions I made. For it to matter it has to be a) included with the OS and Be seamless and c) provide the full solution, not just some half-solution that's enough to make OS advocates declare victory on some message board..

Here are the 10 most popular personal pages on WinCustomize from the month of February along with how many unique visitors they received:

When someone creates a link to their personal page, something on their personal page, or to one of their skins or articles on another website, then each unique visitor who comes to WinCustomize from that link generates an "advocacy point" for that user.

Here are the top 5 advocates for February with the number of points received:

For those of them who haven't already gotten something, we'll be sending them some WinCustomize/Stardock goodies in the mail. Thank you for helping spread the word!

Hat tip to OSNews.com, here's a cool article that gives the background on MacOS X.

Meanwhile, this article goes over more OS history showing how creaky the underpinnings of our OSes really are.