My car's lease is almost up so I have to think about getting a new one.  I currently have a 2003 Bonnaville. It's a pretty good car actually. Cost around $35,000 back in 2003.

But now it's time for a new one? Any suggestions? Here are the specs:

(1) Needs to be front-wheel or all-wheel drive.
(2) I prefer American made cars.
(3) Prefer a head's up display
(4) Prefer but don't require 4-door vehicle.
(5) Needs ot have built in nice GPS type unit.
(6) Needs to have enough horse power so that I never feel like I'm pushing it (I tend to drive fast).
(7) Would like adaptive cruise control

I'm not terribly price conscious. The limiting factor is typically that the cars I want are rear-wheel drive which simply isn't an option in Michigan.

For instance, I'd be tempted to get the Cadillac XLR if it was front wheel drive or all-wheel drive:

JMS, the creator of Babylon 5 along with a fantastic writer of many graphic novels (including the long delayed "Rising Stars..ahem..) has put his two sents on the recent cancelation of Star Trek: Enterprise and his thoughts on what Paramount needs to do..

I'm sending this to both the B5 folks reading this and any Trek fans
looking on.

Bryce Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and
creator/executive producer of Dark Skies) and I share one thing in
common. We are both long-time Trek fans, from the earliest days, who
felt that the later iterations were not up to the standards set by the
original series. (I'm exempting TNG because that one worked nicely,
and was in many ways the truest to the original series because Gene was
still around to shepherd its creation and execution.)

Over time, Trek was treated like a porsche that's kept in the garage
all the time, for fear of scratching the finish. The stories were, for
the most part, safe, more about technology than what William Faulkner
described as "the human heart in conflict with itself." Yes, there
were always exceptions, but in general that trend became more and more
apparent with the passage of years. Which was why so often I came down
on the later stories, which I did openly, because I didn't feel they
lined up with what Trek was created to be. I don't apologize for it,
because that was what I felt as a fan of Trek. That's why I had Majel
appear on B5, to send a message: that I believe in what Gene created.

Because left to its own devices, allowed to go as far as it could,
telling the same kind of challenging stories Trek was always known for,
it could blow the doors off science fiction television. Think of it
for a moment, a series with a forty year solid name, guaranteed
markets...can you think of a better time when you take chances and can
tell daring, imaginative, challenging stories? Why play it safe?

When Enterprise went down, those involved shrugged and wrote it off to
"franchise fatigue," their phrase, not mine.

I don't believe that for a second. Neither does Bryce. There's a
tremendous hunger for Trek out there. It just has to be Trek done
*right*.

Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of
Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a
return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe.
Understand: writer/producers in TV just don't do that sort of thing on
their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money.
We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines
out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.

But when it came time to bring it to Paramount, despite my track record
and Bryce's enormous and skillful record as a writer/producer, the
effort stalled out because of "political considerations," which was
explained to us as not wishing to offend the powers that be.

So on behalf of myself and Bryce, I'm taking the unusual step of going
right to the source...right to you guys, fueled in part by a number of
recent articles and polls, including one at www.scifi.com/scifiwire in
which nearly 18,000 fans voted their preference for a new Trek series,
and 48% of that figure called for a jms take on Trek. (The other
choices polled at about 18% or thereabouts.)

See, if somebody doesn't like a story, doesn't want to buy it, that's
all well and good, that's terrific, that's the way it's supposed to be.
But when "political considerations" are the basis...that just doesn't
parse.

So here's the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series that's
true to Gene's original creation, helmed by myself and Bryce, with
challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid extrapolation, and the
infusion of some of our best and brightest SF prose writers, then you
need to let the folks at Paramount know that. If the 48% of the 18,000
folks who voted at scifi.com sent those sentiments to
Paramount...there'd be a new series in the works tomorrow.

I don't need the work, I have plenty of stuff on my plate through 2007
in TV, film and comics, so that's not an issue. But I'd set it all
aside for one shot at doing Trek right, and I know Bryce feels the
same.

If you want this to happen...it's up to the Trek and B5 fans to make it
so.

The rest I leave to the quiet turning of your considered conscience.

J. Michael Straczynski

Here are some freeware programs that are very popular but don't tend to get much news made on them:

CursorXP. www.cursorxp.com. This program takes your Windows mouse cursors to the next level. It's free, no spyware, and very cool.

LogonStudio. www.logonstudio.com. This program lets you change your Windows XP logon screen. It hasn't been updated in a long while but it does the job very well and it's free.

IconDeveloper. www.icondeveloper.com. I use this program all the time to make icons. What it does is let you take images (PNG, JPG, BMP whatever) and quickly turn them into Windows icons. Even works from the Windows shell.

In my last article, I talked about how there is a sub-set of people on-line who have a real problem with the concept of capitalism. That is, people intentionally making products and services that are designed to make money for the creator of those products or services.

But while capitalism may be tolerated by those people, some are pushed over the edge over the concept of charging money for intellectual property (such as software).  While one can understand having to pay for food or cars or other tangible things, the idea of having to pay for something that has no physical form and hence no production cost is anathema to some.

The result is that a small but vocal minority of people will go out and harass those who create commercial software. 

The example I gave was a the announcement of a  program called Multiplicity. It enables users to take multiple computers, each with its own monitor(s) and combine them together into a single unit that is controlled by a single keyboard and mouse.  At first, we saw people come on and insist it was no different than some freeware program that's available. And indeed, on paper there are freeware programs that are similar to Multiplicity. But in a similar vein, there are similar programs, on paper, to WindowBlinds such as CustomEyes.  Such freeware, open source programs tend to be more technology demo than something you would use.

The response I got from people in that thread was very interesting.  I wasn't aware that there were people who were really and truly insistent that commercial software and freeware/open source are generally equivalent in quality even though any reasonably experience software user knows that isn't the case.

Commercial software is almost always better than freeware.  Not because commercial developers are better programmers but because the commercial developer has a stronger incentive to keep enhancing, fixing, tweaking, polishing the program than the freeware developer.  The typical freeware developer is making something largely for themselves that they later decide to share with others. By contrast, the commercial software developer is making something they hope others will pay for. Big difference.

There are countless examples of freeware that is better than commercial offerings (Look how good Firefox is). But that's not the norm.

Personally, I use freeware when I can because I'm cheap. But if it's something that matters, I'm going to go with whatever the best and that normally means having to pay for it.

But getting back to the hatred of capitalism, once the argument over freeware vs. commercial in terms of software quality was simmering I also received private messages from ant-capitalists that essentially said "Look, you've already got Stardock and WinCustomize to post your spam on, why do you have to post your spam on Neowin's software news?"  Which was an intriguing unintentional admission. 

The Neowin.net software news section is designed for announcements of software news (I should know, I'm a news moderator there).  It doesn't discriminate on the type of software. It can be free. It can be commercial. It doesn't matter. But it was very telling that multiple people objected to the announcement of commercial software.  If Multiplicity was a freeware program, no doubt they'd been fine. Their hope, from experience, is to try to harass/shame commercial developers to go away. 

Of course, this is nothing new. I've been dealing with this phenomenon for years. During the dot-com extremes and the height of the open source hype such people were much more numerous and more vocal as we got regular demands for us to make our software open source.

But at the end of the day, software that is complicated and hard to develop, particularly if the quality of the software has to do with the execution of it, needs to be developed by people who are paid to do it. And that money has to come from somewhere. WindowBlinds dominates the GUI skinning world because it has been continuously developed for 8 years now. If it were freeware, it would have died off long ago, I can assure you of that. 

That is why capitalism is a force for good -- it provides an incentive for people to do things they would rather not do in order to make the product or service better. And that improvement benefits the user and provides resources to do other things that benefit users (such as pay for a skin site).

Running an Internet based business is vastly different than running a traditional bricks and mortar based company. This is particularly true if you are running and Internet based business that deals with end users since, at that point, you are running the Internet equivalent of a retail store.

The first reason it is different has to do with a term we call "conversion rate".  The conversion rate of a traditional store varies but is typically around 5%.  That is, if 20 people visit your store, you can expect for one of them to purchase something. 

The second reason has to do with pure masses of people visiting the store.  A typical store at the mall can expect around 500 people to come into the store.  A WalMart can expect many more.  But nothing can touch a popular website.   Amazon.com gets in the neighborhood of 5 million unique visitors per day.  That's 10,000 times more. 

This changes the customer/company dynamic completely.  In the early days of retail the phrase "the customer is always right" came into being.  This wasn't based on any sort of noble sentiment but rather necessity. In those days, the family store might only get 50 to 100 people visiting - many of whom were repeat customers. You could not afford to alienate even one of them because one unhappy customer could then talk to 20 other people in their neighborhood about their bad experience.

In an Internet based store the "customer being right" never comes up. A good Internet business tries to maximize the number of happy customers and minimize the number of unhappy ones.  On the surface, this might seem similar to the traditional model. But it's not. Internet based companies merely determine how many unhappy customers they can afford to have statistically and find ways to keep that number at or below that number.  It's a totally different system. 

Where traditional stores did not want any unhappy customers. Internet businesses, because they're dealing with so many people, don't aim for that level of perfection. Instead, customer relations becomes a matter of statistical analysis.  There is no face time between customer and merchant.  It's all virtual. And that virtual relationship lends itself to statistical analysis.

Moreover, the fractured nature of the Internet changes the dynamic further. An unhappy customer of an Internet greeting card making site is not going to have the same impact on business as the unhappy customer of the local hardware store because of the lack of a cohesive customer community (i.e. telling your friends and neighbors about the Internet greeting card making provider being bad isn't going to matter much since none of them were likely to go there in the first place).

And as if these differences weren't enough, you have the unique concept of internet store and community intermixing. Now you're dealing with the proprietors of the products and services you may be purchasing.  In a traditional store, your interaction with a clerk or cashier is the equivalent of a search engine or electronic commerce server. The typical customer in a traditional store doesn't have a long, drawn out conversation about the items available for sale.

The net result is that many end users, particularly older ones, haven't yet come to terms that Internet based businesses are run very differently from stores and shops in their local area. The expectations are different. The policies are different. The experiences are different.  It's a brave new world indeed.

The thing about Valentine's day is that you can appreciate the love of your life.

My wife is really wonderful. She's my best friend and the mother of our two children. She has an almost infinite level of patience and has a quantity kindness that I've never encountered in another human being.  If she has only faults, it would only be in her questionable taste in spouses.

I am very glad that I met her and that she is part of my life. We've been together 13 years now and each day I wake up and I am thankful for the time we've had together.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

The link below will take you through our entire gallery of Valentine's related skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, screenshots, etc.

So our story so far - in the beginning your desktop only supported little static pictures called icons.  Your computer could also load programs but they are contained inside a "window" that is separate from your desktop.

The idea DesktopX postulated in 1999 was to have something new on your desktop. Something more than an icon but not a traditional program.  And today, widgets are slowly becoming very popular and DesktopX is no longer the only provider of extradesktop level content.  You've got Konfabulator and you've got Kapsules and you've got Samurize and a few others that veer a bit further away from the widget concept but still fill the basic premise.

But these widget enablers all suffer a common problem - they have trouble creating things that the developers of the original program didn't think of.

That's because widgets are innovative for TWO reasons: The first is the aforementioned fact that they're a new type of desktop content (i.e. mini-applications that are smaller than a typical program that lives on your desktop.  The second is that widgets are supposed to be able a lot easier to create than regular programs.

And so they make a fairly reasonable trade-off -- they make it easy for you to create this stuff but you have to use their APIs to do it, usually through a scripting language like JavaScript or VBScript.  And hence, if they don't make the API you need, you're up the creek.

The net result is pretty obvious though many people may not understand why - widgets have become (unfortunately) associated with pretty looking but not necessarily useful desktop jewelry. Clocks, calendars, and data retrieved from the net (RSS readers, weather info, stock tickers, etc.).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with clocks and and web-based headline readers and the like. But eventually, when the hype about widgets starts to die down and people start to look hard at this stuff, if that's all they do, widgets will end up in the dust-bin right along with "Push" technology and "Thin" PCs.

So what can be done about this? The answer in DesktopX 3 comes in the form of scriptable plugins.

Scriptable Plugins

Plugins are no joke to make. They require real coding (C++ or whatever). They're not for casual users to crank out.  But the DesktopX 3 plugin format is open so that anyone who knows how to program can create them.

These plugins can then add new methods to DesktopX 3 that we haven't thought of that are then accessible from scripts.  When an object uses a plugin, it becomes part of the object so when you send it over to another user, the needed plugins are created. So there's no need for users to have to run around downloading third party plugins to make sure their widgets work.

So if there is some feature or API you feel DesktopX is missing, if you know how to code, you can write a plugin and add new APIs to DesktopX itself and it's totally seamless in the scripting.

For example, while DesktopX 2 contains a mail checking plugin, you can't access it from script.  So it's pretty limited.

So for our example, we created a DesktopX 3 plugin. Its features are accessible from script.  So I create an object and add the plugin to the object abilities. So in your JavaScript or VBScript you now have access to a new object class called "Mail" (defined by the plugin).

So in my script (JavaScript here) I'd have it first have gotten the user's username, password, and server and then make this call:

The API, of course, would have to be documented by the author (for instance, the "1", and 0 aren't germane to our example but would be part of the plugin's docs).

The Mail class also includes its own mail event (and DesktopX's built in event explorer will automatically display events that the plugins add).

In this example (using VBScript this time) you then have:

This is obviously a simple example. But what you see here is that DesktopX gains a new object class called "Mail" along with its corresponding methods to control it.  In addition, its own event is defined and can be  used as well.  And all this created without the developer of the original program (DesktopX) being involved. 

This is important in particular to DesktopX 3 Pro gadget makers who might want to make something pretty sophisticated to sell or distribute.

DesktopX 3 is scheduled to be released this March. Its home page is www.desktopx.net. The standard edition of DesktopX 3 will be included as part of Object Desktop, Stardock's suite of desktop enhancement utilities (www.objectdesktop.com).