John Kerry and his supporters have made a lot of noise of his 4 months in Vietnam on a Swift boat. But what do the men who actually served with him think? http://www.swiftvets.com/

Overwhelmingly, they reject him. Described variously as a glory hound, he apparently took a home movie camera with him in which he reinacted various events in front of the camera in an effort to glorify what he did.

I don't know enough on this to know how much of it is usual political propaganda or not.  However, I think it is very telling that so few people who served with him have any respect for him. That is very counter to the normal way of things between men who served together in combat.

Even his Purple Hearts have some dispute about them:

(USA Today)
Criticism Of Kerry’s Purple Heart Is Just

…”I was the commanding officer to whom Kerry reported his injury on December 3, 1968. I had confirmed that there was no hostile fire that night – and that Kerry had simply wounded himself with an M-79 grenade round that he’d fired too close.
He wanted a Purple Heart – and I refused**. Louis Letson, the base physician, saw Kerry – and used tweezers to remove the tiny piece of shrapnel, about 1 centimeter in length and 2 millimeters in diameter. Letson also confirmed that the scratch was inflicted with our M-79.” …

“Kerry orchestrated his way out of Vietnam – and then testified under oath before Congress that we, his comrades, had committed horrible war crimes.
This testimony was a lie – and slandered honorable men. We who were actually there believe he is unfit to command our sons and daughters. “

Grant Hibbard, retired commander U.S. Navy, Gulf Breeze, Fla.

Which wouldn't matter one bit to me except that Kerry has made such a stink about his Vietnam service. For all the sewage they've poured onto Bush for "only" flying aircraft in the states for the guard and unsubstantiated postfacto claims of "desertion", Kerry seem to have been living in a glass house all this time.

And that is what is so odd about this.  Kerry has made his Vietnam service such a center point of his campaign.  And yet, at the end of the day, what actually was that service? 4 months in Vietnam with a crew that almost universally despises him as a liar and show boat.  He takes advantage of the fact that most people think of Purple Hearts as being medals for serious wounds when, in his case, 1 of them may have been self-inflicted and the other 2 were for minor injuries.

That isn't to say that he has anything to be ashamed of. But given the war records of Bush Sr. and Bob Dole, neither of whom made anywhere near as much noise about their military career, it is rather stunning that all the valor noise coming from Kerry and his supporters is based on so little.

Microsoft really needs to do something about Internet Explorer. I doubt most people are even aware but it has slowly evolved into being a huge bloated pig over the years. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to bring up your task manager and see for yourself.

It's always a little ironic when I read someone complaining about the meg or two of memory WindowBlinds uses or some other desktop enhancement when they're probably using IE.  Mozilla, Opera, etc. are all much less resource intensive.  And yet, I always find myself back with IE. I'm not sure why. Microsoft must send out hypnotizing rays or something forcing me to use it and declare that it is "better than Cats".

The Spider-Man 2 desktop came out this week. Clearly it's all a matter of taste but I have to say, this is one of the coolest skins I've used in a long time. Even if it weren't related to Spider-Man (and I'm a huge Spider-Man fan, I have every issue of "Ultimate Spider-Man" which is the reformatted version of the comic book) I would still like this skin.  I just love the Start bar and I don't think I've seen the explorer view panes skinned this well before.

For long time members of our community, the Spider-Man skin represents a milestone of gaining mainstream respectability.  I saw some comments on Neowin where they were thinking the skin was too dramatic. But that's kind of the whole point. There's more to skinning than Luna recolorizations and Mac-like gray skins. It's skins like the Spider-Man skin that I got into this sort of thing in the first place. Bold, different, and creative.

I'll resist talking about Dashboard or Konfabulator this week since some people seem to treat their mention like kryptonite. So instead I'll plug a new program that I think is pretty cool, AveDesk. Written by AndreasV. AndreasV is a well known ObjectDock docklet developer. When we designed the ObjectDock docklet specification, one of the design requirements was to make it generic. It was our hope to create a standard docklet specification so that other programs could share the same docklets.  That way the handful of docklet developers wouldn't have to split their work amongst competing docklet types.  AveDesk uses ObjectDock docklets like stand alone "widgets".  I think this has a lot of potential and benefit for the community. The more docklets, the better and the more programs that support a single specification, the better.

Speaking of docks, for those who think Apple's zoom dock is the end all, be all, here's an article that has some areas it could use some improvement. ObjectDock Plus, btw, addresses most of them.

For instance, one common Mac complaint about their zoom dock is that there's no labels.  By contrast, ObjectDock lets you have labels. I find this useful for my system tray and taskbar since it's easy to lose track of what all those icons are. But I would like to be able to set this on a per tab basis. Not sure that'll get into the "final" build but it's definitely on my wish list along with a "To-Do" plugin.

Has anyone else thought of making a To-Do docklet? I'd imagine it working as follows: You double click on the to-do docklet and it pops up a simple dialog where I name it and describe it and can assign an image for it. It then creates a new dock item of it. When I've finished it, I just drag it off the dock and see it poof. Seeing work finish would be very satisfying.

As some of you may remember, about a week before Christmas TGT Soft filed a lawsuit against Stardock asking a court to make a declaratory judgment stating that TGT Soft could use Stardock's IconPackager .iptheme format without our permission with no liability.

Stardock's position is that its formats, such as .iptheme are protected under copyright and just as a simple matter of fair competition.  If someone wants to use our stuff, they need our permission in the form of a license.  I.e. you give us something we want we'll give you something you want.

After a few months of costly litigation, TGT Soft submitted a settlement offer in which they would license the .iptheme format (and .Bootskin) just as they had previously licensed the .logonxp format.

The exact details of the license are confidential as part of the settlement agreement. Suffice to say that Stardock is pleased with the results.

Stardock maintains its position that the people who make a thing have a legal right to say how that thing is used. In skinning, if you make a skin, and someone else wants to use it, you have to get permission.  If you want to use that thing for profit, then the other person (the creator of the intellectual property), at least in our opinion, has a right to benefit financially in some way as well.

Hopefully these events will serve as a notice that if you want to use someone else's stuff, you need to have their permission.  Stardock values its intellectual property that was difficult and expensive to create.

Stardock also maintains that that the icon artists themselves have control over WHERE their icon packages are distributed. Our license enables TGT Soft's Style XP to read in .iptheme files but it does not give them any rights to re-distribute the icon packages created by icon artists. 

Microsoft really needs to do something about Internet Explorer. I doubt most people are even aware but it has slowly evolved into being a huge bloated pig over the years. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to bring up your task manager and see for yourself.

It's always a little ironic when I read someone complaining about the meg or two of memory WindowBlinds uses or some other desktop enhancement when they're probably using IE.  Mozilla, Opera, etc. are all much less resource intensive.  And yet, I always find myself back with IE. I'm not sure why. Microsoft must send out hypnotizing rays or something forcing me to use it and declare that it is "better than Cats".

The Spider-Man 2 desktop came out this week. Clearly it's all a matter of taste but I have to say, this is one of the coolest skins I've used in a long time. Even if it weren't related to Spider-Man (and I'm a huge Spider-Man fan, I have every issue of "Ultimate Spider-Man" which is the reformatted version of the comic book) I would still like this skin.  I just love the Start bar and I don't think I've seen the explorer view panes skinned this well before.

For long time members of our community, the Spider-Man skin represents a milestone of gaining mainstream respectability.  I saw some comments on Neowin where they were thinking the skin was too dramatic. But that's kind of the whole point. There's more to skinning than Luna recolorizations and Mac-like gray skins. It's skins like the Spider-Man skin that I got into this sort of thing in the first place. Bold, different, and creative.

I'll resist talking about Dashboard or Konfabulator this week since some people seem to treat their mention like kryptonite. So instead I'll plug a new program that I think is pretty cool, AveDesk. Written by AndreasV. AndreasV is a well known ObjectDock docklet developer. When we designed the ObjectDock docklet specification, one of the design requirements was to make it generic. It was our hope to create a standard docklet specification so that other programs could share the same docklets.  That way the handful of docklet developers wouldn't have to split their work amongst competing docklet types.  AveDesk uses ObjectDock docklets like stand alone "widgets".  I think this has a lot of potential and benefit for the community. The more docklets, the better and the more programs that support a single specification, the better.

Speaking of docks, for those who think Apple's zoom dock is the end all, be all, here's an article that has some areas it could use some improvement. ObjectDock Plus, btw, addresses most of them.

For instance, one common Mac complaint about their zoom dock is that there's no labels.  By contrast, ObjectDock lets you have labels. I find this useful for my system tray and taskbar since it's easy to lose track of what all those icons are. But I would like to be able to set this on a per tab basis. Not sure that'll get into the "final" build but it's definitely on my wish list along with a "To-Do" plugin.

Has anyone else thought of making a To-Do docklet? I'd imagine it working as follows: You double click on the to-do docklet and it pops up a simple dialog where I name it and describe it and can assign an image for it. It then creates a new dock item of it. When I've finished it, I just drag it off the dock and see it poof. Seeing work finish would be very satisfying.

If you are curious to see how popular different sites are on the net, the tool I use is the Alexa toolbar.  I know some programs list it as "spyware" but it really isn't, not in the bad sense anyway.

Very often websites will claim to be incredibly popular but one check with Alexa will show just how popular they are. See link below.

With regards to my recent rant about hatemail getting me down...

All I can say is: Wow. Thanks for the support. I really do appreciate it. 

I'd like to respond to some points and kind of illuminate some issues that are only partially touched on:

1) WinCustomize finances.  WinCustomize loses money. A staggering amount of money.  Some say Stardock needs WinCustomize.  That's really not true. deviantART or some other site would definitely be up to the challenge of being the "official" site for Stardock's skins and themes.  Microsoft, for instance, doesn't even have a skin library for Windows Media Player.

So why do we have a skin site? Because we love skinning and customization.  You always have to wonder what someone is possibly thinking when they start talking about "greed".  Do they really think there is "big bucks" to be made changing the bitmaps of your title bars and Start bar?  We're proud to say that we can make a living on it.  But no one is going to be buying a private plane any time soon! . 

We love being able to do neat things to our comptuers. It's as simple as that. And like many of you, we like to share what we do with others. We all do that in different ways. Hence, WinCustomize exists.  Hopefully, down the line, we can get the site to being self-sustaining.  It inches closer to being self-sustaining each year. And hopefully WinCustomize 4 will be even better at that.

2) People, myself included, have scaling problems. It's hard to envision the impact of having nearly 3 million different people visit your site each month.  There are about 1.4 million registered accounts here. 

The problem with hate mail (90% of the nasty stuff I see is sent to me via email or forwarded to me one way or the other) is that it doesn't take very much to have quite an impact.  I personally get around 900 to 1200 email each day.  3/4ths of which is spam. But that still leaves 200 to 300 email each day I have to go through.  Out of those 200 to 300 email probably about 5 are from unhappy people.  Out of the 30 to 40 unhappy users emailing me each week, probably only 5 or 6 are really really nasty. 

It's just a matter of build up though.  How many emails or posts or whatevers over an extended period of time does it take before something isn't as fun as it used to be?

Many of you are skinners.  Imagine if you're a good skinner and you've spent 5 years giving away great skins for free. But you also have a couple of premium skins out there that you charge a nominal fee for.  Intellectually, you know that you have lots of people who do appreciate your work.  But how would you feel if you got a dozen or so hate mail each week telling you how greedy you are? Or how your skins suck? Or how they're going to report you to some agency because of some error on their part?

Heck, I've had people tell me they hope I get cancer and die. Seriously.

That is the sort of thing that makes it tough.  I think the tipping point was over the weekend I got slightly more hate mail than normal. And then I come on and read a bunch of bitching about the fact that I wrote (gasp) a third article talking about the Dashboard and Konfabulator thing.  3 articles.  I mean sheesh, newspapers cover the same topics over and over again and here I was writing something that I (and other developers) found interesting and I still had people yelling that I would dare write about something *I* was interested in.

I hate that sort of thing.  If I had been in that person's shoes, I would have gone onto JoeUser.com, opened up a blog and started blogging about customization related stuff I was intereted in and then emailing to see if WinCustomize would link to that blog.  We get a pitifully low number of news submissions each week and so I decided to do the blogging thing because I wanted there to be somethign unique and interesting on WinCustomize.  I'd rather someone else create blogs (on JoeUser) that I coudl link to or quote but that's not the case so I do it myself. 

And I enjoy writing.  But sheesh, it's tough when you get an email telling you how much the game you wrote sucks, how much my opinion on software piracy is "moronic", how WindowBlinds "made them have reformat and that we better compensate him for his time or we'd get sued", and then to see someone bitch because I want to talk about what Apple is doing.

But that's the breaks when you're doing something that's seen by millions of people. And I can grasp that.  I could probably grasp that better if the pay was better. Which is the other issue, nearly everyone who sends nasty email isn't some customer (the customer complaints are the minority). It's usually someone complaining that we're charging for something or about the shareware version or about their account or their skin or their wallpaper or whatever.

I think on WC2K5 we'll definitely have to do mroe for people who are subscribers. Some cool little button along with extra features.  That's the really galling part This site gets nearly 3 MILLION uniques each month and about 200 people subscribe each month.  If 1% of people who visited subscribed, that would be 30,000.  If 0.1% people who visited subscribed that would be 3,000.  So if you're a WC subscriber, you're one of the elite elite elite elite users  (0.01%).  Just like if you're an apprentice or higher.

If we had even 0.1% of people subscribing, then WC would be easily paying for itself and I could hire someone to answer the hate mail!

Robert Reich has a new book that talks about the principles of liberalism, conserativism, and adds a new category "radcons". It's an interesting, if self-serving, look at things.  I say self-serving because he seems to imagine that the Democratic party is being run by the warm fuzzy liberals he describes.  But is that the case? Perhaps he should add one more category -- Radlib. Because apparently, in Reich's mind, based on his book and interviews, the radicals are all on the right.  Reich is fairly far-left.  Don't get me wrong, I like the guy.  When I see him debate the "RadCon" Sean Hannity I cringe because Reich comes across as very reasonable while Hannity seems to want to lump all liberals as tree hugging nuts. But I do suspect he is much further to the left than  he believes.  How can you tell? I use the "Bill O'Reilly" litmus test.  If you're describing O'Reilly as a radical conservative, you're probably pretty far left. Far left people tend to view those with any non-liberal views as conservatives just as far right-wingers tend to view anyone who believes in any liberal views as a liberal.

Let's look at the principles:

I added Trade since I felt that one needed to be broken out on its own.

The problem with Reich's principles is that he seems to want to pretend that the Rablibs a) don't exist and don't have significant influence.  I can't blame him for wanting to do that since it defeats his central thesis -- that most Americans are liberals and therefore the Democrats should win elections.  Democrats have both camps in there, fighting it out. Nader has managed to draw some of the Radlibs away but most have remained as part of the Democratic camp this time because of their loathing of Bush.

I'm described as "right of center" and yet I'm liberal on 2 of the 5 issues stated above (Religion and Trade).  So if a "conservative" like me is liberal on nearly half the issues, then it's reasonable to assume that most Americans are to the left of me and therefore make up the majority. But it's not that simple. The views of the Radlibs are such an anathema to most Americans that given the choice between a candidate that is mostly conservative and one that has a view Radlib views, they'll choose the conservative even if he's to the right of them on some of the issues.

Now, let's look at 3 groups: Bush, Kerry, and Independent voters.

Bush: Religion (RadCon), Economics (RadCon), Foreign Policy (RadCon), Society (Conservative), Trade (Conservative).

Kerry: Religion (RadLib), Economics (RadLib), Foreign Policy (Liberal), Society (RadLib), Trade (Liberal). Based on his voting record/statements.

Independent Voter:  Pretty much on every issue they are just slightly between the conservative and liberal view.  For example, most Americans support affordable prescription drug care.  But the liberals want to provide universal health care which is not supported by any distinct majority.  They don't want religious views being shoved down their throats but on the other hand don't object to having "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance.  And while they prefer to have the UN's approval, want other countries to like us, at the end of the day, would prefer the US act alone than to get clobbered. It's the RadLibs that see America as the greatest threat to the world. Does Reich believe that most Americans share that opinion?

In this election, the problem is that neither Bush nor Kerry represent the views of most Americans.  Bush is considerably further to the right than most Americans and Kerry is quite a bit left of where most Americans see themselves. It will be interesting to see where the cards fall.

As for Reich's thesis, me thinks he's spending too much time debating Radcons and hanging out with Liberals.  Most Americans are neither liberal nor conservative, they fall into that gray area in between. And what has made the Republicans so successful is that the RadLibs have become the most vocal part of the Democratic party in the past 25 years and the more moderate Democrats (liberals) have done nothing to distance themselves from it. 

When a Jerry Falwell says something nuts, the conservatives openly condemn him.  When Trent Lott says something insensitive, conservatives sack him.  But when a Michael Moore trashes America, the liberals applaud him.  When former Klansman, Robert Byrd says something outrageous in congress, the liberals salute him.  And for that reason, the Republicans have managed to become the majority party.  Because while the majority of Americans may have very centrist views, the Democrats have embraced the worst of the RadLibs while Republicans have managed to show more ethical spine in dealing with their more "radical" members.

We're getting a lot of email from independent game developers about publishing their games on TotalGaming.net. This Question & Answer sessions will hopefully answer some of the more common questions satisfactorily.

Q: How do I get my game on TotalGaming.net?

A: Your best bet is to snail mail (not email) a kit to:

    Stardock Entertainment
    CO: Brad Wardell
    17292 Farmington Rd.
    Livonia MI 48152

Why not just send an email with a link to your game? Because one easy way to determine the overall quality of a game developer is to see how organized they are. Can they put together competent documentation? Can they present their game in a reasonably good way? Are we dealing with a real business?  Each year, tens of thousands of games get released and it's impossible to sift through them all. There's just not enough time. 

Q: What kinds are of games is TotalGaming.net looking for?

A: We're looking for all kinds. But particularly, we are looking for games that can be electronically distributed and have a single price (i.e. no monthly fees). Quality is paramount, however. We're not looking to have hundreds of games available. We want to keep the number of games reasonable.

Q: What is the royalty model for it?

A: Games on TotalGaming.net can be sold stand-alone as well as part of the TotalGaming.net subscription.  The royalty for the stand alone depends on a number of issues and is separate from the royalty one receives for sales of the TotalGaming.net subscription. Developers do not have to have their game as part of the subscription.  But the stand-alone royalty is doubled when it is.  Developers gets a % of each new sale of a TotalGaming.net subscription or on their stand alone game.

Q: What kind of royalty levels are there?

A: The stand alone game royalties are in the double digits (typically 25% to 50% depending on the circumstances). The royalty from sales on the TotalGaming.net subscription are in the low single digits. But bear in mind, a TotalGaming.net subscription is nearly $100.

Q: TotalGaming.net Subscriptions, why would I want my game part of this?

A: The quick answer is that having your game as part of the subscription won't have a negative net impact on your stand alone sales. Gamers who purchase TotalGaming.net are usually purchasing it because of one, maybe two games that they really want (i.e. would buy stand alone) but all the other games on there help convince them to just buy the entire subscription. As a practical matter, it's a question of whether it's better to receive a few dollars in royalties or none at all.

For example, Galactic Civilizations has been the primary mover of subscriptions. The gamer would have just purchased it stand-alone.  But additional games such as The Corporate Machine and LightWeight Ninja and such were enough to encourage the gamer to get the whole thing.  That gamer wouldn't have purchased The Corporate Machine stand-alone. The Corporate Machine didn't lose a sale, rather, it gained a piece of the subscription royalty.

That said, developers can opt-out, but it will change the stand-alone royalty amount.

Q: What does TotalGaming.net, as an electronic distributor, do that other distributors do not?

A: In a word: Promotion. One of the reasons why we are so selective in our titles is because we want to be able to promote each and every title on there.  That comes in the form of sending out copies to the media, interconnecting with the millions of Stardock.net users, and promoting it in other venues.  But that's not the only value-add.  TotalGaming.net isn't just a store. It's a community. With its integration with JoeUser.com, users can help each other out on games, learn about other games, and more.  As a result, support costs are dramatically reduced for developers/publishers and developers have a place to point their customers to to interact with each other lowering their overhead.  There is also one benefit of TotalGaming.net that bears mentioning: Stardock pays its bills. Anyone who's been in the game development industry long enough knows the pain of getting paid.  Stardock pays its developers promptly and reliably and has a 10 year track record of doing so.  We also don't pay accounting games with royalties. That is another issue that long time game developers are familiar with. Our royalty rates aren't, on paper, as high as some others, but you can track your sales in real time and know that your X% royalty isn't really X/2% because of various "charges".

For those of you into this kind of thing, the Episode 3 title has been revealed...