On the way back from vacation my mild summer cold turned into ETD. Eustachian tube dysfunction.

What is ETD? It's basically where fluid behind the eardrums gets locked in there usually due to swelling or some other blockage. The net result is that your ear is plugged and it's very annoying. It's like having water in your ears but not having a way to get it out.

I've now had it for 5 days and it's driving me crazy.  On Friday, I'd finally had enough. We called the doctor's office and I got in an hour later (those of you living in countries with socialized medicine eat your hearts out <g>).  Sure enought, ETD. 

So what can you do to treat it? Unfortunatley, not much.

The doctor suggested I continue to take decongestants (like Sudafed) and try to sleep on my other ear.  He also prescribed a steroid nasal spray that may help over the next few days to bring down the swelling.  The spray is essentially the same thing as an Asthma solution which tells me that they don't have a very good solution for this kind of problem yet.

If worse comes to worst, they can put a small hole in your ear drum to equalize the pressure and let it drain but that would be a very last resort since it is a surgery (getting tubes put in ones ears which I have had before when I was very young).

The problem is that I've been told that this kind of problem can last for weeks if not months. That's certainly not acceptable since I can't fly while this is occurring.

 

 

Thanks to the tip from our friends at www.OSNews.com, we have some screenshots of MacOS X Tiger.

In a comment to an article about racism, someone from Australia made the absurd claim that Australia is the most multi-cultural country in the world.  Not to be outdone, someone from Canada claimed the mantle for Canada.  What's next? Someone from Japan making that claim?

Here are some statistics on the racial make up of a few selected countries:

Australia: Caucasian 92%, Asian 7%, aboriginal and other 1%

Canada: Canada has diversity if you count various types of white people as diversity. http://www.statcan.ca/english/census96/feb17/eo1can.htm

United States: It's about 62% white, 14% Hispanic (white can be counted as white if you want), 13% African American, 4% Asian. 

Getting into a debate about what is the most multi-cultural country in the world is futile because the definition can be played with until it becomes meaningless.

I tend to view the US as pretty multicultural because it has multiple racial groups (defined as people who physically look significantly different) that represent significant percentages of the population.  African Americans, Latinos, Whites (various European ancestory), and Asians all make up significant percentages of the population as well as having high enough populations to reach a critical mass.

4% of Americans being Asian represents arouns 12 million people (to put it in perspective, the entire population of Australia is 19 million).  13% of Americans being black means nearly 40 million people (Canada's population is around 30 million total).

When you have those kinds of raw numbers representing a pretty significant percentage of the population, it means each group has to deal with the other in a very real and practical way.

Australia, for instance, being 92% white, claiming to be multicultural is akin to some all white high school claiming to be multicultural because there are 3 Asians and an African in one of their classes.

Europeans who smugly talk about American racism have no idea what they're talking about.  Besides the fact that Europeans only recently tried to wipe out one of their own racial minorities in death camps for apparently not being white enough (I tend to think one of the reasons why there's relatively little anti-semitism in the US is that we jsut don't understand it. When you have neighbors and coworkers whos ancestory is from India and Japan and China or African, it's hard to really notice the differences between some guy whose ancestors are from Poland who happened to choose a slightly different religion).

But given how much under observation Americans are, when you have 300 million with minority groups that would be the majority population in most other countries you are bound to have incidents where one group doesn't like another.

Koreans and African Americans in LA notoriously don't get along.  I have no idea why. But it's widely reported. African Americans and Jewish people don't get along in New York for some reason. No idea why. And African Americans and some White southerners don't get along. I do have an idea what caused that at least!

But when you mix around so many different cultures and races so much, you're always going to (statistically) have cases where there is conflict.

In Europe (or apparently Australia) cultural diversity means being a slightly different type of European. But in the US, the threshold is much higher. If you're from Europe you're white. Italian, Pole, English, French, whatever, doesn't matter.  And if those Europeans who complain about that when they arrive are bound to be eventually rebuked by the Korean or Mandorian Chinese or other type of Asian who says "Hey, welcome to the club, our cultures have been lumped together for centuries by you Europeans!"

 

In one of the multitides of Michael Moore related blogs, one Moore defender essentially argued that unless you could debunk Moore's various conspiracy theories then we have no reason not to believe them.

Their position, essentially, was that crackpot theories are true until proven false. Which is absurd. It's much easier for crank out a crackpot theory than to spend the time debunking it. In my opinion, Michael Moore's books and films are little more than well produced and polished crackpot theories that feed the gullible and weak minded. 

I asked one of our IT people today how hard it would be to implement a feature where the answer to poll question would automatically prevent them from commenting on my blogs.  Basically, the poll question woudl be "Do you believe Michael Moore's assertions to be essentially correct?"  The preson woh says yes is basically telling me that they're too dumb to comment on articles I write.  I enjoy discussing topics with people who disagree with me (that's half the point after all). But I don't want my time wasted by...well dumb people.

But like I said, it's tedious and time consuming to actually put togther a good fisking or debunking of a crackpot assertion.  But the blogsphere is a wonderful thing and someone actually has taken the time to put together a reasonably thorough debunking of Fahrenheit 9/11's biggest charges.  It doesn't cover it all (no single article does) but it does cover a lot of it which is a good start to help bring those who have enough gray matter to at least be skeptical about some of the kooky theories and connections espouse d in the film.

Check the link below to visit the article. He has more time and patience than I'd ever have.

I'm back from vacation. It was great to go to the gulf of Mexico with the wife and kids. We had a blast. Coming home was a bit of a pain due to weather and my summer cold came back to haunt me. My right ear is totally plugged up.  Lots of crazy stuff happened last week. Apple announced MacOS 10.4 code-named "Tiger" with a feature called Dashboard. Dashboard is similar to DesktopX but it is really a knock-off of a Mac program called Konfabulator. Not that the Apple-does-no-wrong zealots will admit to it. In their mind, Konfabulator is just a derivative of Apple's long defunct desktop accessories or even Active Desktop on Windows. Whatever. In the Apple zealots world, only Apple innovates. Next time Apple users bitch that Windows users are "stealing" some idea, remind them of Dashboard.

Meanwhile Arlo Rose blasted Apple over their borrowing so much from Konfabulator. I can't blame him for being ticked. But based on what I've seen from Apple's defenders, they don't get it. They don't see why Apple should be held to a different standard as Microsoft. After all, Microsoft borrows from its ISVs and regularly competes with them (IE, UXTheme, WMP, Instant messaging). But the reality is, Apple isn't Microsoft.  When someone develops for the "underdog" one tends to expect to be shown a little appreciation. Or, at the very least, not blatantly do things that ruin their business.

I mean really, what's the point in developing software for the Mac if Apple is just as likely to eat your lunch as Microsoft despite the risk being much greater in the first place for the Mac? No one has really talked about that but I think that goes to the heart of the matter.  Apple shouldn't be pulling this kind of crap, especially given how loudly they bitch and moan when others borrow their ideas.  After all, these are the guys who sue computer makers for having their cases too similar!

I know people at Microsoft who just loathe Apple or at least their culture because they know something most people don't -- if you think Microsoft is nasty, Apple is much worse. Apple does things that Microsoft would get clobbered over. When a program breaks between versions of Windows, Microsoft, who legitimately tries to ensure compatibility, gets accused of all kinds of malicious intent.  Meanwhile, Apple, who seems to almost go out of its way to break third party programs between fixes, gets a free ride.

Not that it ultimately matters to me. I don't write for the Mac. I'm harping on this becuase I've gotten hundreds (if not thousands) of nasty email from Mac fanatics over the years claiming how we or Microsoft or the boogeyman stole our ideas from Apple. Whether that be them retroactively claiming that the Mac had alpha blended shadows first (WindowFX had them first) or the various claims that WindowBlinds was a rip off of some Mac program despite the fact we were "skinning" OSes back in 1994.

Mac zealots always seem to think that Apple is some huge innovator. But they're not. They merely take other people's ideas and polish them up and introduce them to the mainstream. That doesn't make Apple a bad company. It makes them a smart one. But I get irritated when the ignorance of Mac users of the wider world causes them to think that Apple comes up with all this stuff from scratch.

So next time you see some Mac zealot claiming Longhorn "stole" some feature from Apple, remind them that Apple has no room to talk.

 

I'm back from vacation. It was great to go to the gulf of Mexico with the wife and kids. We had a blast. Coming home was a bit of a pain due to weather and my summer cold came back to haunt me. My right ear is totally plugged up.  Lots of crazy stuff happened last week. Apple announced MacOS 10.4 code-named "Tiger" with a feature called Dashboard. Dashboard is similar to DesktopX (which, btw, predates Konfabulator) but it is really a knock-off of a Mac program called Konfabulator. Not that the Apple-does-no-wrong zealots will admit to it. In their mind, Konfabulator is just a derivative of Apple's long defunct desktop accessories or even Active Desktop on Windows. Whatever. In the Apple zealots world, only Apple innovates. Next time Apple users bitch that Windows users are "stealing" some idea, remind them of Dashboard.

Also last week Microsoft made a new visual style for Windows XP Media Center edition called Royale. We updated SkinStudio 4.3 yesterday so that it can convert this visual style seamlessly to WindowBlinds format. I don't know why anyone would run it, it looks hideous in my opinion. It's basically a gradiated version of Luna. Meanwhile, with the GUI Olympics now complete and the prize patrol about to begin, the visual styles, skins, and icon packages are being migrated over to WinCustomize.com. Go here to get the WindowBlinds skins.

With the GUI Olympics skins added in, the WindowBlinds library at WinCustomize.com has grown to 2,990. It'll probably hit 3,000 within the week which is quite a milestone.  Many good WindowBlinds skins are also at deviantART.

Meanwhile, work continues forward on ObjectDock Plus. We're running an internal beta of it. It has a lot of really cool features such as tabs, system tray support, really good auto hiding, plugins, etc.  What I think makes it stand out is the usability features. Pity those won't show up in a screenshot. Regular ObjectDock remains (and will continue to remain) free. ObjectDock Plus will be like CursorXP in that it isn't part of Object Desktop but will be a stand alone program.

Getting back to DesktopX for a minute, version 2.2 is nearly done.  DesktopX 2.2 is going to lose a feature though IconX.  We've determined that one of the coolest features of DesktopX should really be its own program.  So IconX will become its own program (part of Object Desktop still). Current DesktopX registered users will get a free license of IconX of course.

On the games side, Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy (the expansion pack to GalCiv) is doing really well.  Stardock has also signed a bunch of games to go onto Drengin.net which will soon be rechristened. Will have more on that soon. The games side of things is really going to get interesting in the next few months as the technology back end for Object Desktop and WinCustomize gets applied to games.  I don't know how many of you are gamers but for me, I get frustrated when a game isn't available at the store. After a few months, most games disappear from the shelves and many good titles never see the light of day on the shelves.  That's where we're going with electronic distribution. We want to make it so that people can just press a button and download the game. And from then on be able to redownload as many times as needed. No DRM, no copy protection nonsense, no wrappers. Stardock Central 2 would handle the "activation" once and off you go.  For me, that's the key, I lose CDs and I don't want to have to back up huge games to DVDs or something. I want to know that if I buy a game that 3 years from now if I format my drive and I lose the game that I can download Stardock Central and get all my games back in a few clicks.  I don't know how many copies of Total Annihilation I have but I've bought several over the years because I've damaged CDs, lost them, misplaced serial #s, etc.  That's something Drengin.net will address and I think will open the door for mainstreaming electronic distribution (just a note: there are places that will let you purchase and download a game but they come in wrappers and once you have it, it's yours, I'm pretty sure if you lose it you're up the creek, there's no sort of account management).  The big thing about Drengin.net isn't just that you can purchase games one by one but rather that you can pay a fixed price and get everything.  So for $100 you would get a dozen, two dozen, whatever games.

Well that's all for now! More soon.

Most of the propaganda peddled in Michael Moore's new Fahrenheit 9/11 basically boils down to playing tricks with the old 6 degrees of separation concept and crude manipulation of statistics. As I wrote in my other article, I don't tend to have a lot of patience for gullible people. People who buy into propaganda strike me as weak minded. If someone buys into some crackpot conspiracy theory I don't tend to feel like I should put in the effort to debunk it. It's a lot easier to fabricate a bizarre theory than it is to debunk it and the gullible aren't worthy of the time involved in providing that debunking.  Moore's film is full of, IMO, crackpot theories and crass manipulation of statistics.

Early in the film, Moore claims how Bush has not been working 45% of the time.  This statistic is really representative of the entire film in many ways because it is true and yet misleading.  If you count weekends and Bush's working vacations (i.e. where he meets with foreign leaders, does press conferences, etc.) and work the timing just right, the statistic is true.

But like all statistics, it can be abused.  I tend to work 60 hours per week. But I only work around 40 hours at the office. With these two data points all kinds of interesting statistics could be created.  If I work 5 out of 7 days of the week (full time) I automatically have 30% of the time off.  Since 9/11 occurred just after Bush finished his yearly vacation, there were only 8 months in the work year for the President thus far (because he was inaugurated in late January).  Now bear in mind, if he worked every day without a day off between his first day in office and 9/11 he would already have 30% of the time off.  Throw in some vacation days and voila, you're at 45%.  Moore's statistic came from a Washington Post article that indeed counted weekends as time off.  This is, by no means, the worst distortion of F 9/11. It is simply representative of the kind of intellectual dishonesty throughout.

In 2002, a full year after 9/11, Moore claimed in a TV interview that Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. Yet, in his movie, he jumps all over Bush because Moore's hero, Richard Clarke, allowed Saudi and Bin Laden family members to return overseas. What about innocent until proven guilty? Error #1 in the movie - those people left AFTER the airspace was reopened not before as claimed in the movie and they were interviewed by the FBI contrary to claims in the movie (source: 9/11 commission).

The 6 degrees of separation stuff really comes into play when Moore tries to use the Carlyle group connection to tie Bush, Bin Laden, and the Saudi Royals.  This is akin to arguing that if you have stock in Exxon and Bin Laden has stock in Exxon that you two are tied at the hip.  Newsweek has a pretty good article debunking a lot of that nonsense.  One has to wonder at the gullibility of people who buy into the oil connections alleged here.  Are there really people out there that think there is some vast conspiracy between the Bush family, the Saudi royals and Bin Laden? Apparently it's a conspiracy so vast that the 9/11 commission, which investigated into these kinds of connections in exhaustive detail, must be part of it and covering it all up.

Which brings us to Moore's other premise which is that essentially unnecessary American wars are started by elitist rich white men whose own sons are safely insulated from the action while the poor and downtrodden of America are left to fight it out.  In the film, Moore is sympathetic to the poor underclass who gets sucked into the rich man's wars. This is an absurd argument given that our military force is all volunteer.  Moore plays with people's emotions while hoping to get viewers to forget that most jobs in the United States have particular demographics involved.  Ever looked at the socio-economic background of most fire fighters? Or police officers? Should the "rich elites" of the world have their children assigned to be policemen or firemen?  Somehow I suspect Michael Moore would be quite pleased if the government were there to assign everyone what their job should be. But in a free society, people are free to choose what they want to do.

All of which brings us back to a fairly basic problem with the film: It has no point. It's just a long pointless diatribe. It's criticism without alternatives.  Moore, who opposed US action in Afghanistan and claimed it was all for an oil pipeline anyway, later in the film argues that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. Well which is it? Serious people have to make serious decisions. If Moore had had his way, the Taliban would still be in power and so would Saddam.  This is a good thing? Can anyone honestly say that we're not better off with Saddam and the Taliban gone?

Personally, I don't think Moore really cares that much about these issues. I think it's about the money. He says outrageous things (such as once saying to the former Mayor of New York that he doesn't see why Americans think of Terrorism as a "big deal" as we're more likely to get struck by lightning than to die in a terrorist attack) to raise controversy and awareness for his books and films.  The difference between Moore and any other obnoxious hyperopinionated ideologue is that Moore happens to be a pretty talented film maker. 

As time goes on, I am sure there will be collections of distortions from his film listed on the net just like there was for his other "documentary" Bowling for Columbine.  But I suspect that like last time, Moore will get away with his propaganda largely unscathed because so many people want to believe what he says.  After all, the terrorist group Hezbola has endorsed it and hopes to distribute it as far as it can. That really says it all, doesn't it?

Interesting Links:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5251769/site/newsweek/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/
http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/k/k-misc/king062704.htm
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/

Interesting Statistics:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html
(Iraq only exports ~$7 billion annually. Any argument that the war in Iraq was to get Iraq's oil represents a profound ignorance of global economics. Iraq simply isn't valuable enough to justify going to war there to steal its oil).

Let me start off with admissions that 1) I am a registered user of Konfabulator and 2) I work at Stardock which makes DesktopX (www.desktopx.net) which if there's a Windows version of Konfabulator would be Konfabulator's primary competiton.

Arlo has shown real poise and restraint. Much more than I would be able to show if roles were reversed. So let me tell you why I think it's so crappy for Apple to do this:

It's gratiutious.

Apple isn't going to sell more copies of MacOS 10.4 because of Dashboard or at least not enough to justify screwing over one of its most innovative developers.  Apple harming its ISVs ultimately harms Mac users and Apple itself in the long run.  Konfabulator got a LOT of media coverage that the Mac otherwise wouldn't have received. When third parties thrive on a platform and make innovative things, it helps everyone.  Believe me, no one was more conscious of just how much media exposure Konfabulator got than me. But it was media exposure that put the Mac in a good light.

Konfabulator is not $200. It's $25.  For any Mac user interested in extending their environment with widgets, $25 is nominal.  It helps build up third parties who might be able to grow and do even more innovative things in the future. It helps build more user communities.

But now Apple is squelching that.  Will it "kill" Konfabulator? No. I'm sure Arlo will be able to extend Konfabulator to appeal to users who need "more" than what's built into MacOS X. But it is going to take away a lot of "low hanging fruit" sales.

And to what end? What exactly does Apple gain by adding in Dashboard? Can anyone who tends to upgrade their MacOS versions anyway honestly say that Dashboard is going to make them more likely to do it given that the upgrades are typically >$100?  Let's face it, most of us would get Tiger anyway and if not Tiger, the one after it. 

It's just a gratuitious slap in the face not just to Arlo but to ALL ISVs.  With Sherlock it was an anomaly. With Dashboard, it's a pattern. Make something that is remotely unique and innovative and watch out, Apple may just throw it into the OS.  In the long run, it hurts the Mac and it's just shameful business.

Now, read a counter argument here: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator

 

Apple has announced the next generation of MacOS X called Tiger and it includes a new feature called "Dashboard". But this time, no need for Mac envy. PC users can do essentially everything in Dashboard -- and MUCH more today with DesktopX.

Check out this article on JoeUser.com about how Apple's Dashboard is (ahem) inspired by Konfabulator. And if you don't have DesktopX, get it and check out the widget library.

To be honest, at Stardock we've long considered people like Arlo Rose (who works on Konfabulator) as kindred spirits. When Apple announced Dashboard, which meant that they were essentially going to rip off one of their most innovative ISVs, I felt irritation towards Apple.  Apple claims to be incredibly innovative but in reality what they tend to do is find original concepts and then make them much more mainstream and polished.  This was the case with the GUI, the mouse, and other Apple "inventions".

And so we see the same thing with Dashboard. What it looks like to me is that Apple looked at one of its ISVs and saw something cool and decided to lift the whole thing and throw it into their next version. They even call these new things "widgets" which is particularly appalling. Konfabulator deserves credit for popularizing the term widget to represent mini-applications that exist on the desktop.  DesktopX was arguably the first program to actually put mini-applications on the desktop but it referred to them as objects.  Only in DesktopX 2, which came out in 2003, did DesktopX add "widgets" (which differ from objects in that they run in their own memory space -- they're .EXE's whereas objects are .dxpacks that run within the DesktopX environment).

Allegedly, when Steve Jobs was confronted about this, he wrote: "Excuse me, but Mac OS 9 had desktop Widgets long before Konfabulator did. Apple was the first to use the term Widgets as well. We never complained when the Konfabulator guys "ripped off Apple" and I think its a bit unfair for them to be claiming we ripped them off now. "(see full thread here).  Sorry but what a load of crap.

MacOS 9 had nothing like Konfabulator in there and if it used the term "widget" it certainly didn't use them in any sense that Dashboard/Konfabulator/DesktopX use the term.  This is precisely one of the reasons why I have no interest in writing code for that platform. For all the grief Microsoft gets for ripping off their developers (and yes, Microsoft is guilty of this too but it seems much more friendly to ISVs overall) it's amazing that more attention isn't paid to Apple's total disregard of its ISVs. Konfabulator isn't the first victim. What about Sherlock? A blatant copy off of Watson IMO.

There does, however, seem to be a debate on who can make the great "innovation" claim here.  Arlo Rose claims in his journal that Konfabulator was the first to make it possible for end users to easily create mini-applications on their desktop.  That's not quite untrue. There were calculators, mail checkers, CPU meters, calendars, etc. for DesktopX long before Konfabulator came out -- all made by end users without having to do anywhere near as much techie-ability as Konfabulator requires. And before DesktopX there was Litestep which required being a techie but still allowed users to create desktop modules.  But what Konfabulator did do was raise the bar on quality.  Stardock made DesktopX and just put it out there and waited for its skinning community to do neat things with it. That was a mistake because what mostly got made for DesktopX was eye candy stuff.

By contrast, Konfabulator came out from the start with a series of highly polished, useful, mini-applications. Konfabulator had laser-beamed precisely what it was about.  Meanwhile, Stardock treated DesktopX as this big technology environment that could do tons of things but provided few useful examples. The appointment widget you see here is an example of the type of widget Konfabulator came with.

Where Konfabulator had a finely tuned goal, DesktopX meandered with being able to build desktops AND objects. It was trying to be all things to all people and run on Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0 to boot.

Early DesktopX themes looked more like toys (here's one from early 2000, is it trying to be a shell replacement?). But as the mail checker screenshot shows, DesktopX also allowed for useful "objects" to be made that required no programming on the part of the object maker.

As hardware evolved and more users moved to Windows 2000 and later Windows XP, DesktopX continued to evolve.

None of this takes anything away from Konfabulator mind you. Konfabulator is a great program on the Mac and it really is very innovative.  But it wasn't the first at delivering user-created mini-apps to the desktop, DesktopX precedes it and it's likely that something else out there precedes DesktopX. What I'm getting at is that this concept isn't new, or revolutionary. What we have seen is the evolution of a concept that is quite old.

For DesktopX isn't without its own inspirations.  The whole DesktopX concept was inspired by IBM's OpenDoc desktop initiative that never got off the ground.  In 1996, IBM invited me to Austin Texas to demonstrate what would have been OS/2 Warp 5 (Warp 4 was in beta at this point and they were planning the true follow-up to it for 1998 which eventually got canned).  This would be OS/2 Warp 5 was to have a full OpenDoc based desktop in which end users, using REXX for their scripting language would be able to make use of OpenDoc parts and put them together easily to put mini-applications on the desktop.  The example I was shown included a printer that showed itself printing (animated) and if it ran out of ink would visually show you. The printer wasn't icon size but rather could be any size you wanted it to be. Other examples were clocks, stock tickers, calculators, and schedulers. What IBM wanted to do was take icons to "the next level" by blurring the line between icons and applications.  Keep in mind, this is 1996, 3 years before DesktopX's first betas would show up and long before Konfabulator would see the light of day.  IBM had the idea, they just weren't able to get it together into a commercial product.  DesktopX did.

But it took Konfabulator to really do it right -- in terms of polish, presentation, and focus. When Stardock was developing DesktopX 2, much more attention was put on creating sample objects that would show off what DesktopX could do. There was, admitted, considerable frustration that Konfabulator was getting a great deal of press for doing things DesktopX had been doing for years (though with uglier looking objects). Fully animated MP3 players were made by artists from the very beginning for instance but often felt kludgy and unpolished. But with DesktopX 2, Stardock would document things better. It would put out objects that would show what DesktopX could do. And it would add its own form of widget support where now users could export their objects as .EXEs that would run on your computer as any other program as long as DesktopX was installed somewhere.

   

Examples of DesktopX widgets created by Stardock. Konfabulator proves that better marketing trumps being first.

Getting back to the point, innovation rarely belongs to a single source. We are all inspired from something. Innovation often involves taking a concept and moving it to the next level.  DesktopX is a very innovative product.  Konfabulator is a very innovative product.  Dashboard, however, is not. It is, from what I can see, a step back from Konfabulator but at the same time does enough that it'll really take the wind out of Konfabulator's sales (pun intended in hindsight). What galls me is how aggressively Apple protects even the most suspect of "innovations". 

Given Apple's Dashboard, it'll be hard to take any future Apple complaints that someone "stole" their idea seriously.  Because at the end of the day, Apple is just like most other large software companies, they'll borrow, beg, and steal wherever they can to make their products better. Which isn't a bad thing unless you're touting yourself as being uniquely innovative.

Related Articles: Konfabulator vs. DesktopX

Update 9/2005: Konfabulator gets saved from the jaws of doom by Yahoo who then discovers a month later that Microsoft is going to include support for "gadgets" in the next version of Windows. Oh what a tangled web.