Eugenia at OSNews.com has a great editorial talking  about software patents and more specifically, talking about Apple's latest patent.

At first glance, Apple is patenting transparent windows. Luckily for Apple, Stardock doesn't do software patents since the first OS to have transparent windows when dragging them (for example) was WindowFX on Windows.

But that's not what Apple is patenting and a lot of people have gotten up in arms needlessly.  In reality, Apple is patenting using transparency to visually cue the user that a window hasn't been used in awhile.

But Eugenia's point is that large companies are starting to really abuse the patent system in ways that could really stifle innovation as we go into the future. That's because the patent office is regularly quite clueless in what patents it grants.

And if you're a small company, forget it. Patents can be useless. That's one reason Stardock doesn't bother with patents. Luckily for Microsoft, for example, the way WindowBlinds skins the Windows GUI wasn't patented or XP would have had to either license the patent or find another way (like the method eFX used to skin which was totally different).  Small companies can't realistically make use of software patents because they rarely can afford the litigation to enforce their rights.

And so the net result is that large companies end up having a ridiculous number of patents.

As Eugenia points out - the US is shooting its own industry in the foot by having such a lax patent system.

Read her article at the link below.

It's now time for another episode of: WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER PUT YOUR IMAGE ON THE INTERNET.

(see link below)

Another excellent satire over at Right Wing News. Here's an excerpt:

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: Mr. Lincoln, you took us to war two years ago and said it was to save the union.

Lincoln: It still is.

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: And yet - and I’ll put this text in the record - there’s not a single reference in this speech to saving the union.

Lincoln: It’s implied.

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: Not a single reference. Isn’t it a fact that you said in the speech, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”?

Lincoln: Yes, in the first sentence.

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: And isn’t it a fact that you say, and again I quote, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”?

Lincoln: Yes.

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: Isn’t it a fact that you were referring to slavery?

Lincoln: Well, yes. But I also said, second paragraph, that they died, quote, “that nation might live.”

Mr. Ben-Gorelick: Yes, but what nation, sir? Clearly, your real goal is to abolish slavery. You took us to war under false pretense, didn’t you, sir?

 

Read all of it by clicking the link below.

So I'm hanging out on the various skin sites like I always do and it hit me. We're boring. We suck. Where's the heart? The problem isn't that we're boring and heartless. It's just that it's easier to just post news. So that's it. I'm done. I'm going to try to occasionally write a skinning blog item here on WinCustomize and just talk about cool computer customization.

DesktopX stuff

This week was E3 which is the big game show. I normally got to it but I'm too busy finishing up The Political Machine and Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy to go. Part of that is negotiating contracts. What a pain those are.

Anyway, why am I mentioning games? Because in our games, particularly The Political Machine, the entire game interface is done with DesktopX. That's right, the game reads in .dxpacks.

We use DesktopX to actually put it all together and then the game, using DirectX 9, reads them in and puts them on the screen.

Think about it. DesktopX lets you deal with .PNG files that can be positioned relative to other "objects" with full alpha blending. Different states can be used. Font information is in there, etc.  It allows us to build these screens much much faster than we otherwise should. And they look so good.  The Political Machine will be at a store near you later this summer.

Speaking of DesktopX, I made a video of how easy it is to create stuff with it.  We're about to release a product called Impression Creator that is basically DesktopX Pro with a different name to target software developers.  Know those incredibly ugly Auto-run programs? The ones that come up when you put the CD in? That's the first impression a program gives you. Most companies, particularly smaller ones, don't have time to develop something nice. But imagine with DesktopX Pro, er I mean "Impression Creator" a company could create a really slick menu program in literally minutes. I put one together in this video.

We put up a new build of DesktopX 2 tonight. It's still in beta. The whole graphics engine is being redone.

Not that most people even realize this. People go crazy that Microsoft showed off a build of Longhorn that has shadows and transparencies and transitions! Wow! Amazing. It's not like WindowFX has done this for the past 3 years.  And now that DesktopX is giving Windows the kind of abilities that Mac users get with Quartz combining with what XAML in Longhorn will be able to do (DesktopX will even support XAML eventually) do you think that DesktopX will get that kind of coverage? Obviously not. It was probably a mistake to ever have a version of DesktopX at $19.95, people see the price and think it's a toy. They don't realize that under DesktopX is DirectGUI, the world's most powerful third party Windows graphics engine for the desktop that integrates seamlessly into Windows.

WindowBlinds trolls

This week I battled trolls from around the world. There seems to be this inherent hatred of WindowBlinds by some people. But that shouldn't be surprised. Hating stuff is "cool". Didn't you know that? If you want to level up in the Nerd class you have to say something "sucks". Only then will you be able to make use of the +2 Sword of Geekdom.

Most of these people act as if uxtheme (the bundled XP skinning mechanism) was somehow ordained by a higher power. You know, I wonder how people would feel if they learned uxtheme were just WindowBlinds, stripped down with features and bundled in with the OS with the marketing goal of getting people to upgrade to the "full" version?  That's not what happened but let me be clear: If there had been no WindowBlinds, there'd be no uxtheme on XP as we know it.  UXTheme on XP is basically a lite version of WindowBlinds. They work almost the same way. If uxtheme were called WindowBlinds lite, these same trolls would be patting us on the back for our marketing ingenuity. And as a practical matter, that's what UXTheme is.

But some people have taken the intentional limitations of uxtheme as being somehow a feature. It's like saying "I like Photoshop LE better than the full Photoshop because its limitations keep me focused." Right.

This really came up this week during the GUI Olympics. On various sites the winners of the GUI Olympics week 1 (1 of 6 weeks of winner announcements) were announced and the same old "Too bloated" came up. Not that the critics run these skins. Not that they acknowledge that any feature can be turned off pretty much. It's just rationalization by people who think $20 for a product they'll use over and over and over for months or years is a lot of money as they stand in line to pay $8 to see Troy.

After all, who wants to change their progress animations when those great Windows 95-era animations look so classy right? Because the nerdlings can say "Did you know that I was in the Chicago beta back in late 1994 when they first put in those progress animations! This October will be the 10 year anniversary of those great animations! It's sacrilege to pay $20 for software that, amongst other things, can change that!"

Oh to Boot

Meanwhile, we still see problems with BootSkins. It works for most people. But not everyone. We have no idea why. We can't reproduce it. But we have a conundrum. There are two groups of people who have problems. The people who can't get 1.05 to work but had it working on 1.01 and the people who couldn't get 1.01 to work but could get 1.05. We're stumped.  We also have the true-color high resolution BootSkin done. Or at least, as done as it's going to get. We've basically concluded that it's just not worth the effort to finish it. So we're going to probably throw it on Object Desktop as a permanent "beta" that users can give a whirl. It works for probably around 80% of people and the other 20% will get a blue screen or something (don't worry, remember, BootSkin doesn't mess with your system files so you just have to boot up in safe mode or go back to your last good configuration and voila, you're fine).

So that's about it for this week. Next week I'll be talking a bit about new sections on WinCustomize.com and SkinStudio 4.3. I'd like to get a Rainlendar section going on WinCustomize.com as we think it's gotten to the point where it's ready for the big time. But we'll need to get the developers of that app to heavily support the section (i.e. drive traffic to its section so that it doesn't die on the vine).

...is on Drengin...

Let us know if this takes care of all your problems.

The Flame Warriors website is an awesome tool. It's not just funny and amusing. It's really quite on the spot. Lots of people try to say that we're all different. But are we really? In reality, we all tend to conform to a very finite number of basic personality traits. And to that end, The Flame Warriors page provides a service.

I've been in on-line communities now for 17 years. I was the Sysop (admin) on a whole set of BBSes back when I was a teenager. And from then on up, I've come to realize that the same people keep showing up over and over. The handles change but it's basically the same type of stuff over and over again.

Of course, even I have a stereo-type.  I am the Tireless Rebutter. I'm not so much that here on JoeUser because, well, here I'm all powerful so I take on more of the role of The Admin. But you strip away my petty self-delusions of grandier and more importantly my admin power and I'm just another user who has one main weapon: I type 120 words per minute and so I can crank out the content very very fast.

But here on JoeUser, because it has more political discussions than most of the sites I hang out on...well let me clarify, it has more political discussions from people whose...um... how do you put this nicely, experience in reading up on history, politics, and knowledge acquisition in general is...more...limited...I've run into types I haven't seen as much.

But have no fear, the Flame Warrior author has put together this one: Pinko. And holy cow does it represent quite a few people on JoeUser.  I'll be honest, I don't like most pinkos. I think most of them are ignorant. The reason I conclude that they're ignorant is because their writings almost universally lack any basic level of...well perspective. I'm not thinking of any one person btw. There's a whole range of people that fall into that. 

For instance, anyone that considers actions in World War II as "ancient history" would fall into that. It's like they're throwing up their hands and saying "Hey, I realize you've spent years reading history and I haven't even the foggiest idea what you're talking about so I'm going to try to take historical knowledge on human beings off the table by declaring anything that happened before 2001 as irrelevant."

Pinkos are really just one type of kook. There are right-wing kooks too. They both have the same thing in common in my experience: They are people who..um...who believe that they can read some websites on the net and "Catch up" on 20 years of having not learned about geo-politics, world history, anthropology, etc. 

I usually don't have much patience for those people and my comments tend to be pretty acid-like.  I'm not the sharpest stick in the pile by any means. What I do have going for me is that I've spent the past decade on an almost daily basis reading up on many of the things I discuss here. That puts me at a real disadvantage to someone who's spent many decades doing that kind of thing.  But compared to say the 40 year old man or woman who's just "gotten into" "this stuff" in the past year or so and gets their (ahem) "knowledge" on these things from propaganda websites and email lists, I would say I have a real advantage over them.

But the Internet is the great equalizer. I can walk over to my home library and pick up one of any number of books that go into many of the topics that I write about (hey, I'm just a bloody engineer, writing's just a hobby so I stick to writing about things that interest me after all). Meanwhile, Sally Jane can turn on the computer in her trailer that she's had for about a year, read through the email telling her how the whole attack on Afghanistan was just a ploy to build a big oil pipeline and tear me a new one on my article.  After all, we're equals. That's the nature of the beast.

I could clarify that I don't think all or even most left-wingers fall into the "Pinko" flame warrior. There's so many others to choose from!   

But look for the warning signs. 

Do religious people give you the creeps?

Do you find George W. Bush to be a crazy person yet are unable to come to a rational reason that most people would agree    with as to why?

Do you tend to play equate minor US trespasses as being the moral equivalence of real atrocities? ("Well sure Hitler murdered 12 million people in death camps but look what the US did to the Indians?", "Well sure, they cut his head off and threw his body in a road after putting the video out on TV but some American soldiers may have permanently damaged the self-esteem of dozens of Iraqi prisoners!").

Do you tend to consider your viewpoint more "enlightened" and that the only reason your views aren't carried out is because the average person is a "sheep" being "manipulated"? 

Do you believe that you know the real reason why the US did action X (war on terror, invaded Iraq, hosted the 1994 Olympic games) but those who disagree with you with their stated reasons that don't go with yours do so because they're "gullible".  After all, people like me supported the US invasion of Iraq and it had nothing to do with oil. It can't possibly be that my reasons are valid, it's that I'm just another right wing sheep that's been manipulated. For only you and your friends that know the real reason we went in there -- OIL of course. Your opponents are just too dumb -- which is amazing because these dumb people tend to be a lot more successful financially somehow...

These are, of course, just some of the warning signs. And Right-wingers have to be careful too. There is the Capitalista. Usually the guy who thinks that Europeans are a bunch of pathetic losers and thinks that "market forces" will take care of everything. If only we let the market take care of everything we could live in a perfect world....Yea. Right. A perfect world in which MEGA CORP. owns us as slavelings to work for "credits" to buy food and medicine from the company store so that we can live in company apartments. Well, I admit some people might like working at Microsoft but I'd rather there be other choices too which we wouldn't have if market forces had their way indefinitely.

So which one are you? Look for yourself.

So I'm hanging out on the various skin sites like I always do and it hit me. We're boring. We suck. Where's the heart? The problem isn't that we're boring and heartless. It's just that it's easier to just post news. So that's it. I'm done. I'm going to try to occasionally write a skinning blog item here on WinCustomize and just talk about cool computer customization.

DesktopX stuff

This week was E3 which is the big game show. I normally got to it but I'm too busy finishing up The Political Machine and Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy to go. Part of that is negotiating contracts. What a pain those are.

Anyway, why am I mentioning games? Because in our games, particularly The Political Machine, the entire game interface is done with DesktopX. That's right, the game reads in .dxpacks.

We use DesktopX to actually put it all together and then the game, using DirectX 9, reads them in and puts them on the screen.

Think about it. DesktopX lets you deal with .PNG files that can be positioned relative to other "objects" with full alpha blending. Different states can be used. Font information is in there, etc.  It allows us to build these screens much much faster than we otherwise should. And they look so good.  The Political Machine will be at a store near you later this summer.

Speaking of DesktopX, I made a video of how easy it is to create stuff with it.  We're about to release a product called Impression Creator that is basically DesktopX Pro with a different name to target software developers.  Know those incredibly ugly Auto-run programs? The ones that come up when you put the CD in? That's the first impression a program gives you. Most companies, particularly smaller ones, don't have time to develop something nice. But imagine with DesktopX Pro, er I mean "Impression Creator" a company could create a really slick menu program in literally minutes. I put one together in this video.

We put up a new build of DesktopX 2 tonight. It's still in beta. The whole graphics engine is being redone.

Not that most people even realize this. People go crazy that Microsoft showed off a build of Longhorn that has shadows and transparencies and transitions! Wow! Amazing. It's not like WindowFX has done this for the past 3 years.  And now that DesktopX is giving Windows the kind of abilities that Mac users get with Quartz combining with what XAML in Longhorn will be able to do (DesktopX will even support XAML eventually) do you think that DesktopX will get that kind of coverage? Obviously not. It was probably a mistake to ever have a version of DesktopX at $19.95, people see the price and think it's a toy. They don't realize that under DesktopX is DirectGUI, the world's most powerful third party Windows graphics engine for the desktop that integrates seamlessly into Windows.

WindowBlinds trolls

This week I battled trolls from around the world. There seems to be this inherent hatred of WindowBlinds by some people. But that shouldn't be surprised. Hating stuff is "cool". Didn't you know that? If you want to level up in the Nerd class you have to say something "sucks". Only then will you be able to make use of the +2 Sword of Geekdom.

Most of these people act as if uxtheme (the bundled XP skinning mechanism) was somehow ordained by a higher power. You know, I wonder how people would feel if they learned uxtheme were just WindowBlinds, stripped down with features and bundled in with the OS with the marketing goal of getting people to upgrade to the "full" version?  That's not what happened but let me be clear: If there had been no WindowBlinds, there'd be no uxtheme on XP as we know it.  UXTheme on XP is basically a lite version of WindowBlinds. They work almost the same way. If uxtheme were called WindowBlinds lite, these same trolls would be patting us on the back for our marketing ingenuity. And as a practical matter, that's what UXTheme is.

But some people have taken the intentional limitations of uxtheme as being somehow a feature. It's like saying "I like Photoshop LE better than the full Photoshop because its limitations keep me focused." Right.

This really came up this week during the GUI Olympics. On various sites the winners of the GUI Olympics week 1 (1 of 6 weeks of winner announcements) were announced and the same old "Too bloated" came up. Not that the critics run these skins. Not that they acknowledge that any feature can be turned off pretty much. It's just rationalization by people who think $20 for a product they'll use over and over and over for months or years is a lot of money as they stand in line to pay $8 to see Troy.

After all, who wants to change their progress animations when those great Windows 95-era animations look so classy right? Because the nerdlings can say "Did you know that I was in the Chicago beta back in late 1994 when they first put in those progress animations! This October will be the 10 year anniversary of those great animations! It's sacrilege to pay $20 for software that, amongst other things, can change that!"

Oh to Boot

Meanwhile, we still see problems with BootSkins. It works for most people. But not everyone. We have no idea why. We can't reproduce it. But we have a conundrum. There are two groups of people who have problems. The people who can't get 1.05 to work but had it working on 1.01 and the people who couldn't get 1.01 to work but could get 1.05. We're stumped.  We also have the true-color high resolution BootSkin done. Or at least, as done as it's going to get. We've basically concluded that it's just not worth the effort to finish it. So we're going to probably throw it on Object Desktop as a permanent "beta" that users can give a whirl. It works for probably around 80% of people and the other 20% will get a blue screen or something (don't worry, remember, BootSkin doesn't mess with your system files so you just have to boot up in safe mode or go back to your last good configuration and voila, you're fine).

So that's about it for this week. Next week I'll be talking a bit about new sections on WinCustomize.com and SkinStudio 4.3. I'd like to get a Rainlendar section going on WinCustomize.com as we think it's gotten to the point where it's ready for the big time. But we'll need to get the developers of that app to heavily support the section (i.e. drive traffic to its section so that it doesn't die on the vine).

According to PoliticalCompass.org I'm slightly left of center with a slight Libertarian bent. This would probably come as a surprise to some of the extreme left-wingers on JoeUser.com who think anyone who isn't an outright socialist is a "right wing kook".

So what makes me slightly left-wing according to this test? Easy. Consistency in viewpoints. I don't trust monopolies. My dislike of big government is not founded by libertarian values. I'm not a libertarian. It comes from the belief that monopolies are less responsive to the needs of individuals than entities in a competitive environment. So to the statement "the freer the market, the freer the people" I strongly disagree because you create a completely free market and you'll ultimately end up with an authoritarian corporate government instead. 

Similarly, companies won't keep the environment clean because they operate in a way that is only good for their stock holders, a belief I also think is wrong -- companies have an innate responsibility to society as well in my opinion.  All the questions along that line move to the left.

On the other hand, I am notoriously unsympathetic towards the poor because I know from experience that most people who are poor are poor because of their own fault (in the United States that is, I'm not talking generally on a world wide scale). But I don't feel that religion and morality are tied together even though I believe that faith based institutions have much to contribute to our society. Ultimately, I'm a utilitarian but on a more macro-scale. I like faith based institutions because we can all use all the help we can get from as many different sources as possible. But I don't think that faith based institutions are any better the secular based ones. 

And socially, while I mildly oppose gay marriage, I believe that what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their business.  I also have little patience for those who think race or class should determine anything at all. I don't care what the color of your skin is but what's inside (yes, I mean that literally, I want to harvest your organs! Okay, maybe not).  But even though I don't think race is a road block to success, I do believe that some cultures are inherently better than others. After all, I don't have to claim to be objective.

Overall I think this test is interesting but far far too limited in scope.  Consider this:

According to this chart, I'm to the LEFT of John Kerry and Carol Mosley Braun. I somehow doubt that.

Take the test at: http://www.politicalcompass.org/