This issue occasionally comes up and will almost certainly come up again in the future. That is, how does one go about getting something they've written on the home page of JoeUser.com.

There is no simple answer to this. Instead, the best I can do is provide some general tips on two basic things: a) How the feature system works and How to make a good article.

How the feature system works today

Right now JoeUser.com hasn't even officially been launched. We've been tidying up features here and there and figuring out things like the revenue model so that the site will be self-sustaining.

The way the featured article system is designed to work in the future is that articles that get a lot of points via "insightful" or "interesting". ratings in a short amount of time will automatically get featured. Each user has their own access level. There are 9 of them between Citizen (1) and Admin (9). The higher the access you have, the more points your "insightful" rating gives. As time goes on, users will move up the ladder in access. Access increases are given by admins. Users like Bakerstreet, Stevenadlous, Jeblackstar and others have already moved up from citizen to "Power user" (1 to 2). Eventually there will be enough users with high access that the aforementioned system will be able to be put into place.

In the meantime, articles are featured by me manually. I don't make any claims of objectivity. I feature articles based on what I think other people will find interesting. The goal, after all, is to attract more people to the site. Based on the phenomenal growth of this site it seems to be working reasonably well so far.

Good writing suggestions

Each day dozens of new articles get written. I don't have time to read them all. So here are some quick tips:

• Make titles that are descriptive. Many articles get passed by because they have titles like "Thoughts" or "Another day" or whatever. The first step to getting featured is getting someone who can feature your article to choose it in the first place to read which means having an article title that is descriptive.
• Use the sub-header. If you want to have a clever article title that isn't descriptive, then use the sub-header to describe what the article is about.
• Write about something specific. Lots of articles I read here meander all over the place and it's not clear what they're supposed to be about. Remember, you can always write several different blog entries rather than have one giant one each day.
• Formatting. I can't tell you how many times I've read something really good only to balk at featuring it because it was unreadable. Wacky font choices and other poor formatting choices can make something visually difficult to read.
• Paragraphs. Paragraphs are your friend. Use them. It's amazing how many people will write a single gigantic article. Doesn't matter how good it is, break up your article every few sentences based on context.
• Don't alienate the featurer. This is the one place where bias does play a role. There are people who write things that are so far out there that I tend to just not read what they write. You may be certain that the media is "government controlled" or that "Bush was behind 9/11" or that the "Democrats are putting drugs in the water." Feel free to write about whatever you want. But I reserve the right to not visit blogs that routinely write what seems crazy to me. Sorry, there's just too much to go through and I would agree that we're all poorer off by not checking in occasionally to see if something more mainstream has popped in there.
• Same as above but in terms of personally attacking me. I'm amazed at the energy some people put into their blogs in attacking me personally. To what end? We're providing you with a free blog. Sure, some of my articles may offend you. They are, afterall, designed to be provocative. I turn up the "gamma" when I write in an effort to make the article more interesting. But the sheer volume of people who write blogs that insult me personally is not constructive. I just end up not reading those blogs which again, because of the way the featuring system works, means those articles won't get featured. Sorry, I'm human. I don't like to read people calling me the Gastapo commander or a "liberal freak" or a "right wing kook" anymore than anyone else does so I avoid those sites. 

So there are some basic tips. I try to spend a few minutes each evening looking for things to feature. The more stuff other peopel write, the less stuff I have to write.

 

On May 4 the judging for the first event begins. That event, Most Minimalistic WindowBlinds visual style, will be judged by 5 judges. One from deviantART, one from Neowin, 2 from Nullsoft, and 3 from Stardock. If you have a minimalistic WindowBlinds skin you are working on, get it in before May 4.

Odds are, unless you regularly run anti-Spyware software, your computer is full of it. Not only does it invade your privacy by hijacking your web browser without your knowledge, throwing up pop-up ads, and reporting your activities to companies, it can slow your computer down and make it unstable.

This article as Joeuser.com talks about the growing problem of Spyware and how, thanks to legitimate companies bundling it and distributing it, it is financing a whole new Internet business model at the expense of unwary users.

Okay, based on working with people who had problems with BootSkin 1.05, we have put out a version 1.05A. If you have previously had problems with BootSkin, please try this version and let us know if it solves your problems.

BootSkin is a program that safely lets you change your Windows XP boot screens. The problems we've been mentioning actually highlight BootSkin's safety -- no matter how badly a boot screen is made, you can always get back to Safe mode and recover. By contrast, other boot screen programs patch your Windows XP kernel and if something goes wrong there, well you can imagine. BootSkin doesn't modify any system files. Instead, it takes the form of a boot screen driver.

In 2000 Stardock was presented with an opportunity. It was near the height of the dot-coms and one of those dot-coms recognized a fundamental truth about WindowBlinds: It had the ability to fully control what was presented by the Windows GUI.  So not only could WindowBlinds change the look and feel of your Windows GUI (title bars, push buttons, borders, etc.). But it could add new content. And one of these dot-coms came to us with a fairly straight forward proposition -- integrate advertisements into the Windows GUI and you could make big bucks.  We turned them down.

While lots of money is always appealing, we did not want to be the company that made it possible for advertisers to take over your desktop. But that was before spyware really took off. 

In the post-dot com collapse, advertising has lost much of its value but if companies could advertise without having to be on an actual website, they could still make money. And that's where spyware has come in.  What is spyware? Odds are you have some on your computer. In fact, odds are you have a lot of Spyware on your computer. Spyware are various programs that manage to get themselves installed on your computer, usually without you knowing it. They sit there quietly informing their patrons what you are doing on your computer. Maybe they'll just report what websites you visit. Maybe they'll send back what programs you use. Maybe they'll list what songs you listen to. Who knows. Different programs spy on different things. Some of them will hijack your web browser so that you end up going to different websites than you intend to. Or maybe they'll pop up an advertisement randomly on your screen. 

What they definitely do, besides invade your privacy, is cause all kinds of stability and performance issues on your computer. A couple of weeks ago I ended up having my system brought to its knees simply from having visited a website that used a vulnerability in Internet Explorer to install dozens of Spyware programs onto my computer. It took the better part of the day to get them off. They're as bad as viruses to remove and most anti-virus software won't remove them.

The program I've come to rely on is called Adaware. It'll scan your computer and remove much of the Spyware. If you haven't ever run one of these programs, you'll probably be shocked at a) how much of this crap has gotten onto your computer and how much it has slowed your computer down.

But that's not the worst part of it. Legitimate companies are increasingly putting Spyware in their software. The temptation is great. Stardock estimated that it could have generated between $600,000 to $800,000 last year in additional revenue by bundling Spyware with its software. It has rejected all proposals because it doesn't need to make money that way. Stardock generates its revenue by selling its software. On-line, you'll see on some tech forums people complain that Stardock is "greedy" because it charges money to buy full versions of some of its products. I would say this method is much better than the alternative. Because increasingly, "free" software and "free" services aren't really free anymore. They claim to be free but they put this stuff on your computer.

WinCustomize, for example, is paid for by the sales of software and subscriptions. But the revenue it receives is nothing compared to some of the other sites in its market that now bundle spyware with their downloads. As I make my rounds on the net, I see the trend moving forward -- more and more sites, more and more products are moving to Spyware. Why? Because its victims usually have no idea that they're even victims. The distributors of Spyware can make millions of dollars while most people are totally unaware that they are funding it.

The net result is that we are seeing a mini-resurgence of the Dot-Com era. Entire companies and industries and even business models are being funded by Spyware. Personally, I hope Microsoft updates Windows so that this junk can't get installed on your computer without your knowledge. It's a serious security issue. People shouldn't have things running on their computer that they haven't given their okay to. But one has to wonder what will happen to the industry and the products and services which have come to rely on it.

For this article I scanned one of my laptops. I have never intentionally installed any Spyware on my computer. These are programs that installed themselves after having been surfing the net. And I don't frequent porn or warez sites.

In game development subtlety has to take a back seat to directness. This is particularly true in algorithms where many developers with dither around trying to tweak their algorithms to the nth degree while the more successful ones will come with more straight forward approaches that do the job.

That isn't to say directness is superior to subtlety. It's just that the successful developer knows when the situation calls for subtlety and when the situation calls for directness. The same is true in diplomacy. Diplomats tend to love to dither with nuanced approaches. Lakhdar Brahimi seems typical. He's the new special UN envoy to Iraq. In an interview, he said that there is never a situation where military force is preferable to diplomacy.  Really?

I've often wondered just how knowledgeable on human history diplomats like Lakhdar Brahimi really are.  In May 1941, Great Britain was faced with a nightmare scenario. Germany had overrun essentially all of Europe. France had signed an armistice and was effectively out of the war. Hitler was making peace soundings.  Should Britain have accepted Hitler's offer?  After all, peace is always preferable to war isn't it? At least according to Lakhdar Brahimi. There was no diplomatic scenario one could envision in which Hitler's gains could be turned back.  France's official government was now on Germany's side at that point. The United States was still locked in isolationism. Luckily for the world, Britain was led by Churchill and not Lakhdar Brahimi. Churchill lacked the subtlety of a Brahimi. He saw things more "black and white". He recognize that there are bad people out there. And bad people do bad things for reasons that civilized people can't understand.

World War II wasn't some misunderstanding that could have been avoided. Hitler wanted to exterminate large swaths of the population and preferred to use military force to do so. The only way to defeat Nazi Germany was with military force -- not diplomacy. 

Fast forward to today and based on the words of UN diplomats and the chattering classes in some parts of Europe and you would think we had reached the end of history. If only Israel was more reasonable. If only the Americans would negotiate harder with the insurgents in Iraq.  If only Americans would understand "why they hate you". But that is all wishful thinking because ultimately, there are bad people out there that not only are willing to murder as many people as they can to achieve their objectives, but murder is their preferred mechanism for reaching those objectives.

There is a tendency by some to believe that it is only Americans and in particular the Bush administration that uses violence to achieve objectives. They believe that the opponents of the United States are simply misunderstood and left with no alternatives. What they don't realize is that these opponents come from a totally different way of thinking. To a secularist, killing is abhorrent because they believe deep down that death is the end of the line.  But to the Islamo-fascists, death is merely another step in a long journey and hence do not fear killing or being killed as a secularist might. When dealing with people like Lakhdar Brahimi they have a huge advantange because they believe in the most direct of strategies possible -- violence.  Whereas Lakhdar Brahimi has already forsworn using violence to achieve any of his objectives.

What people need to wake up to is that there are bad people out there. Lots of them. And if you think Bush or Cheney or whoever your American boogeyman is, they're angels compared to what we're facing over in the middle east. The terrorists would not think twice about exterminating every man, woman, and child in Europe and the United States had they the means. Luckily, they don't. Our job, is to make sure that they don't get the means. And one way of doing that is to to to have local allies devoted towards a peaceful, democratic culture that is more interested in improving the lives of their own people rather than snuffing out those they hate.

That is why people like Lakhdar Brahimi are not terribly helpful in Iraq right now. Hard work has to be done. Fallujah has to be taken and it will probably require the most direct of approaches to be taken -- violence. Lots of it. Brahimi needs to understand that we're in a part of the world that values strength over nuanced approaches. Courage over subtlety. Power over compassion.

History has shown, regrettably, over and over, that in order for diplomacy to work, both parties have to be committed to a diplomatic solution. The insurgents in Iraq are, generally, not interested in diplomacy.

WindowBlinds 4.3 is nearly ready. One of the new features is skin changing morphing. That is where going from one skin to another now smoothly morphs into the other.

Here is a link to a video that displays it. You'll need Windows Media Player 9 to view it.

Some of you may already knwo about this but it was new to me - Dos Box, a program that is designed to emulate a real DOS box so you can play games and such that were made in the DOS days under XP.

BootSkin is a freeware program that safely changes your Windows 2000 and Windows XP boot screens. Rather than patching your XP kernel, BootSkin does it via a boot screen driver. That way, if some boot screen isn't compatible with your computer, you can boot up in safe mode and turn it off (rather than trying to figure out how to restore your Windows kernel back to normal).

There are hundreds of boot screens available. Version 1.05 associates the .bootskin file with BootSkin the program so that you can just double click on one and have it installed. IF you have any problems with BootSkin, please respond here with your system info (video card, CPU, OS, video driver version) so that it can be resolved. The goal is to have a program that works universally on any configuration (it works on all of Stardock's test lab machines fine as well as with our external beta group).

For the past 3 years our company has relied on the Xerox Phaser 850DX. It's a fantastic color printer that makes use of "solid ink". Solid ink is marketing talk for wax. You put these cool little blocks of wax and off you go. No mess, incredibly easy. Very low maintainence.

The quality of the Phaser 850DX from 2000 was really good for the time. Screenshots, which were our big use for it, looked very good, for the time. Over the years though, it has developed a minute leak that caused images to have too much magenta in them.  We were so satisfied with the Xerox Phaser 850DX that we naturally wanted to look at getting their "latest/greatest" version.

So 4 or so years have passed and so we bought the 8400. It's about $1000 and it prints much much faster than the older version. It has an even easier setup than the 850DX did and a few other ergonomic enhancements. But on the downside, the print quality is...exactly the same. It's just faster.

I was really hoping it would print even sharper images. And so in that department, we're still looking for a printer that isn't an injket that can print screenshots on regular paper that are magazine quality. The 8400 does it pretty close and I'm sure most new users of it would be suitably impressed. But I was really expecting it to have made some progress in the image quality department in the past few years. Good quality, but no better than 4 years ago.

So do I recommend it? Yes. It prints incredibly fast. It's much cheaper to maintain than a laser or injket printer. It's very low hassle. And it's definitely good enough for most people's needs in the quality department either. But don't expect magazine-like quality from it. It's pretty close but not quite there.