I was doing an article today on the history of WindowBlinds skinning. And I firmly believe that the vocal "minimalistic skinsa re king" crowd have really done real harm to skinning. I say that because skin authors seem to have become so afraid of making anything that isn't "minimalistic" because not only will they not be appreciated for being creative and original, they're likely to get flamed by the "Minimastic" brigade.

Let me show you some skins from 1999 so you can see what I mean in terms of originality.

 

This is old but when was the last time you saw a skin that tried to look like something other than "Look, it's another generic GUI"? Or at least done reasonably well?

This is from 2000! Sure there's OS skins in here too but look at that Allend Bond skin. Or Dangeruss's skin.

This is from Shoggot. His title bar blade actually rotated (animated) when it was the active window and the blade stretched as you increased the size of the window. I can't even remember the last time someone made a good animated title bar. And it's so easy. It's just frames of animation. Some little glowing effect or SOMETHING other than the usual gradients that everyone seems fixated on.

I believe that the reason for the lack of creativity these days is because of the obsession with downloads combined with fatigue from being flamed by the critics who will look at a skin that took 2 weeks to make and shrug it off "I won't use that crap" simply because it's not Windows Luna (but red) or some skin that looks like a slightly more minimalistic version of Luna.

Here's one from DAK from Russia released FOUR years ago.

When was the last time you saw a skin that used animation this clever? This Matrix skin by Mercury was made 4 years ago.

 

These two skins from Dangeruss, which are going on 5 years in age, show what skinning is all about. Creative and yet outstanding quality. These are the kinds of skins WindowBlinds was made for artistic freedom to create cool and interesting looking things. Little touches like semi-transparent scrollbars (how often do you see that these days?) and captions on the title bar buttons.

Many skin authors seem to be skinning more for popularity rather than for themselves. Back before skinning was so popular, popularity wasn't an issue - there just weren't enough peopel using this stuff.  But now, skinning is not just popular, but with popularity comes..well criticism. The skins you see here took real work to make. But who wants to spend weeks on a skin only to have some anonymous user slam it because they think it's "gaudy".

I wish I had the talent to create good artwork like you see here because I would create "gaudy" skins (if these are "gaudy"). I would rather create a skin that is new and different than yet another "It's very much like Luna but the title bar is slightly smaller and it has a gradient..."  (not that I'm not guilty of that myself since those kinds of skins take less time and will get more downloads.

The skins you see here are available on WinCustomize.com in the WindowBlinds section. Just look at Dangeruss, Mercury, D.A.K. and Allen Bond if you, as a skin author, want to see how these skins were made or if you, as a skin user, want to try them out (of course, since they were made before XP, not all of xP will be skinned with them).

We often hear someone say "There's too much junk in the library!" We have a rating system on skins but what if you want to find the cream of the crop? Well, you would still need to look through the library to see what the best skins are.

..But another way would be to look at the skins that the admins picked as their favorites...

You can now, in a given library, sort by featured. This lets you look at just things the admins have played around with and thought were good enough to feature. They are, effectively, the admins picks.

In our upcoming game, The Political Machine, the candidates must occasionally do interviews with the press.  Coming up with questions is not that hard. Coming up with thoughtful answers is harder.  So we've decided to let users have a crack at it.

Here is our first batch of 5 questions. If you were a Presidential candidate and had to answer in less than say 500 words (i.e. BRIEF answers) how would you answer these questions? Also, answers cannot reference the current President (or "This administration") since we are not dealing with the current/party/person in office (both sides are "Challengers").

1) With the babyboomers heading towards retirement, many analysts believe that the social security system, as we know it, will collapse. What would you do, as President, to ensure the viability of Social Security?

2) The national debt has increased substantially in the past two years. A few years ago this country was running a modest surplus. Now we are running record deficits. As President, what are your thoughts about the national debt?

3) The poverty rate in the United States remains remarkably high. Given the great society programs of the 60s and 70s, it seems that the war on poverty has not been won. As President, what would you propose we do to help the poor in this country?

4) The war on drugs is nearings its third decade with no end in sight. Drug usage has hovered about the same but our prisons are filled with drug users and police report that a great deal of violent crime is the result of the illicit drug trade. As President, what would be your prescription to deal with drugs? Legalize them? More enforcement? More education? What?

5) With tragedies like the Columbine massacre, gun violence has really become a front and center issue for the American public. As President, what is your position on gun control?

It's funny because I debate all kinds of issues on the net. Political issues. Military history. Game industry issues and of course skinning issues.

But as a group, none of them compare to Style XP "advocates". I don't know why but we are quite regularly subjected to flames by their users on our news groups, forums, and even Download.com.

Let me give you a few examples:

Usenet thread

This is just one guy recently - but it's typical. If you look at his stuff, look at how LONG it is. And what is his alleged source of why he needs to attack us? Because I had the audacity to point out that Style XP just patches uxtheme.dll. He won't accept that. But if you read through it, you notice a pattern, his claims are the exact same claptrap Style XP advocates have gone with for years. It's as if there's a bunch of talking points.

But we'll see this kind of thing on forums ranging from Neowin to deviantART to people coming onto our own news server. It's not enough for them to bash WindowBlinds, they act like Style XP is some sort of great program that they're on a mission from above to sell to everyone.

They can't just use it, no they have to go out and trash our software. Nevermind that if it weren't for our software, uxtheme wouldn't likely exist in the first place.

I honestly can say that I advocate people try whatever they want and make their own choice. I say that because I feel pretty confident at this point that WindowBlinds is such a superior choice that the only reason not to use WindowBlinds for skinning would be price at which point free uxtheme patchers become preferable.

Which is what makes me suspect that many of these people who are so militant, so aggressive about making sure the world knows that "WindowBlinds sux" and "Style XP rulez" are people who are in denial. They paid $20 for something that patches parts of their OS and don't want to admit they made a poor purchasing choice. They don't want to admit that they could have gotten the same functionality (or virtually all of it) for free.

What gets me is when someone tries to accuse *us* of "bad mouthing" Style XP. There's nothing we've posted that is even remotely equivalent to TGT Soft's Style XP marketing document. Maybe these people can't accept that a company would so boldly write false statements like this (according to their document - updated for Style XP 2 so recent - no one else skins the Explorer task panels as one example).

It's incredibly frustrating as you can imagine.

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In many ways, JoeUser is an experiement. It is the only blog site on the Internet that combines the strengths of all the individual bloggers together. When you make a post or comment on someone blog, it is distributed across the thousands of blogs here on this site. And, because JoeUser.com is so popular, your article is likely to get picked up on search engines.

Which, needless to say, creates a temptation for abuse. People who intentionally try to humiliate others by taking advantage of these features.  After some discussion internally, we've decided how we're going to react to this.

1) You may NOT create attack articles about other individuals on this site with your blog site using the person's name or derivative of that name as part of the article title.

2) You should avoid criticizing other users of this blog, by name, in your articles if you have black listed or prevented them in some other way from commenting on your article. Generally speaking, it's cheesy to abuse other people in your article.

3) Related to #2, it IS OKAY to write a counter article. That is, if you disagree with someone else's article, you can certainly reference that article (linking to it is fine) and disagree with the article.

4) Debate the issue don't attack the person. I'm getting so sick of reading flame articles by people that are nothing but hate mongering against other people. I don't care if you think someone else is racist, homophobic, atheist, fanatically religious, whatever. It's irrelevant. If you disagree, then disagree. Explain why you disagree. But to just say "You're a racist" or "You're going to burn in hell" or some other nonsense is obnoxious. 

Bottom line: If you want your blog to be full of hatred towards someone else, then go away. We didn't put all this effort to let people's blogs get a lot of attention so that people could use it as a blunt instrument to attack other individuals by name.

One other note: I also get tired of those who think they have some first amendment right to heap personal abuse on people. You want to write a "I hate <insert person's name here>" articles, go make your own site. Whiney "You're a facist, you're censoring me" articles get old in a hurry.

JoeUser is meant to be a place where intelligent thoughtful people of ALL political persuasions can get together and talk about whatever they want. And they can't very well do that if they have to worry that some hate monger is going to write up a post entitled "<User X> is a jerk!" or whatever.

In The Political Machine we are creating a PC strategy game in which players run for President. But no game would be complete without your candidate having to go on TV and answer "tough" questions. Not only do these questions make the player have to answer real world questions, but they help make players understand why politicians "spin" the truth.

We've put together two editors that we use internally to build these TV interviews. The first one is called the Issue Editor. In it, we create political issues "Abortion", "Crime", "Healthcare", "The war on terror". Then we set whether Democrats, Independents, or Republicans are in favor of a given issue (a positive value) or against it (a negative value). The higher the number, the more strongly they feel about it.

Since it's a game, we focus purely on the two major political parties.

Here's an example (click to enlarge):

So first we come up with an interview (in this example it's a parody of "Nightline" called "NightTime" -- all our parodies are designed to be respectful, they're not charactertures). Then we come up with questions that they might ask.

From there, the player has a list of answers they can choose from.

We try to provide answers that are reasonable. However, we also provide unreasonable (funny) answers too. They don't have to use them. We also have answers that are based on the candidate's intelligence, charisma, etc. Players designing candidates have to pick and choose amongst the traits they want. If someone makes their candidate an idiot, they'll only have idiotic responses available to them to choose from.

Once the player chooses an answer, we then affect how their answer will affect their candidate's rating and that of those watching. Most of the time, we don't have answers affect the people's opinions. But very intelligent candidates are more likely to get responses that persuade the public. Most of the time they are just building their own positions up. When you start the game, you start out at 0 on all the issues (neutral). Your answers on the issues will help build up who you are.

So if you are against universal health care, for instance, you'll get negative points (negative just means you're against it). 

Here's a vastly over simplified example:

Let's say you're a Republican and you are very against universal health care. Let's say your position comes out to be a -5.

Then let's say Republicans are -10 on the issue of universal health care. Independents are 0 (neutral) and Democrats are +10 (in favor).

So you would score: -5 * -10 = 50 points with Republicans (two negatives makes a positive in multiplication).

On the other hand, if your opponent was wishy washy on the issue and only got 30 points with Democrats, the net result would be that you would win a higher percentage of the Republican vote than your opponent would get of Democrats.  However, it's not quite that simple because different states have different percentages of Republicans and Democrats. Getting 70% of Republicans to vote for you in New York may not be enough to win against a Democrat who got 50% of Democrats. And on most issues, Independents are truly neutral. They lean slightly one way or the other. Not much but enough to tip the scales.

The hard part for us is coming up with good responses for all sides. So we'll be posting questions to YOU, readers of PoliticalMachine.com / JoeUser.com and see what pithy answers you come up with.

So you have Windows XP and want to know what programs can change what parts of Windows XP? Here's an article that talks about the various programs available (free and non-free) that can let you change nearly every aspect of Windows XP.

Over the months I've been playing WoW I've learned a lot of useful things that have greatly improved the game experience. Let me first say that WoW doesn't assume you've ever played a massive multiplayer game. There is jargon in the game at higher levels but by then you know it. And most of the jargon is really just slang.  For instance, "Tanks" refer to fighters who have no ranged weapons who are covered with armor. It makes sense because you start to feel like a tank as you go up in levels. Similarly, "buff" is a term for adding spells and enhancements to a character to increase their traits. So let's go through some tips:

1) Elite monsters see ghosts. If they have a + by them it not only means they're tough. It means they can potentially see your ghost. That means if you die, you're not coming back easily if at all to get your corpse. The most infamous place for that is in the Redwood Mountains in the Orc castle. If you die in that castle, forget it. You won't recover your body and will have to take the XP hit. The orcs will see and attack your ghost as you near and your ghost only has 1 HP. I've lost thousands of XP because of that. So don't mess with the elites unless you really know what you're doing. (on the other hand, elites give vastly more XP to offset this when they die).

2) Get Everything Script and Quest Share. These are wonderful tools. You can find them in the World of Warcraft forum in the interface customization area. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=wow-interface-customization This tool will speed up things like smelting, seeing how much damage people are doing, seeing what common quests are available in your party (very nice), let you know when someone has completed a quest in your party, tell you how much damage per second a weapon does (very good for dealing with the whole speed versus damage thing).

3) Go with the smallest party you can get away with. 5 people tromping around the world is very safe. But if you're on quests in which you have to collect an item that drop from dead creatures, you could be waiting quite awhile. You also get a lot less XP.  A good group would consist of a tank, a rogue, and a preist (or wizard if the tank is a paladin).

4) Rogues are very useful in parties. The rogue can sap creatures. This is a power that puts them to sleep for 25 seconds and it can make a huge difference when dealing with mobs of creatures. I don't particularly care for the rogue as a lone quest (they're pretty lethal but the XP gained per minute on their own isn't as favorable).

5) Sell high value articles in Stormwind in front of the bank.  If you find something you think it unusually useful, and you think it's worth >1 Gold, you're probably better off going to Stormwind and selling it in front of the bank (in the trade district).  You can typically get 4 to 5 times as much (sometimes more) selling an item to users rather than just selling them in a shop. So if you get something that is worth 30 silver to a NPC trader, you may want to try selling it for 1 gold. 

6) The best items are made by players. It takes awhile but eventually the best items are the ones created by players. I bought, for 2g, a 1 handed mace that does 18 damage per second (that's something like a 2.5 speed mace that does 40 to 50 damage per hit). That's before "buffs". It was made by a player. Of course, to get to that point you have to make a lot of crap. I still haven't broken 100 with my armor smith Paladin yet.

7) If the world's ground is flashing... Find the config file (it's in one of the subdirectiries) and find where it says "specular lighting" and make it from a 1 to a 0.

8) Expand Expand Expand. If you're hanging out in Westfall forever, be aware that there are whole areas of the map that you could do other..easier quests. The higher you go, the mroe quests that were easy become in accessible because of your level. I leveled up very quickly because I didn't stick around in westfall doing every last quest. Instead, I did the ones that were fun and easy and then made my way to Iron Forge and did those quests that were fairly easy which took me to the east and I did those quests that I found enjoyable. Then I returned to Westfall and found myself quite a bit tougher. Sure, I didn't get quite as much XP for the remaining Westfall quests because I was 2 or 3 levels higher than I was, but on the other hand, I wasn't dying because some vulture went after me or because I bumped into some gnoll group.  Same thing happened in Duskwood (darkshire quests). Those are nasty. So I ended up going up to the Wetlands and doing some of the easier quests there. Got up a couple more levels, came back and was able to handle the duskwood missions much easier.

Hope this helps!

When I first got into the alpha of World of Warcraft I quickly concluded that keyboard commands and hotkeys would not cut it when it came to on-line communication.

My friend here at Stardock who is also on the alpha introduced me to Ventrillo: http://www.ventrilo.com

Ventrillo is a voice chat system. It's like IRC but with voice. I assigned my Ctrl key as the hot key to let me talk. I just have a microphone on my desktop and talk to the other members of my guild. It's a great way of communicating because it's so clear and easy.

You do have to set up a server in order to use Ventrillo -- someone has to relay all that stuff. When the game's released, I'll have a special server just for those who join our guild so that people can easily communicate back and forth to each other.

I highly recommend giving it a try. It's so good that we're thinking about using it here at the office for communicating with our European developers.

http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2004_03_14.PHP#001868

The hatred towards George Bush and Republicans in general has certainly increased since the 2000 election. I visit a lot of websites during the week and while I see a lot of idealogues on the right, there is no right-wing equivalent to Democratic-underground.

Even here on JoeUser, the tolerenace for the right by those on the left seems to be problematic, at best. I have seen people argue that this site is right-wing. Why? It's pretty easy to demonstrate that as being false. Just look at the top 20 blog sites on this site (right of page) and you'll see that there are more that are left of center than right of center.

Here's an excerpt John Hawkins found on Democratic underground:

SCRUBDASHRUB: OK, this is juvenile but this is how fed up I am. I need to watch it because I don't want to wind up getting shot, but I was driving to work and some idiot drove by me on the expressway whose license plate read 1GOP1 (I might add, he was driving completely arrogantly (no signalling, etc...typically of the party he's so proud of).

I waited until he got far enough ahead of me and promptly flipped him the one finger salute, then gave him three fingers to spell "W" and the thumbs down symbol.

Jack @ss...

boobooday: "Don't get shot. But really, he deserved it. It's like smoking. We have to make it socially unacceptable to be a Republican.

That's what they tried to do to the word "liberal." Time to ATTACK BACK!!"

nicecakes: Sure thing. Time to go beyond politics and get personal to start a new civil war! After enough victories we will be the only party and one party rule will rool!

MadProphetMargin: "That's not juvenile. Juvenile would have meant following him to a gas station, and "improving" his license plates when he went in to pay.

Try this one: On a Friday, after working hours, put a crack & peel sign on your local republican headquarter's (8.5X11 crack & peel inkjet paper is available at any major office supply company) front door. Have the sign read "Whites only - Blacks please use rear entrance."

With any luck, it will remain up until Monday. For additional fun, call the local papers and complain about what you "just saw".

MPM,
Master election prankster."

lastknowngood: "Call DMV with tag # and get his address then send off for some gay porn to be shipped to his house. Just one of my little evil ideas to use on arrogant christens and prudes."

Now, maybe this kind of hatred and vitriol exists on the right but I can't find it. This isn't some lone kook here, this is several people all wanting to do harm to someone simply because his license plate has the words GOP on it (which may or may not have anything to do with being a Republican).

This is the kind of intolerance Bakerstreet made note of in his article http://bakerstreet.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=10659 .