Randy, a long time Stardock customer dating back from the OS/2 days wrote me today an email that raised my flu-subdued spirits. He included a photo of all his Stardock stuff from over the past decade.

Like me, he was a big advocate of OS/2 during the good old days. Randy was one of our first (I mean very first) customers. Lot of OS/2 software there and the Windows version there too.  Thanks Randy! You made my day!

 

My wife and I are on a diet. I'm trying to lose about 10 pounds this year. The diet we're following calls for it to start with 3 days of cleansing the system of starches and sugars. It's not so much fasting as it is trying to get us over our addiction to starches and sugars.

And holy cow am I an addict. I never realized how much in starches and sugars I consume each day. I would start out the day with French toast. Then grab a glazed donut or two on the way to work. For lunch, Penara Bread. And then for dinner something fairly typical like chicken or beef or whatever. I also drink 1 to 2 cans of coca cola each day. Before bed I'd have some toast or a piece of sour dough bread.

Now, for the cleansing period, I can drink water, eat as much chicken or other lean meat as I'd like. Just no sugars or starches. That means no bread, no donuts, no chocolate, no coke.

I wasn't hungry per se, because I coudl eat as much meat as I wanted to. But my craving for donuts and bread were painful. I never realized that starches and sugars could be an addiction.

Some various pictures of the family...

Quickie picture

Wife Deb in the car

Alex

Ryan

Alex with little snowman

We used up all our snow to make the snowman!

In 2002 we had the GUI Olympics. It was a contest to see who could create the best user interface designs for the Windows GUI. The tool used was WindowBlinds to apply them.  The contest was a huge success. Something over 100 skins were submitted.  But while the contest was a huge hit, running it was an absolute nightmare. The politics behind the scenes nearly brought it all to a screeching halt. 

The near-disaster should have been easy for us to predict but we were a bit naive on such things.  You see, the contest was an inter-site contest. That is, each of the major skin sites had a judge. The gotcha was that the skinners had to choose to represent one of these sites. And the money ($10k in cash/prizes were given out) from this contest was split between the author and the site. So you can see the problem - the people judging actually had a potential financial conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, add to that the classic issue of who is in charge? Stardock, who sponsored it, felt it should have the final say since it was providing the prizes, running the website, and running the day to day contest. But some of the smaller sites felt that they should have an equal say in every decision. This included requests for post-facto changes to the rules. At one point, a group of the smaller sites banded together and demanded that none of the judges be appointed by Stardock. This would have essentially meant that the only ones who could judge the contest were those who had a financial stake in the outcome.  Stardock rejected this and two skin sites dropped out of the contest.

The net result was that a couple "Teams" dominated the entire contest (deviantART and LotsOfSkins). To spectators and contestants, this was no big deal. You really only need 2 reasonably equal contenders to make it an exciting competition. And in the end, deviantART won 18 medals, LotsOfSkins won 10 mdeals, and VelocityArt 9 medals. So despite some half-baked ideas on how to run the contest, it all worked out well and people have been asking for a new GUI Olympics ever since.

How times have changed...

It was 2 years ago this April that the last GUI Olympics was finished.  And so here we are again, 2 years later and things have changed remarkably since then.  For one thing, back then there was an ongoing battle between the "old guard" of "community leaders" of skinning who had wanted to keep skinning a small, private hobby. As one of them put it at the time, "This is our scene, we created it, we don't want it turned into some mass-market, would you like fries with your happy meal phenomenon!".  And on the other side, there was the "new guard" whose response would have been "Yea, we want skinning and customization to be a mass-market, everyone and their brother should be trying it out."  And so behind the scenes this battle was waged. The old guard has since faded away as skinning became mainstream.

Where skinning was a tiny niche hobbyist thing before, it has grown and grown. Three "new guard" sites: WinCustomize, deviantART, and Neowin have grown massively in terms of number of users.  deviantART, in fact, moved beyond merely spreading skinning to the masses to helping make art itself something that everyone could take a shot at. And for good and ill, these two sites now get over 6 million unique visitors per month between them -- more than all the other sites in the "community" combined.

And Neowin went from being a niche tech site to being possibly the world's most popular technology forum. It has become not just a hub for skinning but one that has opened up customization to the average users. In terms of actual quality skin creation, it has become immensely popular and likely to be a real force this time around. If there were any old guard people still active, they would say that WinCustomize, deviantART, and Neowin have let in the "riff raff" in which mediocrity prevails, originality quashed and skinners focused on making popular skins and themes rather than new and fresh ones.

But no matter how you slice it, the times have dramatically changed.  Skinning has become mass market. Look at the table above and the stats make it clear.  The rankings of every customization-related site that was involved in the GUI Olympics 2002 has dramatically improved except for Teknidermy which was, at the time, the core old guard center of things.

Skinning as a niche is gone, it's mainstream now. Countless programs these days are coming skinned. Microsoft made Windows XP be skinnable to a degree. Longhorn boasts of having all kinds of new customization features in the pipeline.  Stardock is making almost as much selling DirectSkin at $10k a pop to companies to skin their applications as it does selling WindowBlinds to end users for $19.95 a piece.  Skin authors themselves are now making thousands of dollars annually making professional skins. The recent Zippo Lighter Suite is just one example. Professional skin authors have made skins used by Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, and countless other companies. Another reason why this would be a good opportunity for someone to try their hand at skinning using industry accepted standards like WindowBlinds.

And so it makes sense that the GUI Olympics 2004 would expand too. Expand and be run fundamentally differently...

GUI Olympics 2004 concepts

This time around, skinners will be able to form their own teams. They don't have to represent any particular site (though they can).  The winning team will get a $500 bonus prize. A team can be merely a group of guys with no particular affiliation other than each other. They just have to create a logo and form a team. When the GUI Olympics gets going in March, contestants will be able to create and join teams.  Teams can be websites. They just don't have to be this time around.

There will be 3 categories this time:

1. Visual Styles (must be provided in WindowBlinds format)

2. Icon Packages (IconPackager format)

3. A MP3 player (to be announced soon)

There will be 6 judges.  4 appointed by Stardock and 2 appointed by the company that sponsors the third category.. Of the 4 appointed by Stardock, 1 will be Paul Boyer, who works at Stardock now and is considered the leading Windows icon author (since he can't compete in the icon creation portion it makes sense to have him judge). Another will be Kris Kwilas who has been a GUI expert for nearly a decade.  The other two judges from Stardock will come from the community.

In addition, there will be 3 moderators. Think American Idol. These 3 moderators will weed out skins, icons, and player skins that don't have a chance to keep the final total reasonable. It just means a skin or set of icons that contains ripped material or is incomplete or is just plain terrible won't be allowed in. The moderators won't be judges though, they just get to give a yay or nay to the submissions as they come in.

All skins and icons must be new. They can't be something that's existed on any other site previously. They also must be exclusive to the GUI Olympics (i.e. you can't go uploading them around the net). Once the contest is officially started (early March) there will be approximately one month of submissions before the various events even begin to be judged so there will be plenty of time to put together the skins and/or icons. 

We expect each category to have between 3 and 5 events. 

The visual style events will include: Best OS-like skin (not an OS skin, but an original OS concept that one would say "Now that would be a good OS skin!".  Most Creative Skin (that is, one that doesn't look like every other skin ever made out there but still looks nice).  Most Minimalistic Skin. Best PowerUser Skin.  Best Overall Skin.

The Icon packages one would be: Best OS-like icons  (see above). Most Original Icons.  Best overall Icons.

The MP3 player categories will be influenced by the sponsor but are likely to be: Most Creative Skin.  Best PowerUser skin.  Best Overall Skin.

Plus one final event: Best overall submission.

Additional Awards: Most Valuable Player and Winning Team

Overall, we're looking at 12 events.  12 events competing for $10,000 cash and prizes. Prizes will include hardware, software, shirts, and possibly trophies (we're looking into that).

Each major customization site will be able to have a flag posted on the top of the GUIOlympics.com page in exchange for the GUI Olympics logo being put prominently on their site during the the contest.

The Next Step

The contest will get officially announced soon. We just have to make sure things are set for the third category (it's a large company) as well as get prize sponsors all together. But this is a head's up of what is coming. 

But for those who do feel that skinning has become so mainstream that skinners now top themselves in seeing who can create the most mild looking skins out there, this is an opportunity to stretch your talents out. The most "Creative" skin is unlikely to go to someone making a "Luna-like" visual style (WindowBlinds supports buttons on the sides and bottom as well as the standard top right position), today's media players are almost infinitely customizable.

It's going to be blast!

Good luck to everyone!

This month kicks off the first official month of Stardock TV.  Each month we'll be demoing some skinnable program and showing you what we can do with it.

This month we're showing off the widget features of DesktopX 2.1!  Check it out at SDTV.Joeuser.com

	Stardock TV: February 2004

This month's Stardock TV is a 15 minute demo of DesktopX 2.1's object features.  Now, anyone with DesktopX installed can make use of widgets created by other DesktopX users just like they could any other program.

Stardock TV: February 2004 (requires Windows Media Player 9)

IBM is working on migrating MS's Office 2003 over to Linux. Details are sketchy on how this is being done but but if it becomes a reality, it would be a major step forward to getting Linux on desktops.

Source: Neowin.net

When I speak on-line on various sites, including JoeUser.com about the role of government, it becomes apparent quickly that many people think of the government as some sort of independent entity that is not connected to us.  Those people tend to favor having the government solve all kinds of problems, including problems better left to individuals to solve for themselves.

People like me, as I discussed in the philosophies of the left and the right are wary of having the government do anything that we could be doing for ourselves. The reason for that is because we recognize that the government is us. When the government does something, we're basically paying money to have someone else do it. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer runs for sanitation commissioner. His campaign slogan is "Can't someone else do it?" He promises that the garbage men will take care of everything from emptying the litter box to changing diapers. Of course, after he's elected he puts his program in action and quickly runs out of money. It was hilarious and yet it had a point - no one is going to be as efficient at taking care of you as you are. Sure, we can pay someone else to change our litter box but it'll cost a lot more for the government to do it than it would for you to do it yourself.

In a country in which half the adult population effectively pays no federal taxes, it becomes pretty tempting to vote in programs that take care of all kinds of things we could do ourselves. Programs that involve literally giving money to other people are, in essence, asking other individuals to pay for something for someone else. When people demand universal coverage to be paid for by "the government" what they are really asking for is their neighbors pay for their health care. Oddly, I have seen few movements to try to start health care charities. How many people who support government health care would be willing to go door to door asking their neighbors to chip in to pay for their own health care?

Or let me be even more explicit: Federal taxes represent days of the year that you work exclusively for the federal government.  Let's say you pay 30% of your taxes to the federal government.  That's about 120 days. 4 months. January, February, March, April . Those are the 4 months that you work exclusively for the federal government. When you start looking at it like that, you start to view things a bit differently.

When someone throws up their hands and says "let's have the government do this" they are really asking the 50% of the adult population who pays taxes to do it for them. We already, for example, work 2 weeks each year just paying the interest on the debt. Isn't that nice?  And because the government is so wasteful, the 50% who pay taxes end up working more days for the government than would have been necessary otherwise.

You say you like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare? Well, if you're like me, you are already working 50 days each year to pay for it.  Imagine what you could do if those 7 weeks of income were instead put into some sort of private saving's account or a mutual fund or heck, saved towards buying a house? But instead, it goes to social security and unfortunately, it's a rotten investment for most of us. How rotten, how about this: If you were to pay say $5,000 per year from age 20 to 30 and then never pay another cent after that into savings, at an annual investment rate of 7% (a little less than the S&P 500 average) then at age 65 you would have around $600,000. Let's say you you received payments over the next 30 years (until you were 95) from it.  That would be over $20,000 per year for 30 year! And remember, this is with eliminating saving even one penny more after you turned 30. Most people would likely continue to save something for retirement, this just illustrates how extremely wasteful Social Security et al is.  Instead, we pay and pay and pay and for what? A bunch of little checks that had made no interest at all. And why? Because a bunch of people successfully argued that we should just throw up our hands and let the government take care of retirement for us. And so now we work 2 months each year for the government for the rest of our non-retired lives so that we can get a bunch of little checks.

Of course, the counter to this, which is valid, is that these programs help the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate. I think most people are willing to work several days each year to help them. Unfortunately while supporting the sick, poor, and unfortunate we also support the lazy, the foolish, and the unscrupulous. And it is very hard for the government to make a distinction between the two groups.  Which is precisely why so many Americans, such as myself, oppose programs that replace individualism with collectivism. If it's something we could really do for ourselves, then it's probably better to do ourselves. And to protect the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate private institutions or at worse the state and local governments are better off doing that -- because they are much better equipped to tailor their programs to the needs of their constituents than some far off bureaucrat.

I am okay with the current tax system - if I make more, I can afford to pay more. I'm fine with that.  What I am against is a system in which we give up personal responsibility to ourselves and our community to some far off government bureaucrat who will never be able to do the job as efficiently as we could do for ourselves.

If you want to dramatically raise unemployment with the poor, then by all means advocate for "living wage" laws.

Did you know that some cities already have living wage laws? The resultant unemployment amongst the poor in those cities is probably publicly available on the net somewhere. New York, for instance, has areas that have living wage laws.

And here's what happens:

Let's say I have a living wage law that says that you must pay at least $10 per hour. One publicized example was a big New York low income housing construction project. Lots of rennovations and building in that area. Lots of unemployed poor people wanted to be employed helping on this project. I.e. digging, moving debris, drilling, etc. But they weren't hired. Why? Because $10 per hour is too high to take a chance on someone without any experience. So the construction companies simply brought in people from other parts of town who had experience already and already proven reliability.

So if you really are interested in increasing poverty, by all means, support "living" wage laws. I don't, btw. have a problem with minimum wage as long as the wage is low enough not to affect hiring. It's already pushing the border line now though.

I have people at our company who started at barely above minimum wage because they had no experience whatsoever. They had to learn and be trained at what they do just like everyone else at some point does. But now, a few years later they make very good wages (well above the average salary in the United States). The free market is the best way to help provide opportunity to people.

Toon-XP suite in action!

Some of the top graphics designers in the world have got combined their efforts to create some incredible suites of skins, icons, and themes. Check them out here: Oranda Cursor Suite Carbonix Skin Pack ToonXP Desktop Suite Orion Icon Suite