Having a search engine also being the one who provides the ads makes for interesting reading.

Check the bottom right of your blog and you'll see the google ads. But here's the kicker - the google ads are based on Google's search engine results. So you can see what kinds of people are visiting your site, to a degree, based on what types of things are being advertised.

I was reading Tangled Wishes website and the ads were about personal relationships, meeting people, that sort of thing. I read through my blogs and I see a bunch of ads from right wing sites. I guess that should tell me something. But now I know where I can get a "liberal vooodoo doll."

Reading through Wahkonta's site and I see ads for UFO sighting books and news.

The google ads are far more interesting than I ever thought they'd be.

Stardock is a very profitable company. But I hate to say it, but we could be immensely more profitable than we are if we were just willing to do things we don't think people would like.

For instance, our site, WinCustomize, is the world's most popular skin site.  But it loses money every month. It doesn't even come close to paying for itself. At the same time, it has to compete against websites whose skins install spyware. Needless to say, they make a lot more money than us.

Occasionally we get offers from companies to pay us 10 to 15 cents per installation of our freeware and shareware programs if we agree to also install their software. Their software being spyware of various types.  Oh, how could anyone be tempted to do that?  Well, last week our software got 167,000 downloads just on Download.com (not counting other places).  That would be (if we use the 10 cent figure) $16,700 per week.  Let's say it was only $15,000 for easier math, that's roughly $60,000 per month. $780,000 per year.  Gets a bit more tempting then.

But we decline those offers. 

A lot of people speak of holding principles, but it gets a lot tougher to uphold those principles when "Big money" is put in front of you.  Principles, they say, are a luxury. Perhaps so. We're already profitable. How would things be if it were a choice between laying 8 people off or doing the sort of thing I mention above? 8 people with families to take care of.  I suspect it would be a lot tougher then.

But still, even now we find ourselves regularly competing on an unequal playing field.  We have one competitor who installs a MacOS X skin as their default skin complete with Apple's trademark as part of the skin.  The graphics themselves appear to have been lifted right from MacOS X 10.3.  On the other hand, the skins we include with our software are created by skin authors.  We include a Mac classic skin because Apple's legal gave us the okay on that -- but we made it ourselves, we didn't go and copy the resource bitmaps from MacOS 9 or something. Not including a MacOS X skin puts us at a disadvantage but we're trying to abide by Apple's wishes. It's their stuff.  Still, I wonder how many sales we lose each year because of that decision? I wonder how many sales our competitor gets at our expense because they can claim their software will make "Windows look like a Mac" upon install?

Another example, we're putting together a desktop aquarium. Our animators got the models from a website in Japan. Now, realistically, we could in all likelihood just use those make new models that are derivative and create new graphics and no one would ever know. But instead we contacted the author and put together a contract in which we pay him thousands of dollars, up front, to use his models. Why? Because it's the right thing to do. It's as simple as that.

But again, in the real business world, such actions put us at a competitive disadvantage. Many companies only worry about whether something is legal as opposed to whether it's moral. We have a company suing us right now to force us to let them use the files generated by one of our programs. Files we created. They want to use them so that they can compete against us.  Forget for a moment whether such an action is legal, I can't see how anyone can say it's moral.

But that's how so many businesses we run into operate, the only question is whether it's legal. And if it's not legal, they just ask themselves if they can get away with it?  I've been asked over the years why we play so straight and narrow? Why do we operate so transparently? Someone usually presupposes, "Do you do it so that you can look at yourself in the mirror?"  No. That's not why we do it.  I guess you could say I believe in the power of projection. That we simply operate in a way that we wish everyone else operated. And maybe, just maybe in some small way others will see our success and see that they don't have to go into that gray area to succeed.

Still, $700,000 to $1 million more in revenue -- revenue that would go straight to the bottom line, would be nice. And all we'd need to do is install spyware. And heck, while we were doing that, we could have all our skins and themes that are downloaded from our sites do the same thing, get that amount up to 2 or 3 million dollars per year. 

But you know what? I'd rather be part of the way things should be. Even if other companies don't necessarily operate that way.

Oh yea...this is a leap year. 29 days this month and it's sooo awesome. Employers all over the world know what I speak of.

For those of you who get paid a salary, you work an extra day this year. No extra pay. Just extra days. EXCCELLLENNNT!

It's great. At our company, salaries make up the vast majority of our expenses. So February 29 is like a free day. So the thousands of dollars in revenue for that day are basically pure gravy. Mmmmm. Gravy.

Each day I tell my co-workers: "If you guys work really hard, put in extra time, *I* can get a plasma screen TV." It's a morale booster of course. Gives them something to work for.

Though I think I'll use some of that money to buy new tires. For some reason, all 4 of my tires are flat every evening after work. Very odd.

In hindsight it was probably a mistake for the Democrats to start trying to smear Bush with the AWOL nonsense. When one side of zealots begins smearing the other side, that other side's zealots are bound to strike back. And it looks like Kerry's glass house is about to get shattered.

Wesley Clark told reports that Kerry has an "Intern problem" and predicted that Kerry's campaign would implode as a result. Sure enough, The Drudge Report (linked to at the bottom of this article) has a report that Kerry indeed apparently had an affair with an intern and that intern has left the country to head off the inevitable media uproar.

What affect will this have on the Democratic nomination? Kerry doesn't have it wrapped up yet. Edwards and Dean are still in there. At the end of the day, it's looking like this election season will be one of the nastiest on record. Though ironcially, it wasn't Kerry's Republican rivals that spilled the beans, it was a fellow "Democrat" that did so. But now that it's out there, the right wing zealots will be all over it like fresh meat, particularly after the AWOL charges by Democratic zealots.

I didn't accomplsih as much as I had hoped today. Lots of busy work. As my friend and co-worker Kris would say, too many things in the oven. Did spend some time on The Political Machine. Now that it's up and running on my laptop (stayed up until 4am on that and still had to go into the office) I'll be able to work on it more.

JoeUser is up to nearly 80 new articles today. I am hoping we will be able to officially launch the site in early March. Still a few more features we gotta have in there.

Read through a bunch of blogs. I have been keeping to my policy of not commenting as much on the less experienced writers. I did see one that I was tempted to write on. One of the young women on this site wrote a scatching article that was directed at comments in one of my articles. It was pretty obvious that she, at best, skimmed the responses. I don't think she even understood the main issue. I happen to be one of those people who don't care if people respond to one of my articles. But if you do, I want it to be on the topic. Especially if it's one that is on a serious nature. I am a self-admitted elitist when it comes to political debates. I want to stick to the main topic. If someone wants to go on a tangent, write a new blog and we debate on that.

DesktopX 2.1 is now out and it's really quite oustanding. I believe DesktopX will be the cornerstone of a lot of our business in coming years. We'll see. Konfabulator for Windows is always looming and the way the press has fawned over it, who knows what the end result will be. Apparently having a superset of the features of Konfabulator, 2 years before Konfabulator existed, doesn't merit much these days.

I've gotta read through various legal documents before bed so off I go.

Democrats are talking about "Two Americas" in which they crudely separate Americans into two categories: The noble have-nots and the corrupt haves. Calling such a description an oversimplification would be charitable.

Republicans and Democrats talk past each other because they, fundamentally, don't understand each other.  There is no "compromise" really possible because they approach their positions from completely alien points of view.  When someone tries to provide a compromise, they are disdained by both because neither party will be satisfied with any compromise.  It's not like liberals are a 10 and conservatives a 1.  It's more like Liberals are a 10 and Conservatives are Z. What is half way between 10 and Z?

To use my own over simplification, let me illustrate the basic difference between American liberals and American conservatives on the role of the federal government.

Conservatives see the federal government as essentially a huge neighborhood association.  The federal government is there to provide services that are impossible or impractical for individuals to provide for themselves or can't be provided by a company.  The list of things that fit that criteria is very very small.  Defense. Roads. Police. Fire Departments...Um...Police..

And so in the conservative view we all help contribute to paying for these services in the form of taxes. Conservatives don't like the idea that different people have to pay different amounts for the same service.  After all, imagine getting your cable bill and being charged 20X as much as your neighbor simply because you make more money.  Because conservatives see the government as an association of citizens, they tend to be unsympathetic to suggestions of having it into the business of doing things that people should doing for themselves.  A neighborhood association will pay for the streets to be plowed in the winter but not for someone to shovel everyone's walkways. If someone doesn't want to shovel snow, they shouldn't buy a house with a big walkway.

Liberals, by contrast, see the federal government as the guaranteer of social justice. The federal government is there to provide services to the people that benefit all citizens. This is a critical difference. Services that benefit everyone versus services that are impossible for individuals/corporations to provide. A liberal would argue that the neighborhood association analogy is flawed because it makes the assumption that everyone moved into a given neighborhood on remotely equal grounds. The federal government, precisely because it isn't driven by profit or religious ideology, is best positioned to provide service that benefit everyone. Sure, everyone will pay a bit more in taxes, particularly the wealthiest but so what? Realistically after a certain income level additional income is fairly meaningless. That extra income can be distributed to the less fortunate of society to provide services to all people.

It's because of these radically different views that the two can't really be compromised.  Bush, for instance, can't satisfy either by trying to go half way.  His prescription healthcare plan is a perfect example. A conservative says "The government's job is not to provide pills for anyone at all. That's not its job. Caring for the elderly should be done by families and having the government assume jobs best suited to families inevitably weakens families. The rise of the single parent house hold goes hand in hand with the great society programs of the 60s which has been harmful to all of society.  Liberal programs may have good intentions but result in bad results."  And so Bush's prescription plan for the elderly alienates conservatives.  By contrast, it fails to satisfy liberals because it's a half-measure. Bush brings in the insurance companies into his plan, the very people that liberals dislike in the first place. A liberal would say "You either believe that prescription drugs for the elderly is something the government should take care of or you don't."  Programs like this can't be half-baked. It's like trying to make a car (to satisfy car lovers) without an engine (to satisfy environmentalists).

This is one reason I think Bush is vulnerable this year. He has alienated the base of conservatives who feel that the federal government is already too involved in taking care of individual citizens rather than providing services that no individual can provide for themselves. But in the process he's befriended few liberals who see his efforts as clumsy cynical attempts to get some half-baked program through.

It really comes down to axioms. A conservative asks "Is this something that individuals or companies could do for themselves? If yes then forget it." A liberal says "Is this something that will benefit all individuals in our society? If yes, then do it."  There is no half-way because they are coming from completely different perspectives.

 

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!

So if we can combine Comcast with Disney we can create some sort of super villain type scenario. Oh boy.

Not too excited to hear Mexicans treating our soccer team this way. Booing the US national anthem and yelling "Osama" as a soccer game in Mexico helps make the case that the US really needs to secure the border. It's not just that Mexican illegal immigrants aren't assimilating as well as other cultures have for economic reasons, they're not assimilating because unlike other immigrants, there's a considerable number of them quite hostile to the US.  I have seen interviews with immigrants who quite openly hope to become a majority in New Mexico, Arizona, and California and effectively turn it into a quasi-separate country. Don't kid yourself, Mexico isn't our friend. They have ample reason not to like the USA btw. But that doesn't change the end result.

Meanwhile...

France's solution to discrimination? Eliminate personal freedom to express their religion. Great...

So Clark is out of the race. Big surprise. Maybe he figured out that Republicans should run in Republican primaries. I mean, what kind of fool would think Clark was a Democrat? Oh yea, Michael Moore.

Meanwhile, my friend Andrew Orlowski has an article at The Register about iPod owners ticked off about their alliance with Pepsi. I like the Register but frankly I tend to want to focus on Andrew's articles as they're my favorites and I have to go by the sub-headers to figure out which ones are his (his tend to be more smart aleky). Of course, he's likely horrified at my right-wing blogging.

Meanwhile, the anti-Orlowski, Steven Den Beste has an article about why Muslims need to deal with the fanatics. If you're left of center or against the war in Iraq you'll probably want to avoid it as it'll cause you to wither up.

Another net friend, Jark, is having some problems with his employer. Besides being the main guy at deviantART, he has a day job. If the cheapskate users at deviantART were willing to help the site more Jark wouldn't have to put up with crap from his employer, the US Navy.

Speaking of day jobs, running JoeUser isn't my day job. Not really anyway. But I will tell you one thing, everytime someone marks someone as a troll it shows up in a log. So you left wingers and right wingers running around trying to bring down your ideological opponents through abuse of the trolling button, beware, we know who you are.

Meanwhile, John Hawkins has an article suggesting that if the Star Trek dream came true, it would ruin the human race. I tend to agree. In fact, I predict that my son's generation will likely run into serious issues once virtual reality becomes a..ahem reality. Who's going to want to do real work when you can just go have virtual sex anytime you want? Look at the popularity of Everquest now and that stuff is nothing compared to what VR will one day offer.

Well it's going on 2 am. I'm finishing up my install of SP5 for Visual Studio 6.  I really need to upgrade to Visual Studio.net one of these days. I'll know soon whether I'll be working from home or dragging the 3 year old to the office with the laptop to get The Political Machine setup on this machine.  Hmph, gotta go grab the latest MSDN.  Pain.

Gnight!

 

I didn't realize that the newer laptop didn't have Visual Stuido. In fact, it doesn't have development tools on it in general! Having gotten in at 11am I spent most of the day pouring through email, getting DesktopX 2.1 announced, and taking care of various "biz stuff".

At 9pmish I got home and started on getting the laptop ready which included downloading the 200+ meg DirectX 9 SDK. Good grief it's huge. And stupid too as it it's just a bit self extracting EXE with an installer in it. Would it realy kill them to launch the installer?

I remembered the source code for the project but not Pear. So this will be the first real test of FolderShare to do something useful. I realy wish we had our own network independent file syncronizing tool ready since FolderShare is...well kind of crummy but I may get to see if it's useful now.