WinCustomize never removes sections. But we do try to keep only a limited number of very active sections available on the home page.

With going on 2.5 million unique visitors per month, we take great care over choosing just the right sections.

The following sections are in jeopardy of losing their home page status (i.e. users would have to click on the [more...] link).

1. Widgets for SkinStudio
2. NextSTART
3. Litestep

The widgets section really is pretty hard core stuff so doesn't really belong on by default.

NextSTART is something we have pushed quite a bit but there have been no new themes uploaded in 2004. If you're a NextSTART skinner, now would be the time to a) submit your themes and help WinStep promote its use to others.

Litestep is an old favorite by many skinners and themers out there. But there's been only two new themes created in 2004 for it. If you're a Litestep advocate, now would be the time to spread the word to help get things going.

We have a couple of sections we'd like to put on deck:

1. Rainlendar
2. Samurize
3. Trillian

Like I said, we don't remove sections but if any of these 3 programs are pulling ahead of the ones already listed on the home page, it's time for them to show that they're still heavily used or step aside and let others come up.

Your thoughts?

To organize the site better for future growth, we have implemented topics (sub-categories). There will be nested sub-topics as well.

What we want to do is decrease the # of channels overall and instead let users post into those fewer channels on a wider range of topics. Users interested in those topics will be able to delve deeper and deeper into that category by going to a particular topic.

Let me give you an example:

Let's say you're really into history. You click on the history forum or channel and you see ALL the articles that are of the category of history. But maybe you feel overwhelmed by hundreds of articles ranging from the Fall of the Roman Empire to weapons used in World War I. Let's say you want instead to just talk about the Civil War.

You would go to History::Civil War and see just posts that are of that topic.

Eventually it could get even deeper:

History::Civil War::Gettysburgh

What most sites do is have very seperate forums with each forum being exclusive. On JoeUser, we'll be taking the opposite path, each forum is inclusive with the broader the category/channel, the broader the articles/posts. Anything that shows up in a sub-topic will also show up in the parent topic and the parent channel/category.

Here's what we have so far.

Personal Computing

Hardware
    Desktops
    Monitors
    Laptops
    Video Cards
    Printers
    Hard Drives
Software
    Development
        Longhorn
        .NET
        XAML
        C++
        Visual Basic
        .ASP
        SQL
    Operating Systems
        Windows
        Linux
        MacOS
    Customization
        Skinning
        Icons
        Tutorials
        Help
        WindowBlinds
        DesktopX
    Internet
        Usenet

Entertainment
    Books
    Movies & TV
    Gaming
        PC Games
            Strategy
            Adventure
            Action
        Console Games
    Music

Politics
    Republican
    Democrat
    International

Blogging
    Welcome

History
    Current Events
    World War II
    Civil War
    Europe

Personal Relationsips
    Home & Family
    Pets & Nature
    Adults Only

Philosophy

Business
    Consumer Issues
    Work Reports

Hobbies & Recreation
    Gadgets & Electronics
    HDTV
    PVRs
    Photography
    Sports & Leisure

Home Improvement
 

The next step is to consolidate the existing articles into this structure. Feel free to suggest changes or additions.

For those running multiple OSes on your machine and want to know which virtual hardware simulator is faster, this article has a host of benchmarks on it.

Based on a casual glance it seems VMWare is faster.

The Republican party hasn't changed nearly as much as the Democrats were. The Democrats bet the farm on slavery in the 1860s -- they wanted to protect it. They lost. So then they became the party of white power. Woodrow Wilson was incredibly racist for instance and undid many executive branch reforms brought in by Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. The KKK, the Jim Crowe laws, the seperate but equal schooling, seperate drinking fountains were all laws passed by Democrats over the objections of Republicans.

The first African American congressmen were Republicans.

But over time, overt racism is just a loser of an issue. Sensibilities change and Democrats like Woodrow Wilson and his contempoaries arguing that this country was for the white race sounded more and more ignorant and hateful. It was a lower of an issue. Of course, it took Democrats a long time to figure that out as Wilson was only one of two Democratic presidents since before 1860 (Wilson was elected in 1913 so picture only having 2 Democrats in office in a perid of 53 years).

So the Democrats found a new strategy -- rather than being the party of the white man they would become the party of the downtrodden.

The change began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt. He was earnestly trying to save the Republic but was also a shrewd politician. He was the first President to recognize the true power of the recently passed amendment allowing federal income taxes. He began teaching the masses, particularly the lower classes that democracy could be a tool in which they used the power of the ballot to confiscate the wealth generated by the upper classes. It wasn't hard given the inequalities of the time (people who argue that there are greater differences between the rich and the poor today than at any time in history are..to be charitable, wrong).

He was much more subtle and I believe more honorable in his intentions than later politicians would become. In those days (1930s to 1945) you could work hard and still be in poverty as millions of Americans of that era could attest to. I mean really working hard (full time working in a dangerous mine or mill or factory where you could die at any time and still be living in poverty). And people who cry about Enron should read up on the great depression in which millions of regular Americans suffered while a few percent of the elites walked away just fine.

So the earliest programs were about taking some wealth from the highest echelons of income earners and providing some benefits and services for those who were honestly trying to make their way in the world. Hence the term "New Deal".

Later Democrats recognized even greater opportunity by looking at the trends. Those who ended up being dependent on government help were overwhelmingly supporting them. No matter how well constructed, some percentage of people will always end up dependent on some goverment service. By pushing through programs that "assisted" the less fortuntae, they could create more and more dependents that would increasingly serve as their base.

And so here we are today with 90% of African Americans supporting the political party that literally fought to the death to keep them enslaved. Siding against the party that was largely formed (largely to free them whose very first President did free them (I'm not arguing that Lincoln was some sort of abolutionist, I am only arguing the facts here).

Democrats switched their strategy of white power to a strategy designed control of the less fortunate through the growing percentages of government dependents. Slaves of the government if you will. So I suppose, depending on how one looks at it, the Democrats haven't changed so much after all. They are still about keeping large segments of the population down in slavery. It's just that now they use much more flowery language to attain it.

At this point it seems pretty clear that Janet Jackson had every intention of pulling this stunt at the Super Bowl. The question is, what should be done?

Based on the reaction there seems to be 3 basic views:

1. Have the FCC impose a huge fine on whoever is responsible including MTV and CBS.
2. Outraged viewers to push pressure on Viacom to punish those responsible.
3. Lighten up, it's a bear breast. Get over it.

The first option comes with lots of potential issues with it. First, the FCC has the right under law to fine those who put things that are so indecent as to offend the majority of people in the community. It's intentionally vague and  I tend not to favor this sort of thing. It's not the government's job to decide what's decent or not. I just don't feel comfortable with the government censoring things. That said, everyone knows that network TV isn't supposed to show frontal nudity or say any of the 5 big swear words. The broadcast networks use of the airwaves is predicated on having agreed to government regulations on what those airwaves will be used for.

The second option is the option I favor. Viacom (owners of CBS and MTV) should conduct a very public investigation into this and figure out whether Jackson was doing this as a publicity stunt. If so, it should take very public action appropriate to its findings. Angry viewers should keep the pressure on. I see right-wingers ticked off at organizations like MoveOn.org but at least the radical left is organizing behind the things they feel strongly about. The "moral majority" needs to get off its rear end and do the same thing on that kind of scale too.

The last option I just find patently offensive. The people who really need to lighten up are those who find contemporary American culture too restrictive. It is the way it is, grow up and deal with it. The vast majority of Americans have decency expectations of what will show up on network TV. This was the Super Bowl for crying out loud. Millions of children were watching it. The left-wingers of the world always argue "Parents need to do a better job keeping an eye on what their children are watching." Fine. Then the networks need to keep their side too and ensure things that are rated G (or the TV equivalent) are of that standard.

I believe that the free market will resolve this. Janet Jackson's career will probably be harmed considerably by this. I think it was gratuitous and foolish.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/index.epolls.html

I tend to be pretty caustic on debates because I don't have much patience for people who confuse their personal experiences or their feelings as facts. I like statistics but I understand why many if not most people stay away from them. Statistics can be manipulated to come about to nearly any conclusion. So it often takes a lot of time and effort to sift through the crap to get to actual meaningful data.

Even exit polls are full of stuff that are useless.  For instance, they talk about things like "What class do you consider yourself part of"  Other than for its psychological value, it is fairly meaningless.  But demographic data is hard to twist.  Things like "How much do you make" or "Are you married". It's very hard to twist that around.

Some stats of interest from the last election.

Are You Married?	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
Yes	65 %	44 %	53 %	1 %	2 %
No	35 %	57 %	38 %	0 %	4 %

 

Married people preferred Bush 53 to 38.

 

Vote by Income	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
Under $15,000	7 %	57 %	37 %	1 %	4 %
$15-30,000	16 %	54 %	41 %	1 %	3 %
$30-50,000	24 %	49 %	48 %	0 %	2 %
$50-75,000	25 %	46 %	51 %	0 %	2 %
$75-100,000	13 %	45 %	52 %	0 %	2 %
Over $100,000	15 %	43 %	54 %	0 %	2 %

 

People who pay federal taxes (people making over $30k per year -- $28k and below generally get fed taxes back at tax refund time) supported Bush. Only reason why last election was close was because "the poor" overwhelmingly supported Gore.

 

Vote by Education	All	Gore	Bush	Buchanan	Nader
No H.S. Degree	5 %	59 %	39 %	1 %	1 %
High School Graduate	21 %	48 %	49 %	1 %	1 %
Some College	32 %	45 %	51 %	0 %	3 %
College Graduate	24 %	45 %	51 %	0 %	3 %
Post-Graduate Degree	18 %	52 %	44 %	0 %	3 %

Similarly while those in academia overwhelmingly liked Gore, those who just went to college to get out into the real world overwhelmingly liked Bush.

People who didn't even graduate from high school overwhelmingly liked Gore.

You see the correlation though - people who don't finish high school end up poor and need public assistance and end up voting for the candidate of the party promising to take from the producers to give to them.

I don't pretend to care about fairness in results. When someone yelled that Gore won the popular vote, that meant nothing to me. I don't care. Because I knew these stats. The margin for Gore's popular vote came from people who are on the dole. My greatest fear for my country is that over time we will become a nation of dependents. Look at those stats. The people who don't finish high school and end up poor are overwhelmingly supportive of Democrats. Over time, as services creep up into the middle class, you will slowly erode our freedoms and end up with a nation of dependents.  Take the adults who actually work for a living and the election wasn't really that close. Take the people who finished high school on up (Even those in academia) put them together and Bush won there too.

If you go through all the exit polls and start thinking about what the numbers mean you start to get a pretty clear picture of things.  The nation isn't as evenly divided (not in 2000 anyway) as some say. You have a slight but definite majority of those who work for a living, finished high school, and are living responsible lives in support of Bush. And you have a massive majority of those who have made poor choices in life who have their hands out waiting for the government to be their mom voting for Gore. And because there's now enough people who fit into that category, it has the effect of making elections quite close.

Which puts the Democrats in a position of wanting people to fail because as people fail in life, they inevitably become dependents of the government and hence constituents of the Democrats.  The only major exception to that are those in Academia or others who are exquisitely well educated who, in my opinion, are divorced from practical reality who imagine the down-trodden as victims of the rich or victims of powerful interests.

There are lots of ways to fail in life. But if you actually meet 1000 people who fall into the poor/uneducated/dependent category you'll find that the majority of them (if you don't believe this, use Google, this data is readily available) did at least 2 of the following:

1) Got pregnant before marriage

2) Didn't finish high school

3) Became addicted to a controlled substance

Note that I said two, not one. Everyone makes mistakes, but those who end up dependents of the government are typically guilty of having made two of those mistakes.  Sure, there are plenty of exceptions to that (so don't write letters about how your 28 year old friend's husband died leaving her with 4 kids, yes, there are legitimate victims in this). But in generally this is what causes someone to be dependent.

But many people choose not to learn about these things. It's a lot easier to say that Republicans are just a bunch of cold heartless bastards who are so greedy with their money that they don't want to help the downtrodden. The reality is that you will always have a certain percentage of the population that are just..well frankly just a bunch of losers. Throw money at them and they'll squander it and end up losers anyway. And when 60% of federal outlays now are about taking money from one person to give to another, I think it's fair to say that conservatives are already giving a lot.

Let's look at the stats again:

15% of the voters  makes over $100,000. Bush got their votes 54-43. That's a 11% margin (a massive landslide). Those people pay 54% of the federal taxes in this country. Heck, 90+% of the taxes are paid by those who make $50,000 or more which are all overwhelmingly Bush voters.  Like it or not, the picture is pretty darn clear -- the ones who vote for politicians for free goodies are, by and large, not paying for those goodies. They are basically using the federal government as a tool for self-enrichment.  Next time someone calls conservatives greedy, keep that in mind. It's not conservative (generally) voting for politicians promising to confiscate other people's money to hand over to them.

Will the United States eventually become a nation of dependents? It sure seems we're heading down that path. Now we have Bush and the Democrats both trying to outbid one another to hand out freebies to people.

This is making the rounds on the net.

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their
new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler
(a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough)
had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic"
some 2,000 years prior.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A
democracy will continue to exist up until the time that
voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts
from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates who promise the most
benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every
democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy,
(which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from
the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During
those 200 years, these nations always progressed through
the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage."

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University
School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out
some interesting facts concerning the most recent

Presidential election:

Population of counties won by:

Gore=127 million
Bush=143 million

Square miles of land won by:

Gore=580,000
Bush=2,2427,000

States won by:

Gore=19
Bush=29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:

Gore=13.2
Bush=2.1

Professor Olson adds:
"In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly
the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country.
Gore's territory encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..."

Olson believes theU.S.is now somewhere between the "apathy" and
"complacency" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy; with
some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the
"governmental dependency" phase.

I can't say I'm happy overall with the company's progress. It's no one's fault. It was just so many things are interconnected that it was bound that things would get off track.

We got IconPackager 2.5 out which has the smarter packaging in it and the encrypted format so that we can protect our intellectual property better from quasi-warez companies.

We then followed that up with IconDeveloper.

Which we followed up with BootSkin.

But it has bene DesktopX 2.1, the hugely ambitious update to DesktopX 2 and the program that is getting a large share of our resources internally as well as externally that has bunched things up.

Basically 3 major issues with their status:

[X] ActiveX controsl turn black when you move them around.
[ ] ActiveX controls for Flash games and such don't accept mouse input
[X] Complex objects don't always have their scripts started (seems fixed)
[?] ActiveX control Z-order always goes to top of a combined object group

We need to get DesktopX 2.1 out in order to get Object Desktop 2004 out the door.

We need to get Object Desktop 2004 out the door to release Universe Metal 2004

We need to release Universe Metal 2004 to release the Aquarium theme

On the games side things are chugging along nicely. We got a new GalCiv build up today. We got the maps done. Pretty pleased with how those turned out. We did figure out that the minor races are a pain when dealing with the custom maps (they imbalance things).

The Political machine I am probably most happy about right now. They say in business that successful companies are about hiring really smart people and they'll make things happen. Cari and Joe and Scott and Paul are the kinds of people who "just make things happen" very happy about how that's going. We ironed out bunches of issues today.

I spent a considerable amount of time dealing with lawsuit stuff. I'm glad I have a staff of people who can help wade through that stuff and break it down into sizeable chunks.

Once Object Desktop 2004 is out the door we can then execute on our 2004 strategies more effectively. I just want to get that done. The marketing and PR is all waiting on that so we just have to get DesktopX 2.1 out the door. The direct marketing plan for that is moving along with brochures in the making on that.

We have a really big WindowBlinds focused project about to go out that will be a shock to many and one that will make WindowBlinds much more prestigious.

I need to make Stardock Magazine and send that out too soon. Looks like I'll miss getting it by January.

The first issue for 2004 of WinCustomize Magazine is now out.  This month's issue talks about making icons, Samurize, Rainlendar, WorkShelf, BootSkin, the GUI Olympics 2004, and more! Check it out at the link below. Spread the word!

If you don't subscribe to WinCustomize Magazine, here's a link to the Christmas issue that went out last month. Lots of goodies in there that are still relevant now.

The new issue is currently going out to subscribers via email.