I often talk to people who are convinced that that aliens are visiting our planet. They believe in UFOs.  Having thought about it, I've concluded that it's highly unlikely that we're being visited by aliens.

It's not that I don't think there is intelligent life in the universe. Space is big. Very big. And there are trillions of worlds in this universe and so statistically it seems pretty likely there are intelligent beings on other planets. But how close would these beings be?  One of the great misconceptions about evolution is that intelligent life, such as humans, is inevitable.  It's not. In fact, consider this: In the something like 3 billion years that the Earth has existed, humans are the only ecomorph that could have built a civilization.

Let's talk about ecomorphs first.  An ecomorph is a general bodily shape. Pick a time in history and odds are the same ecomorphs will appear.  Eliminate mammals and reptiles from a habitat and eventually you will end up with birds that will fill all the ecomorphs. Hard to believe? It's happened countless times.  New Zealand was once totally dominated by birds who filled in all the common ecomorphs. Mammals and reptiles failed to colonize New Zealand because of its relative isolation. Over time, these birds evolved to form the common ecomorphs (flying predators, land based predators, land based herbivores, etc.).  We think of birds as feathered flying things because that is the one ecomorph that this particular class of animal has successfully dominated.  But take away the mammals and reptiles from say North America, give some time, and you'll end up with herds of large animals that are essentially flightless birds.

Some ecomorphs show up again and again. Vultures, for instance, are on every continent even though genetically they have nothing in common. They are simply two types of birds that evolved to fill that niche (the flying carrion eater). It's really the niche that determines the ecomorph.

Which brings us back to our friends the humans. Humans have a few very unusual traits amongst animals. Traits that are all required in order to have built civilization (as we know it anyway). The first trait is obvious - large brains. Brains, however, are not very advantageous until they get to a certain point. They consume a great deal of energy and thus require a lot of food to power. That energy has to deliver something pretty useful in exchange or the species quickly becomes extinct. A large brain on its own isn't enough. Dolphins have reasonably large brains and they're not likely to be colonizing space any time soon. This brings us to the second particularly unusual trait amongst humans - our arms (not hands, we'll get to that). Consider every animal you can think of in the history of the world. How many can perform the simple duty of reaching back and touching their own backs?  In the 3+ billion years that life of some sort has existed on this planet, only primates have evolved to be able to do that. What a fantastical coincidence that primates happened to be blessed not just with this truly unique ability but also have large brains? And don't kid yourself, the two did not evolve together. These two things were happy coincidence that led to the final and most important and unique trait for humans.

The last and most important trait that is unique to humans and yet required to build a civilization is our hands.  Once again, out of the billions of species of animals that have existed on this planet, only humans have hands this dexterous. Not even our primate cousins can do as much with their hands as we can. Forget our huge brains for a second. Our hands on their own are truly unique. We can make things with our hands. Of course, making things with our hands would mean nothing without our large brains. But having one does not necessarily mean the other would evolve.  Give a gazelle a large brain and it's still lion food. Give it our hands and it's still going to get chowed down too.

In other words, humans aren't just unique for our large brains. There are 3 different wholly unique aspects to humans that in all the history of our planet never evolved as an ecomorph before. The dinosaurs roamed the earth from 300 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Did any of them have the ability to reach behind their heads? Did any of them have hands that could grasp and manipulate anything? Did any of them have particularly large brains? No. The closest you get are the raptors who are probably only as smart as a mid level mammal (despite what Jurassic Park may make you think). And they weren't scratching their backs with their claws.

And consider the unlikely ness that mammals are the dominate species at all. If it weren't for a meteor hitting the earth precisely 65 million years ago there's nothing to say that dinosaurs wouldn't still be masters of this planet and our ancestors still being small rodents on the edge of extinction.

So what does this have to do with aliens? A lot actually. You see, while we can debate all day whether life may exist elsewhere in this galaxy or universe, the real question comes down to what are the odds of intelligent life existing. Even if you manage to get life going in the first place somehow, and even if they somehow manage some sort of sexual reproduction or equivalent, you aren't anywhere close to having intelligent life. And I suspect just getting complex life requires a number of exceedingly unlikely events to occur. And it seems pretty obvious that getting to intelligent life requires a set of remarkable coincidences that are so unique and so unlikely that it's not something we're likely to find on even 1 out of a billion planets that already have complex life.

Which doesn't rule out intelligent life. Like I said, space is big. But that's also the problem. Space is very very big. And so if there is other intelligent life out there, the odds are that it is very very far away.

And if it is really that far, it just doesn't seem likely that they would use their trans-galactic-warp engines to buzz hicks on farms like a bunch of rowdy teens taking out dad's car.  I think the more likely scenario is that intelligent life is simply too far away for us to realistically ever come in contact with. Then again, I could be wrong. And if so, I'll be the first to welcome our hyper-intelligent space ant overlords.

There is a chink in the mighty iTunes armor. Those of you who follow this blog know that I've been a strong proponent for Apple's iTunes. But today I discovered something I wasn't aware of before: iTunes will not burn MP3 CDs with commercially downloaded music.

Why is that a big deal? The other players probably don't do that either right? (actually I'm pretty sure that Windows Media Player does but I could be wrong). The reason it's a big deal is that if I want to make an MP3 CD for listening to in the house on our stereo (which plays MP3 CDs), I have to burn them to regular music CDs, then burn them back as MP3s.

Which gets to the economic harm part for Apple: I was about to buy an iPod.  In fact, I went to Best Buy today and they were out of them. I was going to get the iPod because I've so "standardized" on iTunes for buying my music that I figured it would be less hassle to just get the iPod and use my commercially bought music that way.

 

But the iPod for iTunes advantage evaporates for me once I'm stuck having to make audio CD archives of all my music.  Because at that point, I can use any portable audio device to play those. And at that point, that puts the iPod having to compete on the same ground as the other portable devices and sorry to say, the iPod carries quite a premium price when in fact many other portable players now are just as good and cost less.

iTunes may have been designed to be a great way to sell more iPods for Apple, but its inability to create the increasingly popular MP3 CDs takes away a big advantage for a lot of people.  And it's foolish as well. It doesn't stop piracy. If I wanted to pirate these songs I still could by burning the plain audio CD (which I'll now have to do so that I can rip them from CD to turn into unprotected songs so that I can make an MP3 CD to play on our stereo).  Sigh.

 

Through life we all have experienced, to varying degrees, how high ideals don't survive the encounter with real life. To put it another way, life is unfair and despite noble sentiments otherwise, some things are true even if they shouldn't be true.  I've always been a very social person and one to talk to people about all kinds of things (which shouldn't be surprising since I started a blog site).  I've been running BBSes, bulletin boards, forums, chat channels, you name it for the past 17 years straight.  Like many of you, I'm just really interested in people. What they think. What they do. And why.

So here is a list of things I've found to be true about people that are arguably not fair but nonetheless are generally true. In some cases, I feel the same way as the "norm", in others, I don't.

1) Women who have many sexual partners are "sluts". Men who do are "studs". It's not fair but it is true.  Personally I think it awful (at least in the sense that guys should not take pride in how easy they are either). But like it or not it's something we have to deal with. But at the same time, men are still generally compared by their earning potential. That's not fair either. Reading through the various blogs it's pretty apparent that many women are operating on the belief of how life should be rather than how it actually is. Be careful who you share yourself with. Put thought into it. Try to think ahead.  When you're a teenager or young adult it is difficult to realize that you still have your whole life ahead of you and that the teen years will be relatively unimportant compared to the rest of your life. But the decisions you make then can still have long lasting damage. Girls/women who are "easy" decrease the pool of "good" men that they will later have access to or will create significant problems for themselves later in life. 

One night stands and general promiscuousness may not seem to do harm at the time but from what I've seen over the years, it comes back to haunt women much more than men.  Men get off the hook on this kind of behavior for some reason but women are permanently marked as being "slutty".  But like I said, at the same time, it's pretty apparent whether people like to admit it or not that women are much more attracted to men who seem to be financially well off.  There have been many studies over the years demonstrating that when it comes to love, women are the ones who are much more practical and men much more emotional. Pretty ironic eh?

2) Being on time matters. When it comes to first impressions of any kind, being punctual really is a big deal in the United States (and UK). In other societies it doesn't matter as much. Generally speaking, you can't go wrong by simply making your appointment, meeting, date, whatever on time.  This is regularly understated as someone being "casual" about their appointments but in terms of success, particularly in business, punctuality matters a great deal.

3) Tell the truth. Both men and women regularly fall into the belief that it is easier to tell someone what they think they want to hear rather than the whole truth. Eventually the truth will slip out. Obviously it's easier to just not do things that you are ashamed of to the point that you need to be dishonest about them to your friend, boss, co-worker, spouse, significant other, etc.  But most people at times do do things they are ashamed of and honesty really is the best policy. Take the short term pain of telling the truth. Because if the issue is significant, it will come out and the longer that truth has been hidden (or longer the lie has been perpetuated) the more damning it will be.

4) Listening matters. If you find yourself doing most of the talking (Draginol looks down at the floor embarrassed) then you should probably put some effort into becoming a listener. This is particularly true if you are a man. Men of few words are almost always considered more attractive and more commanding of respect.  Don't confuse shyness with being a listener. They aren't the same. Someone who makes eye contact and is clearly self confident but has chosen to listen to your words carefully is going to gain the respect of others much more completely and faster than the person who just seems to talk to hear their own voice.  (of course, knowing this and being able to act on this knowledge are two different things...)

5) High school sucks for most people. People who say that those years are the best years of their lives should be flogged or pitied. One or the other. I thought I was the only one who hated high school and felt terrible being told that these were the glory days and I should be enjoying them. But as I got out into the world and talked to others it became clear that most people I talked to hated high school. The challenge is getting through it without doing any long term damage to your future. 15 to 21 year olds should just say to themselves "none of this will matter much in 10 years, I'll just do the best I can."

6) First loves are probably not true loves. The problem with being a teen or young adult is a lack of perspective. You have nothing to compare your experiences to. Hence many young adults make the mistake of over-committing to their "first loves". What they feel is new and stronger than anything they've felt before. Very true too. But it's all relative isn't it?  My "first love" was in early high school and I was certain that it was "real love". But there is little that can compare to the quiet intimacy of sitting on the couch watching a favorite show or movie or whatever knowing that you've been with him or her for a decade and know everything about them while your children play in the background. And even then, there are probably greater levels of intimacy than that that I simply don't know of yet because I'm still young too. 

7) More than intelligence, more than ambition, self-discipline is the key to success. And for those warm fuzzy people who try to define success out of existence, I mean success in the sense of having accomplished concrete goals. Success doesn't have to mean money, though money in our capitalist society often goes hand in hand with any kind of significant accomplishment, success has to do with having goals and making those goals a reality.  With success comes self-esteem and often happiness and joy and contentment. And often times getting to a goal simply is a matter of finishing it. Most things aren't fun to do all the time but sticking with them ad finishing those things is what self-discipline is all about.  My own success and wealth boils down to this - I am not a great programmer but I had one trait that most other developers working purely on their own don't have -- the discipline to actually finish what I started.   Self-discipline can be applied to almost any endeavor.

8) Recognize that men and women are different.  Duh right? Yet we live in a society that increasingly tries to blur that distinction.  Men want to provide solutions. Women want to provide understanding. Single men are driven to try to "conquer" as many women as possible. The men who don't are either unable or are mentally strong enough to fight those urges (either from a sense of personal conviction or from a moral point of view). Less scrupulous men have figured out what women want to hear: Women like being made to feel special. Since most men are clueless about this, the guys who have figured out this magical secret can ruthlessly exploit it.  Ask a girl who has been with guys (often a lot of them) why she did what she did and she'll say "They made me feel special". That doesn't mean women should be thinking every bouquet of flowers or serenade or poem or whatever is some ploy to get them in the sack, but remember this - being made to feel special isn't about individual deeds. Being made to feel special comes from the day to day treatment. If the guy you are with treats you poorly on a day to day basis but you find yourself forgiving him because of individual deeds of valor, beware!

On the other hand, where women are guilty of degrading themselves into being "sleazy" due to having their self-esteem manipulated, guys are more guilty for going off and marrying the first girl they date. I suspect many reading this have seen this. Guy meets girl. Girl is kind of nasty. Girl gets guy to quit seeing his friends and isolates him. Girl and guy get married and you never hear from the guy again. Guys - beware of girls who try to isolate you from your "Support network".  While more common for girls to do this with guys, it happens to women as well and in those cases it can be outright dangerous.  Men may not try to isolate their wives/girl friends from their support network as often but when they do, they are often in the case of abusive men.

So either way - the right person for you is going to access your friends and family for who they are. And if they can't, then you're probably not right for each other.

So there are 8 observations I've made.  Maybe you totally disagree with them. But they are things I have found to be true even if I wish they weren't or in many cases strongly disagree with them.

 

"Invented on the Mac"

If I keep ripping out my hair I'll be bald in no time.  When it comes to getting press coverage in the tech industry, it's a lot easier to get it if you're a Mac program than a PC program. The Mac has always gotten far more attention than its numbers warrant. Often times, the media will actually make statements implying that a given program is unique to the Mac helping carry on the myth that the Mac is the land of innovation while Windows is the land of cheap knock offs.

This has always stung us at Stardock because we've come up with some really cool things over the years that are quite popular. And then the Mac will get something like it and suddenly something we've had for years will be treated as if it's the copy -- complete with Mac fanatics attacking us for copying their stuff.

We first ran into this with WindowFX where Mac users claimed we were ripping off the Mac despite WindowFX pre-dating MacOS X.  WindowFX adds alpha blended shadows to windows and lets you morph windows when you minimize them. "Just another cheap Mac rip off, can't these PC users come up with anything???"  Except we were first. But emails from outraged Mac users come in on a regular basis.

WindowFX was the first program to introduce alpha blended shadows under windows. Shadows under windows is an old idea so we never made a big deal about being the first to create realistic looking shadows. But many Mac users started retroactively giving Apple credit for something we did long before.

So when we read articles on MacOS X about how polished and slick and pretty it is as opposed to "ugly old Windows" we grit our teeth.  Object Desktop is $49.95. I suspect the price difference between a high end PC and a high end Mac is greater than $49.95. And in many cases, we were the ones innovating.

DesktopX & Konfabulator

But the introduction of Konfabulator on the Mac has taken the cake when it comes to the media assuming that something on the Mac is unique. Konfabulator is a program that lets you put "widgets" on your desktop. Think of widgets as mini-programs. Widgets can do pretty much anything you want them to do and are powered by a scripting language (Javascript in Konfabulator's case).

Widgets can do things like display the current weather information, put a stock ticker on your desktop, control your MP3 player more conveniently, have a nice looking analog clock, display an appointment calendar, or just replace your desktop icons with nicer, larger versions. So widgets are things that occupy the same importance as desktop icons. They're useful but they're not critical. But they are far better than icons because they are interactive and live.

But moving beyond "icons" into widgets is a revolutionary concept. Icons are static, they don't do anything other than sit there. Widgets can do so much more while using hardly any memory.

Konfabulator is a great program. I use it on my Macintosh. I'm a registered user of it even. And Konfabulator would deserve a lot of credit for this innovation if it weren't for the inconvenient fact that DesktopX preceded it by THREE YEARS. 

To be fair, DesktopX 1.0 wasn't as nice as Konfabulator is when it came to delivering widgets. But that has to do more with where hardware was back in 1999 than software technology. We had to deal with Windows 95 users running on Pentium 100s. In all our demos we made it clear which direction we were going with this. As hardware (and video cards) improved DesktopX would continuously become more and more interactive.  And we had the content. We had the weather widgets, CPU widgets, Stock tickers, Drive space meters, etc.  The kinds of things that people expect today we had back in 1999.  And DesktopX content could be created by end users. No compiler needed.

On DesktopX, widgets are called are broken up into widgets and objects. If you install DesktopX you never even have to load it up to use widgets. Widgets are .EXE's that just use DesktopX as the run-time. So even someone comparing the two will say "Yea, but DesktopX is way more complicated than Konfabulator." No, not if you are comparing the two directly. With Konfabulator, you must run Konfabulator first to run one of its widgets. With DesktopX, as long as DesktopX is installed somewhere you can run a widget as you would any other program -- complete with a task manager icon or system tray icon for it.

Where DesktopX seems more "complex" is that if you're running DesktopX you can then deal with objects and themes, both concepts that Konfabulator doesn't have.  Moreover, DesktopX includes a development environment so that even casual users can create things. By contrast, in Konfabulator, only techies can make widgets realistically. Making a Konfabulator widget involves opening up a text editor and writing Javascript. 

In DesktopX, objects are integrated into the DesktopX GUI. This makes it much easier to create objects. And as a result, you tend to have much more complex content made with DesktopX than you would Konfabulator because it's easier to deal with dozens of objects put together.  These objects can then be exported as either an object pack (for other people to modify), as a theme (to replace ones desktop) or as a widget. So DesktopX may seem more complicated but only because it tried to make it easier for people to create content rather than be purely at the mercy of some small group of techies who have mastered the black art of widget making.

But we've been doing this -- for years. Complete with Javascript and VB Script support. And DesktopX isn't obscure. It has remained one of the top 10 desktop enhancements on Download.com. In fact, it's been on the Download.com top downloads chart for 160 consecutive weeks. That's every week for 3 years straight. At the time I write this, it has about 1.8 million downloads on Download.com.

And yet articles still regularly come out talking about how Konfabulator is unique and that nothing on Windows exists like it. DesktopX can do everything Konfabulator does and much much more. And some of the "much more" stuff is pretty significant -- even for widgets. DesktopX supports animation for instance. Fluid animation. So we've got objects (widgets) of things like fish gracefully swimming across the screen.  And users can easily customize their objects. Color, size, shadows, etc. All from a GUI.

Konfabulator Widgets in action

DesktopX Objects in action

But DesktopX can do much more than just put widgets on your desktop, you can build your own secure, custom desktop, kiosk, etc.

A DesktopX theme in action. And like DesktopX objects, you can export these and share them. Like this one? Make it your desktop by clicking here.

My point isn't to try to argue that one is better than the other. I work for Stardock so any sort of opinion on that would be highly biased. My point is that when it's come to media coverage, Mac programs tend to get much easier coverage in relation to their actual user base. There are a lot more DesktopX users than Konfabulator users out there. It's not an obscure program. Every major skin site has a section for it and has for years. It has millions of downloads on C-net and a ton of downloads on the other file download sites as well. Heck, it's the program movie and TV studios have used to create futuristic computer screens. Don't people wonder how they make those?  I even demoed it on TechTV's The Screen Saver's a year and a half before Arlo Rose showed up on there. 

In conclusion, if you're looking for "Konfabulator for Windows" the answer is, it's existed for years already. Konfabulator could be more accurately described as DesktopX for the Mac (or the closest thing to it). Though listening to the media, you would think it was (again) Mac users who came up with this concept of extending the desktop to have neat little gadgets on them.

Notes:

DesktopX's home page: www.desktopx.net

Object Desktop (a suite of desktop enhancements that includes DesktopX) www.objectdesktop.com

Konfabulator's home page: www.konfabulator.com

Stardock's home page: www.stardock.com

The Creative Muvo is a great MP3 player...while it functions. Last night mine died for no apparent reason. I don't even use it that much. It simply stopped working.

So I went on-line to see what I could do. Turns out, the Creative Muvo is very unreliable. Many people pointed out that after around 90 days they tend to just crap out. Which is annoying for a $80 product.

So scratch one MP3 player. I'll have to look around for a new Mp3 player.

Without even knowing it, dozens of skinners were using ripped images.

The weather images that you have seen in various docks, DesktopX objects, DesktopX themes, Samurize, and other programs that have made it far and wide are rips. Those images were taken from a Macintosh program called Konfabulator and made by Arlo Rose.  They are (I think) based on images from Weather.com but only in terms of inspiration, they are wholly his works.

But they seemed to have made their way to the freeware world on Windows in the form of weather plugins, Samurize scripts, etc. and eventually then made their way to DesktopX objects which there are now many that make use of those images.

Inadvertent or not, those images do belong to someone and they took effort to create.  But we don't want all these skinners and such to be out of luck. So Stardock has gone and created high quality weather images to replace them.

Authors on WinCustomize who have used Arlo's images without his permission (i.e. all of them) will be contacted and can use the Stardock created images as well.  Insize the two ZIP files (one a set of PNGs the other icons) is a permission.txt file.  Essentially Stardock is providing permission for skin authors and themers everywhere to use these icons as long as they include the permission.txt in some way (in DX, you can attach it in the summary page).  That means even Samurize scriptors and yZ Dock plugins and Sysmetrix skins and such that use weather images that they shouldn't have permission to use these new weather images.

 

Here are the two images side by side.  We have worked to ensure that the new Stardock images (created by Paul Boyer at Stardock) have the same dimsensions and the same general style to them (still based on the weather.com images).  The image names are also the same so a DesktopX object maker can just rename their .dxpack to .zip, open it up, copy the images in there, and then rename it to .dxpack and voila, it's updated and ready to be re-submitted.

No one has to use these images but we will be removing images that use Arlo's images without his permission shortly. We are providing these as a way to make it easier for authors to use images they do have permission to use.

The Files are located at:

https://www.stardock.com/files/weather/weather_icons.zip

https://www.stardock.com/files/weather/weather_PNG.zip

You can download DesktopX at http://www.desktopx.net

Stardock has released release candidate 2 of its freeware boot screen changer.  RC2 displays the progress animation more smoothly and includes a full screen preview of what a boot screen looks like before applying (complete with animated progress animation).

BootSkin supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and even Longhorn. It is the only boot screen changer that doesn't patch the Windows kernel to change the boot screen (making it much safer to use).

Windows boot screens are 640x480 with 16 colors but with tools such as SkinStudio you can optimize those images so that they look pretty good.

If you want to change the way Windows looks and feels (the GUI) the main way to do that is with WindowBlinds. But some people on Windows XP have found that if their hack their uxtheme.dll they can apply additional msstyles, a basic skinning format made by Microsoft to handle the blue/silver/olive visual styles. So some users have managed to put together some nice msstyles.

Most visual styles made are for WindowBlinds, but if you do manage to come across an msstyle on some site, you can now have it work on WindowBlinds very easily if you have SkinStudio 4.01 installed.

Here's a video of it in action (requires Windows Media Player 9)

 

This will work whether you're running Windows 98, ME, 2000, or Windows XP.

When we got married my wife and I had put a great deal of thought into important issues to us long before we had gotten too serious. We didn't enter into marriage lightly. I think it is for that reason we have had such a splendid marriage over the years. We rarely bicker and have few significant arguments.

When it comes to raising children, we bring very different life experiences to it. And boy are those life experiences different. Different to the point that it creates real conflict on what the best way to raise our children are.

I was raised by my mom. A single parent. She was a firm believer in discipline. I don't mean spanking but rather instilling personal discipline. Setting boundaries but at the same time providing a fair degree of freedom. That freedom was always tied closely with responsibility. Responsibility carries with it pretty big negatives for failure. You are free to make decisions but poor judgment would have negative consequences.

My mom and I didn't get along very well when I was a teenager because of boundary battles. But I think in the end I'm a better person for it. When I became a parent I finally "got it". That more than almost any other traits, self discipline and personal responsibility of ones actions are the pathway to success. Intelligence, ambition, charisma are all very helpful traits, but they are ultimately empty without being tied to having the self discipline to do what needs to be done and taking personal responsibility for ones life. That was what my mom was trying to do, instill personal discipline and personal responsibility to provide me with the tools to succeed in "the real world".

My wife's parents, by contrast, took the opposite path. They took the path of wanting to be their daughter's "buddy" rather than being the parental figure. In my relations with them, this works out pretty nicely as I get along with them quite well. If my father-in-law was my age, he'd be someone I would hang out with if he lived near me. But setting boundaries and instilling personal discipline were not their priorities. Their focus was to try to make their kids as happy as they could be. Unconditionally supportive.  Needless to say, my wife got along a lot better with her parents than I got along with my mom. On the other hand, I would say that as much as my mom and I disagreed, there are few if any parental decisions on her part that I would be ashamed to discuss with people. The same can't be said of some of my wife's parents' decisions as parents. But which is more important? The child's short term happiness or the child acquiring self-discipline and personal responsibility?

Of course, when you have children, which path do you take? The easy answer is to say "A little of both" but in practice that's really not practical. That basically would just mean I'm the "bad guy" and my wife would be "the buddy".  So we've struggled with that but we've slowly moved to the conclusion that it is more important to raise our children in such a way that we're providing them the tools to be successful adults and the two most important tools would be self-discipline and personal responsibility.

That doesn't mean we're our child's adversaries by any means. We love our children and want to provide as much love and support and nurturing as we can. But we also want to set boundaries, give them responsibility. We want to give them the freedom to succeed as well as freedom to fail in their endeavors and learn from those experiences. I want them to experience the rewards of success but also understand the consequences of failure or of poor judgment.

Self-esteem cannot be given from without. It has to come from within. There is no substitute for success. I don't mean success in a broad sense, I mean success in a given activity whether that be success at passing a test or winning a game, or helping another person. Self esteem is about feeling good about yourself. Feeling good about yourself has to come from within -- from personal achievements great and small.  To achieve one needs to have had the freedom to succeed as well as learn from mistakes. It takes self-discipline and personal responsibility to succeed.

What we want to do is teach them skills they need to be successful in life while at the same time providing them with a loving, stable, and nurturing environment. It's a daily challenge but one all parents must face.

Price points are one of the most challenging things in business to come up with.  At what point does something become too expensive for your target audience? It is something we wrestle with constantly. Raising the price decreases the number of buyers but not at a steady rate. The challenge is always figuring out the highest price you can sell for while maintaining the relatively biggest user base.

Sometimes pricing things too low can hurt you. People assume that a product or service is of low quality if it isn't within a certain price range.  So coming up with a good price is always a real challenge.

Over the years we've found these price points to be relatively strong:

$6.95, $8.95, $9.95, $14.95, $19.95, $24.95, $29.95, $34.95, $39.95, $44.95, $49.95, $69.95, $89.95, $99.95, $129, $149, $179, $249, $299, $499.

But not all of these price points are equally good. And their strength changes from product to product.

For example, Object Desktop, our company's primary product, is priced at $49.95.  We would prefer to have it at $69.95 but we believe that the user base would collapse.  $49.95 is something people will buy without too much worry.  At $69.95 it enters a different realm. The only reason we've been able to stay at $49.95 is because our user base has been so helpful in helping out on our forums with other users who have questions. Otherwise we'd either have to drop features or raise the price.

A more pressing one is our upcoming expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations.  We originally envisioned it being $19.95. That is a great impulse buy price point. The problem is that it's not likely to be widely distributed which changes the target demographic considerably.  So we've been playing around with raising the price to $24.95 or even $29.95.  But that price may actually decrease sales to the point where we actually generate less revenue as a result. So we're still agonizing on that.

The reason you always see .95 or .99 by things is because people, particular males, don't pay as much attention to the cents portion. Moreover, males are more likely to round down for some reason than females. Which is why you'll hear some guy say "Yea, it was like 20 bucks" with the wife correcting "It's $30" when the actual amount was $24.95 or $29.95.  But it's hard to say if that's still the case, that was from research back in the 50s and 60s and shoppers are much more savvy. 

We usually just go by our own gut reactions. Anything under $10 is basically "free". At that point it's more a matter of dealing with the obnoxiousness of on-line stores as well as factoring in whether what I'm buying is is "worth" the amount they're asking.  I'd feel stupid paying $9.95 for Q-tips. Same on skins. For some reason $9.95 on an icon package or suite seems just a tad too high. Yet $8.95 is fine even though it's only $1 less. So a lot of time you have to play it by ear.

I decided to write this article because I just couldn't find any good information or studies on the net about price points. The 19.95 to 24.95 difference is a big one for instance that many struggle with.

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.