Out with the old, in with the new. Happy New Year!

We are very close to reaching 600 subscriptions by the end of the year! Still 9 hours left and only 15 more subscriptions needed (at time of posting this) to reach 600.

So what are the subscriptions going for?

Hardware.

We've already put up 1 new server thanks to subscriptions from earlier in the month and the second server arrived during the holidays and will be installed next month.  With the additional subscriptions we will be able to buy more storage, software, and other goodies to help better serve you.

Thanks to all who have subscribed! We're very close to 600 for the month which would be a record!

What if you found a time machine in which you could go back 10 years in time? What business, political, and humanitarian things would you do or prevent? Or more to the point, that you could send a note to yourself 10 years in the past? What would you do? What if you only had a few minutes to decide? So you couldn't do research, you just had to go off the top of your head?

Here's what I would do if I were limited to things I could think of in 3 minutes.

1) Buy as much Microsoft stock as possible.

2) Make a note to not work with "Advanced Idea Machines". They are the ones who "published" Galactic Civilizations on OS/2 who never paid a dime in royalties.

3) Get out of the OS/2 market by end of 1996.

4) Start eBay.com

5) Start Amazon.com

6) Start Google.com

7) Send the government a list of "Bad things" that are going to happen such as 9/11, the Columbia explosion, USS Cole, Okalahoma City Bombing, Attack in Indonesia on Australians.

 

BUG FIXES:
- a couple of paste bugs fixed
- commented functions are now not parameterised in the config editor
- WMI language bug fixed
- Pin to desktop bugs fixed in the client
- 1px clipping on left of text meters fixed
- workaround for Windows multimonitor glitch with fullscreen applications that change your desktop resolution

IMPROVEMENTS:
- string alert values now work
- fonts remembered in config editor
- project interval rate can now be as low as 50ms (obviously to be used with care!)
- plugin meters changed to run at project update interval to allow faster updating (update intervals for the plugins are now the responsibility of the author - a sample plugin with a timer will be supplied)
- multimonitor support for the config editor (extended Design Area and overlays showing the area of each monitor)
- ID3v1.1 tag support for Winamp meters (title, artist, album etc.)
- navigation of meters in config editor via button presses
- zooming in the config editor stays centered
- %tab for tabs in text meters

NEW FEATURES:
- Server program - outputs Samurize data to XML or a PNG image
- Screensaver (by Tropics) - works in conjunction with the Server program to display a config as a screensaver

You can get it here.

The current DTD for the XML output can be found in your Samurize directory after installing, but the latest version of the SamurizeXML DTD can always be found here: http://www.samurize.com/SamurizeXML.dtd

NOTE FOR TRANSLATORS:
A few fields were missing from the English file included with the release. These are:

MainForm.cbShowDesktopOverlay.Caption=Desktop Overlay
MainForm.meTestAllPlugins.Caption=Test All Plugins
MainForm.meTextHelpText.Lines[2]=Tab: %tab

Thanks to Scelt for helping find these.

https://www.joeuser.com/forums.asp

If you like talking to other people on a wide variety of things, check out the forums here which are becoming quite lively. Blogs created on JoeUser have the option of automatically showing up on the forums as well.

Have fun!

 

Christmas arrived at WinCustomize right at the perfect time.  As some of you know, in November WinCustomize lost two of its servers due to catastrophic hardware failure.  While Stardock pays for most of the bandwidth and all the IT costs of WinCustomize, hardware is paid for via WinCustomize subscribers.

With 500 subscriptions, WinCustomize can replace the two down servers.  One has already been put in place which is why the site isn't as slow as it was at the start of the month.  The other one has been ordered and should be on-line in mid January.

From there, we then hope to add one more server in a mini-drive in January so that there's more redundancy (i.e. so that skin authors content is better protected against catastrophic failure).

Thank you to everyone who has ever subscribed and to those who subscribed in December.

WinCustomize subscriptions enable users to have unlimited bandwidth use of the site, a couple of premium suites, the WinCustomize browser (which is REALLY cool) and the WinCustomize System Tray application.

Merry Christmas to everyone and thank you for your support!

No matter where you are, have a merry Christmas!

Hello fellow net addicts!  Wherever you are, whoever you are, Merry Christmas!

Join the virtual party here. Tell us where you are, what you're doing and have a great day!

Attack of the Clones is on tonight. Oh so wrong.

A long while back I wrote a fan-fiction synopsis/screen play of how I imagined/hoped Episode 2 and 3 would be. My Anakin isn't bitchy and whiney and angry. Instead, he's more of a rogue. A Han Solo type. Happy go lucky whose fatal flaw is over confidence. He's so self secure that what leads him down the dark path is his belief that light side, dark side are really just artificial terminologies.

But what I imagined Episode 2 being was the movie where we would see Anakin as a true hero. A glimpse of how he might have been. He is the little boy from Phantom Menace grown up. Full of goodness, light hearted, happy, and seemingly normal. No dark side. No tantrums. No stalking of Amidala.

My Anakin is Indiana Jones with a light saber. Anyway, if anyone's interested, I can clean up my stuff and post it. Just respond here if you're interested so I can gauge how much interest there is.

In my earlier article on misjudging the American character, I argued that the world needs to give up this notion of demanding that we become introspective about 9/11. They need to stop trying to get us to ask "Why do they hate us?".  It ain't gonna happen.  Americans, as history has shown, will do whatever it takes to overcome an enemy. Whatever it takes. I pointed out that in 1945 the majority of Americans, according to polls at the time, supported the elimination of the Japanese as a people.  I wasn't arguing that this was a good thing. I merely pointed this out. My argument focused on trying to get people to start looking at things realistically. The Middle East needs to worry more about the "American Street". It needs to stop expecting that the west and the United States in particular, live to a standard of behavior that they themselves seem unable or incapable of living up to. It is the Islamic world that needs to stop its terrorists. Not to help us. But to help themselves. Because if push comes to shove and it's a choice between us and them, we'll choose us in a nanosecond.

The response to my article was predictable. It boiled down to two basic responses: Either the standard "shoot the messenger" response in which I was the bad guy for pointing out these facts or that my article was "proof" of how blood thirsty Americans are.

Both responses show a certain...naiveté about the world and about its history.  Perhaps I should have renamed my article to this: "Americans are humans".  About 60 years ago the Europeans exterminated about 12 million of its own citizens. Of course, ask a European and they'll blame the Germans. Ask a German and they'll blame the Nazi's. Ask a former Nazi and they'll blame the SS. And so on.  But any student of history of World War II will tell you that it was a team effort by many different people across many different European countries.

Meanwhile Russia, China, Japan have also exterminated millions of other people. Not in battle. Just good old fashion mass murder.  Rwanda saw the same thing not that long ago.  In other words, no matter where you go, people have amply demonstrated that large segments of a given population, for reasons we don't understand, can commit genocide of various levels.

But apparently, this fact is lost on some people. You can almost imagine them with their hands over their ears, eyes closed, yelling "La la la! I can't hear you! La la la!". And for these people, they pretend that Americans are somehow magically different. At the same time they say we're a bunch of blood thirsty war mongers, they also fully expect that these same ignorant, blood thirsty, simplistic, gun toting, death penalty loving, CO2 producing Saurons will always show amazing restraint no matter the cause.  Sure, good chunks of the European countries might exterminate huge swaths of their own population based on some racial theory and certainly the Japanese can't help but to think of Koreans as sub-human and those who aren't Islamic really don't deserve to live in the first place, but the Americans must take whatever is dished out to them. Because they deserve it.

But Americans are human. Simply because, thus far, the US has shown a great deal of restraint in its response to 9/11 (and if you don't think it has, you're kidding yourself) doesn't mean that restraint is infinite.  That was what I was trying to get across in my previous article.

It is futile to try to argue that Americans somehow deserved 9/11. It does more harm than good to shrilly yell "Ask yourselves why they hate you!". No matter where in the world you go, people are people. And when one group of humans feels threatened by another group, the response has always been the same - eliminate or subjugate the other group.

The American people are a remarkably tolerant people who are slow to anger. And like other democracies, its system is designed to blunt the rash passions of the majority. But at the end of the day, the Americans are just as human as anyone else.  I suggest those who see the United States as the villain take a fresher perspective.  There are great masses of the Arab Islamic world that are filled with murderous rage against the west and the United States in particular. And some of those people endeavor to get weapons that could do the American people great harm believing that they can somehow win. They can't. Their best case scenario is peaceful co-existence with the west and the United States.  Their worst case scenario is their complete annihilation. Don't pretend it couldn't happen because it's happened before thousands upon thousands of times in history and it'll probably continue to happen thousands of times in the future at various scales.

It is time for those who oppose American policies to become a little more even handed in their thinking. They need to stop treating Islamic Arabs as children and make those countries and those cultures live by the same civilized standard that one expects of the United States and its friends.  And they need to pressure these countries to stop inciting violence against westerners. Because if they don't, at some point they may prove that Americans are just as human as anyone else and do what humans have always done throughout history when they feel threatened.

Don't shoot the messenger.