One of the things I've come to realize over the years is that our company's management team is incomplete. Much of Stardock's success can be attributed to the incredible talent of our company's developers and management.  But as we've grown, particularly in the past year, holes have appeared. 

For one thing, when you're small, having a management team full of specialists is good. I'm the only generalist in the management team. That works fine when you're a start-up.  But as you get bigger you need more generalists. Bigger companies need more people who know how to code, know how to market, know technology, know business, and know how to deal with other people diplomatically normally or ruthlessly when necessary.

What our company is missing, in other words, is a Vice President.  But you can't easily just hire a VP. I have friends who are well suited to the position but I know better than to hire friends into the company at this point. I have two friends who fit the mold perfectly, Phil and Kirk. So I say to myself, I need people like Phil and Kirk who aren't Phil and Kirk. But that's a real challenge.

I get resumes on my desk on a regular basis from sales managers, executives from large companies, chief technologists, etc.  None of them fit the critiera because they either:

• Are too business-oriented.  In a tech company, you have to know coding or else the developers will walk all over you. Developers respect other developers. I'm not a great coder but my coding credentials are strong enough that I have their respect. I also know the lingo and know how to evaluate different technologies. Too many would-be VPs just don't know technology well enough or at least as well as they think they do.
• Are too sales-oriented.  We already have an outstanding sales manager.
• Could fit the criteria but want huge HUGE salaries (i.e. >$200,000 annually) when in reality we aren't prepared to pay even half that in salary but have stock options.

This has really bitten me in the last few months as I've had to increasingly travel to companies to close deals that really are more suited to a VP.  One trip was to work out an agreement with a major games publisher. A couple weeks later I was off to the other coast to put together a project agreement on a major Object Desktop related project.  Two very different things both requiring me to fly out there.  That's time I'm not helping steer the company (and in 4th quarter, our busiest quarter).

Most entrepreneurs come in pairs or in threes.  That's how they avoid this. A group of friends get together and start a company together.  Stardock was founded just by me. And I'm an only child. And now it's too late to bring in friends to be principles because we're big enough to the point where there is definitely a hierarchy and while one of my closest friends does work at the office, we've known each other for decades now (we met when I started high school) so the company hasn't affected that and I'm not really in an authority position relative to him so it works out. A VP, on the other hand, is someone who would be in the direct chain of command and hence bringing in a friend at this point for that position wouldn't fly.

And so the search continues...

 

If you have a WinCustomize subscription, which is only $20 for 2 years presently, you can now download a new version of the WinCustomize Tray program.

This program sits in your system tray and informs you when new skins, themes, and wallpapers are added and lets you instantly download and apply them from an integrated GUI.  See screenshot for details.

If you're a subscriber, use Stardock Central and go to the WinCustomize tab in the software section to get it.

If you don't have a WinCustomize subscription, you can go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store/

 

Network World has reviewed DesktopX. Their conclusion? It's a killer app. Read the whole thing.

I've been a Tolkien fan for most of my life. I loved Lord of the Rings. But my favorite stories all take place in The Silmarillion, a collection of stories that take place long before the events of Lord of the Rings. It is in that book you get a much deeper understanding of the various characters.  You don't really get to scratch the surface of the real depth of middle earth in the movies. The books go into a bit more detail, particularly the appendixes at the end of Return of the King.

With Return of the King about to come into theatres, I figured now would be a good time to help give those of you who have enjoyed the movies and maybe even read the books some additional details on the characters and world that might make the series even more enjoyable than it already has.

Part I: Of Sauron, Gandalf, Saruman and the Balrog

These guys could be cousins. Literally. We understand that there is the race of men, the race of elves, the race of dwarves and even the ents. But Gandalf, Saruman and the Balrog belong to another race - the Valar.  Specifically, the sub-set of Valar known as the Maiar (basically those who are Valar but not as powerful). 

The Maiar are much different than the others. They are spirits essentially who can take on any form they choose. They can't die. Not in the way we think of death anyway. Instead, what can happen is that they can dwindle in strength to the point that they can no longer affect the material world.  Like all races, some Maiar are tougher than others. Balrogs are a particular type of Maiar. They're basically the name given to Maiar who took the side of Morgoth. 

Who's Morgoth? Well that's another discussion entirely. He was the one evil Valar. The most powerful, at the start, of them all possibly.  He was the most powerful being in Middle Earth. But ultimately he was defeated but his underling servant, Sauron the Maiar, survived and went into hiding until the Valar left again for the western most part of the world.

But getting back to how you can evil "kill" these guys, like I said, they can't die in the traditional sense. They can only be weakened to the point of being irrelevant. Sauron was once much much tougher than he is now. But he's already had his physical body destroyed twice. It isn't trivial, even for a Maiar, to come into physical being. When that body is destroyed, if the Maiar wants to again have a body it must expend its spiritual energy to do it. And that energy is lost forever. Morgoth expended much of his spiritual energy on making his armies and his weapons and other things.  That touches on the "magic" of middle earth. Magic, it could be said, is purely the spiritual energy of the various Valar or some of the first generation elves expended into a different thing. But once spent, it's gone.

Which brings us back to the ring. Sauron put much of his energy into a particular tool - the ring of power. He had to expend his spirit into it in order to make the ring powerful enough to dominate the other magical rings that had been made by an unusually strong elvish smith (named Celebrimbor who Sauron later killed). Think of the Ring of Power as being the magical equivalent of Black Orfice. With it, he could wield the power of all the various magical rings that had been created. But as you can imagine, doing that required sacrificing a great deal of power.  So if the ring is destroyed, Sauron will lose so much power that he will be effectively killed. He won't die though. He'll just be so impotent that he won't be able to affect reality anymore (i.e. the material world).

So what about Gandalf and Saruman? Why don't they seem so powerful?  5 Wizards. Technically called Istari. A special type of Maiar. Think of them as Maiar Cops. But they have been put under rules of engagement that they cannot break even if they want. For one thing, they have to take the form of men with all that comes with it (pain, hardship, hunger, etc.).  And, it could be argued, they actually had to invest more of their spirit in order to so accurately have the form of men. So if their bodies are destroyed, they risk not being able to form into a material form again.  In Gandalf's case, his spirit fled to the west when his body was broken during the battle with the Balrog. But he was decided he had remained steadfast and was sent back with his spirit reinvigorated and some of the invisible bonds that held him down loosened so that he could be more effective. 

You see, the Valar imposed these rules on the Istari because they didn't want Gandalf and Saruman to be tempted to go toe to toe with Sauron and take his place as a dark lord of Middle Earth. Clearly, given that Saruman became corrupted while even in his reduced form showed just how tempting it is for even Maiar to get corrupted when they're a lot stronger than those around them.  But Gandalf had proven his worthiness so the second time around he came back as Gandalf the white and much tougher than before. But still under all kinds of rules of engagement.  No going to the Dark Tower to battle Sauron one on one.  The Istari's job is to motivate the peoples of Middle Earth to work together to defeat Sauron.

As for the last 3 Istari that never get mentioned. No one really knows what the deal is with them.  One was named Radigast the Brown who makes only a brief appearance in the book and the other two are referred to as the "blue wizards" and just went off into the east never to be seen again.

So there you have it with regards to the Maiar. They are a particular group type of Vala who are pretty tough.  But to keep things in perspective, the first generation elves were about as tough as a Maiar. Elrond's ancestors could have kicked Sauron's ass. But we'll get to that soon enough...

 

As some of you know, WinCustomize experienced the catastrophic hardware failure of TWO main servers in the past month. The net result was that WinCustomize had to be moved to some of Stardock's other servers which slowed down all of Stardock's sites as well as WinCustomize's.

While Stardock pays for most of WinCustomize's costs in exchange for hosting and promoting skins and themes for its software, WinCustomize still has to pay for some of its bandwidth as well as hardware.

Anyone who's familiar with Internet servers knows you can't just buy a PC and throw it up there. Servers for sites such as WinCustomize (which gets over 2 million unique users per month visiting) are very expensive.

Which is why we're running a subscription drive. We need to get a minimum of 500 new subscriptions this month.  We're at 333 right now but it's slowing down. We need your help. WinCustomize subscriptions offer many benefits including access to a couple of premium WC suites, the WinCustomize browser, unlimited downloads, prioritized bandwidth, and many new goodies coming out this Spring/Summer.

You can purchase a subscription for $20 which lasts two years. That money goes directly to help keep the site running. See the link at the bottom to purchase.

But since we have 333, we were able to purchase and already implement one new server which hopefully you can already see a dramatic improvement in site speed.  Check out the libraries and compare how much faster it is to surf this site.  Our next server will be designed to provide more redundancy so that we don't experience down times due to hardware failures.  There is still much to be done but hopefully you can now see the benefits provided by a new server thanks to WinCustomize subscribers!

Boot screens on Windows support only VGA resolutions. That is 640x480 with 16 colors (sometimes boot screen uploaders make previews that are in high color but the actual boot screen is 16 colors).

Stardock has been working to allow BootSkin to support high color (16.8 million color) boot screens, high resolution boot screens, and animated boot screens.  But it is proving to be far more difficult than originally anticipated (we're going to write a technical paper on this when we're finished so developers and technical users can get an idea of the immense amount of effort involved).

Rather than delay 1.0 for that feature, we're going to go ahead and release 1.0 as freeware with only the standard boot screen features (16 color VGA).

That said, this new version has a host of bug fixes, especially for Windows 2000 users where it should now be totally seamless.  Another advantage of BootSkin is that boot screens are typically only 20K in size and end users can create them easily.

Have fun!

US forces captured Saddam Hussein last night in Iraq.

Users weigh in with their views on JoeUser.com

Saddam Hussein as captured during a lightning raid that apparently caught him quite unawares last night. CNN has a story on it here. This is good news on many levels.  For one thing, as there is likely to be a trial for his war crimes, there will finally be more attention given to the horrors committed by this man and his regime.  Opponents to the war in Iraq have been amazingly silent on all the evidence of mass murders committed by Saddam.  The one that chilled me to the bone was a mass grave in which a little girl was found still clutching a doll -- she was buried alive.

Saddam has been defiant about this already and responded, "They were thieves." Yea, all those women and children stealing...something..."  There will be plenty of shame to go around to those journalists, protesters, and others who turned a blind eye to the horrors perpetuated by Saddam against innocents.  A blind eye so that they could focus their ire on Bush. 

No doubt the fixation on Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of many reasons given for the toppling of Saddam, will still get plenty of coverage.  But I seem to recall little outrage over Kosovo when it turned out there was zero evidence of "ethnic" cleansing. A couple of mass graves with a few hundred young men in them was about the extent of "genocide" in Kosovo.  Were there street demonstrations in Europe and the United States over bombing civilians in Serbia over this? Nope.

Which makes one wonder -- do the people who are against the war in Iraq simply blinded by their hatred of Bush or are they racist? Racist in the sense that the mass deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by Saddam's regime isn't that big of a deal because they're not white?  After all, most of the anti-war people also propose turning everything over to the UN. The same UN that stood by and watched hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in Rwanda. Of course, those people weren't white. You see the pattern here? There's really only two likely scenarios: Either these people don't really think killing of non-white people is a big deal or they hate George W. Bush so much that it's clouding their rational thinking.  I tend to think it's a bit of both.

The capture of Saddam will bring to light the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. It will be incredibly difficult to sweep the atrocities under the rug (like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have done with their selective recount of war crimes). People around the world will finally have to come to grips that the United States did the right thing when it liberated Iraq from one of the most brutal monsters in history.  Certainly not the primary objective for US forces but one that cannot be denied nonetheless.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Quiz/Quiz.aspx?QuizID=51