It's hard to believe that it's been over 2 years since DesktopX 1 was released.  An during the subsequent 2 years Stardock has been working on DesktopX 2.

Tomorrow: DesktopX 2 will be publicly released.

What is DesktopX 2? It is a desktop enhancement that lets Windows users turbo-charge their desktop by adding desktop objects, widgets, and enhancing their desktop icons.

It is one of the progrmas that makes up Object Desktop, a suite of desktop enhancements that includes WindowBlinds, IconPackager, ObjectBar and more.

Here's the home page it will be at: http://www.desktopx.net

Every week I'm going to try to find cool things from around the web and share with you. On the computer, my favorite thing to do is skinning. Or more to the point, I really like to tweak up Windows XP to match my own insane way of doing things.

The best way to do that is with Object Desktop. Not just because my employer makes it but because it really is the best way to do this sort of thing. Another good program to have is CursorXP. It has a freeware version if youw ant to give it a try at http://www.cursorxp.com. It lets you have really cool mouse cursors.

So what are some goodies for the month that includes Halloween? [Ghostly Cursors] [Halloween Cursors]   [Premium Cursor Suite]   [Barney object] [P97 Calendar object] [Ghost object] [Pumpkin object] [The Labratory Theme] [Pix Gemini] [MRS Dream] [Dashboard for Media Player] [Trick or Treat Suite]

This week we got the boot screen stuff working internally. What a pain that turned out to be. Here's the deal: We want to make a free program that lets people change their boot screens on Windows XP. There are programs that technically do this but the way they do it is scary -- they actually patch your Windows XP kernel which creates all sorts of potential issues. I don't think you have to be a computer expert to recognize that the words "Patch" and "Kernel" do not go well together.  That should start trickling out next week.  Oh, and how did we do it? We wrote a device driver whose only job in life is to display the boot screen (in fact, I'd argue that this is the way the real kernel should be handled -- having the boot logo in the kernel strikes me as not being a great thing in the first place). 

Kudos to Microsoft on the encouragement though. It was only with Windows XP that we got on Microsoft's radar and I think for awhile they thought our software was basically a bunch of hacks. Which always pained us because we put in a lot of work to make sure our software does things the correct way.

Another cool thing this week we're working on is a Theme Manager (WinStyles Theme Manager). We've always had a hard time naming this thing. It is basically a Theme Manager though that expands the Microsoft theming system to support third party programs. But besides coming up with a good name, we've always had trouble making it simple enough for people to use. With this new version in the works, it may be ready for more general use.

I am thinking that we should just call it "Theme Manager" and be done with it. Let it be able to apply Microsoft .theme files as well as .suite files. Just get rid of the name "WinStyles" completely.

To me, Theme Manager is the holy grail. The reason is that most people don't care about what these programs do. They just want to press a button and the program takes care of things for them. Theme Manager (WinStyles) even will download programs that are missing and works with third party programs.  Heck, it even supports our competition -- it will apply their themes and skins too increasing the downloads of their software.

But that makes sense because the overall goal of Theme Manager is to make skinning and theming accessible to the average user.

 

 

According to this article at The Register, TabletPC sales are terrible. Which is not surprising at all to me.  What is surprising is that they are trying to blame Microsoft for the poor sales.

The OEMS basically have 3 main reasons why TabletPCs aren't selling:

1. Cost. Microsoft is over charging for the Tablet PCs version of Windows XP.
2. Marketing. Microsoft isn't marketing Tablet PCs hard enough.
3. Bundling. Microsoft isn't delivering compelling software to make Tablet PCs stand out.

These are probably contributing factors but they're not the main one. Instead of blaming Microsoft, they should be looking in the mirror. Tablet PCs aren't selling because the tablets they produce is not compelling. Sure, the software isn't perfect but the problem is mainly one of hardware. The image on the right is the Tablet PC I own. It's considered to be one of the best ones out there. And like every other Tablet PC I've used, it sucks.

But the suckitude of Tablet PCs is a team effort. It's not just Microsoft fault. They all have worked very hard to create an inferior product that doesn't meet the needs of the market the claim to want to support.

First, they're too heavy. That kills them right away. This Tablet PC is over 3 pounds in weight. 3 pounds isn't a lot until you try lugging it around like a notebook (real notebook not a laptop) for an hour or two. Us geeklings have weak arms you know. The OEMs are to blame for that. Until they can get the weight down to 2 pounds or less, they should just not bother.

Secondly, they're tedious to write input into.  Microsoft's hand writing recognition doesn't work. I mean that. It's not just bad, it basically just doesn't work.  If you are one of the 47 adults on earth that still use cursvive to write, then it works fine. But the other 99.999% of us write our characters in print and for that it fails dismally. Microsoft can be blamed for that.

Thirdly, the voice recognition flat out doesn't work in any useful way. I even bought an expensive headset to train it. I went through the lessons and trained the thing. It's unworkable.  I've used the products from Dragon and IBM and they work pretty well (at least on the PCs I've used them on). What's built into the Windows XP Tablet Edition is just junk.

Fourthly, they're not durable enough. There's not much one can do about this but anyone who's had a PocketPC or Palm Pilot knows that in the back of their head, they're worried about dropping it or damaging it but can at least take solace that they didn't cost say $2000 like the above TabletPC costs. And you're a lot more likely to drop a big thing like this and do real damage than a Palm Pilot which you can, literally, fit into your hand.

Fifthly, the screen edge is a few millimeters below the writing surface which makes drawing and taking notes much more awkward than good old pen and paper. On a similarly sized paper notebook, I can take real notes with a pen.  Yet on the Tablet PC, all my writings tend to be overly large because I can't get quite the precision on a Tablet PC as I can with a paper notebook.

Lastly, Tablet PCs just don't solve any common need. They have to compete with paper notebooks which do the job pretty well and cost almost nothing. I'm not sure the OEMs or Microsoft have really thought out what exactly we're supposed to use a Tablet PC for.  Sure, there are niches galore I can think of that these things can come into play in. But for the average user? They have too many downsides and cost too much to be compelling.

The bottom line is that it's too early. The technology just isn't there yet. I don't think it's an engineering possibility to build a 1 pound TabletPC that is remotely affordable.  I don't think the software (XP) is quite ready for the task yet. They need to license Dragon Naturally Speaking and better hand writing recognition. But even those things wouldn't make much difference in sales.  The first issue I mentioned, weight, trumps everything. Until they can get the hardware to be more practical it's just too early to expect much of these devices.

 

I've been having a fairly heated email discussion with regards to whether different races of humans have significant intelligence differences. On one side there are people who believe that natural selection over the past 50,000 years has shaped humans in different regions of the world to adapt to local environmental factors. The net result is that Europeans and Asians had environmental factors that called for higher intelligence.  I don't happen to agree with that. I do not think enough time has passed for natural selection to generate measurable differences in intelligence from region to region.

One prime example they provide is that Asians accomplished much more in Eurasia than they did when they migrated into North and South America.

Bill writes:

    Asians were the ones who originally peopled both North and South America. So you have an apples and apples comparison. The Asians who stayed in Asia went on to build civilizations of advanced technology and sophistication. The Asians who crossed into North America had no selective pressures and were largely hunter/gatherers right up to the arrival of European colonists. What pressure did the Asians is Asia face that the Asians in North America didn't face? Answer: Caucasians.

Sorry, I don't buy that one bit. For one thing, the "Asians" that came into North America only did so 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Did natural selection generate significant intelligence differences in 10,000 years? I kind of doubt it. I have a better explanation: Environment.

What did you have for dinner tonight? I went to Panera bread where I had Asiago Roast beef. Beef, from cows didn't exist in North America. In fact, there were zero large grazing animals in North America capable of being easily domesticated (try domesticating a buffalo). And that bread? Whether it's from wheat or rye both plants are native to Eurasia. North America got screwed there too -- zero big seeded plants native to North America.  The best North America got was corn which is a pretty piss poor cereal. And in fact, corn demonstrates that the native Americans had a lot of skill with domestication because corn was very hard to domesticate compared to wheat.

In fact, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, you name it, all from Eurasia.  Horses? Eurasia.  How far would the Eurasians gotten without oxen and horses? How well would mass agriculture get without wheat, rye, apples, olives, and any number of nutritious and easily domesticated plants?

But wait, the fun doesn't stop there.  Eurasia is a nice big WIDE land mass. That means a big area of the same growing season that allows different people to learn what works and doesn't and try it elsewhere and so forth. North America is comparatively skinny.

My point is, it's not that Eurasians are smarter. It's that they happened to win the lottery in natural resources.

 

Man do I have a case of the blahs. I sometimes think I have the dullest life imaginable. But I think the real problem is that my job is my hobby and so when I get sick of that, what's left? I'm not sick of my job per se, just want a change of pace but things are so busy this past week.

We've got DesktopX 2 going out the door on Monday. I gotta do the press release for that and then do the Object Desktop 2004 media guide. There's a bunch of documentation stuff. Clearly, this stuff ain't a hobby but it has to be done.  Meanwhile, I need to get moving on The Political Machine. I want to make it into a board game but first I gotta get cranking on the code.

And so many things are just a bit...flaky. We have a bunch of stuff that's 90% ready to go, but lots of tedious stuff has to be done to get it out the door.

Tomorrow is Euchre. We play with neighborhood friends. But I really dislike Euchre parties. I liked them fine when I was in college but now it's just old. My wife loves to play so I play for her benefit and have been for the past few years. But I think tomorrow will be the last one I play. It's just not fun. For one thing, people get overly competitive at it. Which is ridiculous since there's very little skill involved at Euchre.  Poker would be a much better game. Being competitive about Euchre is like getting competitive playing Candy Land.  Last Euchre coincided on a day that my close friends have Poker and I got stuck playing Euchre.  I've "won" the tournament 3 times but it always feels hollow since I know that winning just meant that I happened to get better cards that day than another day. Let's set up a 8 player Rise of Nations tournament and then we'll talk.  But I've already told my wife that I don't plan to do any more Euchres after this.

And then there's the email. I really need to find time to respond to some of the email I get. Most of it is really thoughtful but I've got plenty of emails about everything from the UN to tax rates to partial birth abortion to evolution vs. creationism.  If I don't always respond quickly to your emails, please don't take offense. I get approximately 800 to 1000 emails per day (600 to 800 of it is spam but that leaves 200 legitimate emails per day to go through and a lot of it is work related that I have to deal with).

 

Here's an article that shows some of the tips and tricks we've learned over the years to keep Windows NT based OSes happy and stable (including Windows XP).

https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=505

Okay, so George and JR have been working really hard to clean up the underlying code for the site. For a few weeks, the site was feeling like it was crawling.

Perosnally, I was running into two problems:

1) Overall sluggishness of pages coming up.

2) Page stalling. That is, I would get that top JoeUser yellow bar thingy and then the rest of the site would never come up.

If any of you have experienced any of these things, please respond here letting us know if it's any better. We are now showing 10 articles per page instead of 5 so there is more "stuff" to download which may offset some of the gains but hopefully you can feel a speed improvement.

My work machine stays up for weeks and often months at a time. In fact, the only time it gets rebooted is when our office loses power (which is too frequently, yea I should get a UPS).

People are often shocked at this. How do I keep my system running for so long, especially given how hard I push it day in and day out while running all the major components of Object Desktop? On Windows XP, it's actually pretty easy -- once you know what affects stability.

It all starts with the task manager.  To get to that, hit CTRL-SHIFT-ESC. When you do that, the task manager in Windows XP will come up.

Whenever you have a problem with your system, whether it be acting slow or saying it's out of memory or just acting weird, you'll want to pull up the task manager.

Once you do that, go to the Performance tab.  Check and see how much RAM is in use.  A lot of young techies get obsessed with the amount of memory committed. Don't.  Check to see if your CPU meter is pegged too high, check to make sure you're not using a ridiculous amount of memory (I have 1 gig installed so 419MB in use is no biggie).  But most importantly: Check the handles in use.  This is what slows down your system.

The # of handles in use should never grow much beyond 12,000.  When you get to 15,000 handles, weird things can start to happen and you'll feel your system slow down. This is where most people just reboot. They'll throw up their hands and say "Well, time to reboot." But that's unnecessary because the task manager can tell you what program(s) are using up those handles.

So now click on the processes.  You'll want to go to View->Select Columns and choose the items that are chosen here.  You want to know things like the handle count, the GDI objects, and the User Objects.  If any of those numbers are >2,000 on a given item, that item is doing something bad.

Once you have that set up. Look at the column headers. Sort by the ones I've highlighted in yellow first. Is something using up most of your CPU? Then kill it if it's not supposed to. Is something using more than 2000 handles? If so, you should probably kill that too. Same for User Objects and GDI Objects.

And then finally, sort by memory usage and then VM size. Don't worry too much about those numbers unless you're running low on RAM. The VM Size column isn't terribly useful anyway because it double counts libraries being loaded (i.e. a program that needs to read .PNG files will load a library that uses that but another one that uses the same library will get that counted too. Mem Usage is the one to keep an eye on.  But again, even there, don't sweat that number too much unless it's using a signficant percentage of your installed memory.  Internet Explorer is using 21 megs of RAM. Sounds like a lot right? But that's only 2% of my installed memory.  Back in the old DOS days of 640K 2% would be just over 12K of memory.

CPU, Handles, GDI Objects, User Objects, these are the things to keep an eye on. If you kill processes that are using up an unusual amount of these resources, you can keep your system up indefinitely.

 

The release of iTunes has really sparked an on-line debate over the future direction of the music industry. You see it on websites, forums, news groups, heck my friends and I, who are not exactly music nuts have been debating it too.

However, the pattern in discussion seems to mix business and sports.  Let me explain: In sports it's a win/lose proposition. One way will win, another way will lose.  In business, the goal is win/win. A winning strategy is merely one that generates more net revenue for the company.

For example, at Stardock in 1999 to 2000 there was a strong internal push to dump all the OS/2 software. "OS/2 is doomed, why sell it? It's dying. Why bother selling something that hardly sells any units?"  But when I looked at the books, OS/2 software was still generating $60,000 annually even in 2001.  Sure, that's a trivial amount relative to our other software but $60k is $60k.  There is no bonus for having fewer, more popular things. The goal in business is just to increase the NET revenue.  We only stopped selling OS/2 software when support costs started to close on the revenue.

The same thing is true with music.  iTunes, BuyMusic, whatever are not out to replace anything.  But in discussions on Neowin, WinCustomize, and even in email with my friends, there seems to be a tendency to say "I don't see what the big deal is, there's all these restrictions and buying CDs at retail isn't a big hassle and there are good deals out there. I don't see everyone just switching to buying music on-line."

But that's not the goal. iTunes doesn't exist to replace retail. It exists to expand the customer base for music.  To take people who might have been pirating music or weren't willing to purchase entire albums for songs or just don't care about music enough to go and order a CD and wait for it or drive down to the store and wait in line.

The people who don't see the features of iTunes and similar programs will probably not use it. But it is not as if those people will simply stop buying music. They'll continue to buy (or not) music as they did before.  But now, millions of people (like me) will be added as customers. 

So now, someone like me, hearing about a new Weird Al album can jump onto iTunes, quickly find the album, and listen to 30 seconds of each track. if I want the whole album it's $9.99 or I can pay $.99 per song (a lot of people seem to be under the impression that it's 99 cents per song period but full albums are a cheaper too).  I like that convenience. And I suspect millions of others.

There are legitimate issues with buying music on-line:

• Format problems - they're not MP3. They're either a special version of .WMA or .M4P
• They don't work on most portable players right now (.WMA support isn't enough, it has to support .WMA DRM)
• The quality may not reach the same level as CD music (depends on who you talk to)
• Many full albums these days include extra goodies. If I buy the full album from iTunes or BuyMusic do I get those goodies?
• The whole copy protection thing can be a pain. This is one area iTunes has a big advantage -- I put iTunes on all my machines here at home and as long as it's only being played by 1 person at a time I can play it anywhere in the house.
• If I want to store it on CD, I have to burn my own CD which takes time and requires buying blank CDs. Pretty obvious but still another issue.

But these caveats don't matter equally to all people. For me, they're minor. To others, they're significant barriers to entry. But remember, the music industry isn't looking at this like a sport. Their goal is to increase net revenue. And if they can draw in millions of new customers because of the convenience and lower costs for most demographics that's a win win for them.

 

 

For the past two weeks we've conducted a poll to see what you guys would like to see added to the site. Here are the result after over 2,000 votes cast:

#1 Boot Screens got 38% of the vote

#2 Toolbar icons got 22% of the vote

#3 Trillian skins got 15% of the vote

#4 Rainlendar got 13% of the vote

#5 "Something else" got 9% of the vote

#6 Samurize got 3% of the vote

With that in mind, next month we'll be adding a toolbar icon section. The toolbar icon format will be WindowBlinds 3.2's new toolbar icon feature due out at the beginning of next month (already in beta if you have Object Desktop).

For XP boot screens, the problem that has been discussed previously is that all boot screen programs currently out either require distributing the Windows XP kernel or running a program that patches the Windows XP kernel. In both instances, Microsoft has made it clear to us that they do not approve of such a thing and in fact when SP2 comes out there may be significant problems in applying it (not a problem for experts but for casual users that would be a problem).

To solve this Stardock is working on a freeware boot program that replaces the boot screen by installing a driver that gets loaded and can display a boot screen without touching the Windows XP kernel. The advantage of that is that in the long term other features (such as SVGA support, animations, etc.) can be added to them. We should hopefully have this available to download within a week (fingers crossed).

So there you have it. 2 new sections are planned for next month. We also will look at adding a Trillian section once we talk more with them.