Over the past few days we have broken a few records for the site in number of visitors per day. This is largely due to the increased popularity recently of DesktopX. The main limitation isn't in raw bandwidth but a limitation in server capacity.

Our solution is to upgrade the server. A new server has arrived -- a dual 1Ghz monster machine. We are in the process of setting things up and should have it ready to replace the existing server shortly.

In the meantime, with several hundred users connected to the server at once, we had to decide how best to handle things. Make things unbearable for everyone or make things usable for some.

So we decided the best way is to require until the new server is up during peek times that users have an account here to download skins and themes. This would cut down on traffic as some people won't be willing to do this (Even though it's free and easy). BTW, as a side note, your email addresses are safe, we would not sell them to some spammer as some people on our news groups fear websites sometimes do. We hate spam too - notice there are no banner ads on this website.

Anyway, we hope for things to return to better than normal in a few days time.

We expect things to return to normal in the next couple of days -- or at least close enough to normal that we won't need to require accounts to download skins.

But some itneresting stats:

Over the weekend the website got 13,000 new accounts. To put this in perspective, on Thursday the site had a total of around 6,000 accounts (so we have about 20,000 accounts total).

DesktopX got 47,000 downloads over the weekend just from download.com. These users naturally came somewhere to get more skins and themes which was here.

Very soon we're going to upgrade the server so it can handle more traffic. Bandwidth is only part of the issue, it's purely quantity of users hammering the database. By next week at the latest you should be able to notice a fairly significant performance boost.

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-1461990-100-6582676.html?tag=sptlt

Those of you who have registered DesktopX or have Object Desktop have no need to go to download.com to get DesktopX.

This creates a problem in that the only ones voting on a program over time become just those who don't register the sofware. This tends to make user reviews biased towards being lower user reviews.

When reading through the reviews on download.com, it's very painful to see how many unbelievable things are said. One review tonight says that we
basically install adware onto people's systems. Another claims we change people's home pages. Obviously, DesktopX doesn't do anything of the sort.

One guy tonight claimed we stole his artwork (naturally an anonymous user).

Vendors are not allowed to post reviews (for obvious reasons) so it's quite maddening seeing these kinds of things. Particularly wrongful claims of spyware and registry tampering. We basically have to just sit there and take it.

For those of you who use DesktopX and would like to have your say, please visit the link at the top of this post. We really appreciate any counter balance possible. Even a few people putting in honest reviews (even if critical) helps.

Again the link is:
http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-1461990-100-6582676.html?tag=sptlt

Thanks!

Hi gang, well, Stardock + WinCustomize had over 75,000 visitors in a single day yesterday. This kind of traffic would put us within the top 500 most popular websites worldwide if we maintained that level. Luckily for our bandwidth, it won't stay that high. But it does represent a sneak peak of what is likely to occur once Windows XP ships.

But as a result, during these peek hours, we're going to start requiring those who wish to use the skin library to create an account (which is free). As soon as the traffic curves back to normal somewhat we can return to the unrestricted library access.

Which 3 t-shirt ideas would you guys like to see made first?

If you could go over to the T-shirt section and comment, rate, whatever the T0shirt ideas and comment in this post, we could get an idea of which ideas are liked the most and start making T-shirts.

The Register has done a run down on Stardock's DesktopX 1.0. Check it out.

The USS Clueless is a great site full of philosophical writings on virtually any topic. Highly recommended.

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a lengthy article that *really* told what to expect with Windows XP? Something detailed that targets "Regular people" and not just techies or corporations.

If there's enough interest, I'll try to take a few hours this week to write up smething that tours Windows XP and talks about how it compares with win2k and Winme and all that.

Let me know if you're interested.

The more I read up on it the more I am convinced that within a few hundred years, humans will essentially be immortal. That we'll have figured out essentially what causes aging and have technology to stop it.

But what would happen? All "world population explosion" theories aside, what do you think would change about society if we lived forever?

I tend to think that humans would become increasingly obsessed with finding new ways to entertain themselves. Can you imagine living 200 years? About 500 years? 5000 years? By 200 years assuming 200 years of being physically 25-30 years, I would have read every book I would ever be remotely interested in reading, seen every movie I would remotely be interested in seeing, visited every place I might be remotely interested in going.

So 200 down, 10,000 years to go. What the heck would people do with themselves?

What do you think?

(think of all the skins we'd have! _

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/13/technology/ebusiness/13MUSI.html?todaysheadlines
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/12/technology/ebusiness/12NAPS.html?todaysheadlines

Contains links to what is essentially looking like the end of Napster.

Napster's success/failure and the fame of its developer, Shawn Fanning, is a touchy subject around at Stardock.

That's because a year before Napster came out, one of the early components for Object Desktop (earlier users of ODNT may remember this) was going to be "Object Recommendation" (we'd probalby have renamed it as it came closer just as WindowBlinds was originally named "Enhanced Look").

Anyway, this component would allow people to peer share files and directories to anyone else running it with full searchable features. Imagine Napster but with the ability to share any file type.

But we ultimately had to kill it because we couldn't figure out a way to eaisly keep people from sharing copyrighted material. We didn't want to make a program that would be used to pirate software and music.

As time went on, hanging out on IRC, other developers on #win32 would talk about peer sharing but they too never developed it for similar reasons.

But Shawn Fanning didn't apparently have a problem writing a program that would largley be used for pirating other people's stuff. And that seeming lack of ethics combined with 2 or so weeks of work (Napster as a program is trivial to write) created a world wide phenomenon.

Our culture has rewarded an utter lack of ethics with fame and probably fortune for the young 19 year old who wasn't stopped by pesky moral issues while others who had the idea long before him, could have done it better, were held back because it never occurred to them that it was okay to make something that could be turned into a massive piracy network.

For us, the Napster phenomenon is a real testiment of our culture. Shawn Fanning has been on the cover of countless magazines and is a house hold name in many places. I've seen his picture in Time, Newsweek, US News, People, and elsewhere. He's been labeled as a "Cyber rebel", "Freedom fighter", "Genius", "Techno visionary", etc.

The difference in America today between fame and obscurity is apparently a lack of ethics combined with 2 weeks to write a CS 101 level program.

I know lots of people reading this are probably Napster fans. But as someone whose job it is to create intellectual property, it would have been a pretty frightening new world if companies could become successful by creating things that essentially aided the theft of other creations. If Napster had succeeded, there were a long list of much worse companies lined up ready to create things that would have spelled an end to intellectual property as we know it.