AJCrowley

Reply to Could Hollywood Hack your PC? in WinCustomize News WinCustomize Forums

The best way to attack this kind of proposal is to take the time to write to your member of congress and express your concerns. Since I'm not in the U.S., there's little point in me doing it, but to those of you that are - your member of congress is there to serve and represent you, if you don't make your views known, then you can't expect anything to be done about it. Failing that, there's always the option of dissent. Equal retribution for each machine taken down by MPAA/RIAA hired hackers <i

Reply to The New WTC? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Now you're thinking Dangeruss, my only fear would be that a giant fluorescent lamp hanging from the eaves of the building might attract mindless pilots who would swarm around it until they got electrocuted. If you have any doubts as to the lack of intelligence in pilots, please bear in mind that the starting pay for a pilot at Delta is about 15k, Continental gets around 13k, and American Eagle gets a whopping $17k, out of which they must pay for their own uniforms and their own first year of tra

Reply to STARDOCK 'wish' list?? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I think the guys down at Stardock have more than enough to keep them busy for the forseeable future. The trouble with suggestion boxes such as this is that 99.99999% of the requests are either impractical, unfeasible, or just plain stupid. Don't believe me? Check some of the skin requests on various message boards around the internet, you'll see all kinds of fun things like "A Brittney Spears Skin". AJC

Reply to The New WTC? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I think it's kind of ugly. The old WTC was by no means pretty, but it was dull enough to be inoffensive. While the size of the structure will certainly make it an impressive sight, I can't really say I'm keen on the design. An efficient escape route is a sensible idea, and something that should have been implemented in the first (nothing to do with terrorist attacks, that just showed us what a nice hot fire could do to the structure), but the "airplane repeller" is one of the most ridic

Reply to The Fall of ICQ and rise of MSN in WinCustomize News WinCustomize Forums

I now use trillian, this is mainly because of it's compatibility with all networks, though my personal choice would be ICQ, simply because I've been using it for so long. It's a shame to see MS's self-promotional tactics finally paying off, since MSN Messenger is undoubtedly one of, if not the worst of the available networks. While it offers some neat features and a pretty interface, the inability to leave offline messages for a user is a huge drawback. AJC

Reply to ShellToy's Access Folder's makes getting around easier in WinCustomize News WinCustomize Forums

Yes, this has bothered me for about 2 versions of this program. If there were any way to make it work with WindowBlinds it would give me a special feeling in my heart.

Reply to Ripping & Piracy Double standard? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

The question of ripping is also not really a black an white issue in my eyes. What about music that uses samples? No matter what the source, if the artist has put their input on it in some manner, then it is a unique work. Where do you draw the line? If something is inspired by the shape of a car, is it a rip from the person who designed the car? Obviously it wouldn't be considered so, but it is hard to decide where to draw the line between plagiarization of someone elses work, and where it is m

Reply to Why the new Star Wars toys won't sell in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

As Dennis Miller might say, "I don't want to get off on a rant here, but...." The thing that bugs me most about current big movies such as Star Wars is the crass over-commercialization. The way they use movies to sell products for the Pepsi/Burger King/Doritos conglomerate when the movie doesn't have anything vaguely relevant to the products makes me want to tear my own eyeballs out and throw them at my tv. Am I the only person that finds this shameless irrelevant capitalization insulti

Reply to 15 must-have sections in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

The only ones I really care about are the bigger Stardock ones (WindowBlinds, DesktopX, IconPackager et al), LiteStep, CursorXP, Wallpapers (should be even more heavily moderated) and Winamp. Programs such as Yahoo Messenger aren't truly skinnable, it's more a replacement for the listbox background and button glyphs from what I've seen. Another neat choice would be Sonique (there are some really great Sonique skins). There are in my opinion too many skinnable apps out there that don't r

Reply to Ripping & Piracy Double standard? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

That all depends on the license terms Nite77. I do believe in the sanctity of intellectual property, but I also believe in reason. For example, I believe that Photoshop is a great piece of software, it's expensive, but if you like it you should buy it. Download a warez version, try it out for a few weeks, that's fine by me, but if at the end of the day, you're not prepared to part with the cash, there are many free or cheaper alternatives. To take it in the other direction, I believe th

Reply to Would 3D interfaces make things better? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I think that while a 3D interface is nice in theory, it just doesn't work on a 2D display. To illustrate what I mean a little more clearly, the Task Stack in MS's TaskGallery looks great, you can see more of each task than with a window maximized, but on closer inspection, it's just a window cascade with a 3d effect on it. You can use cascade right now on your windows without any addons (right click your taskbar) - why don't you? Simple, because it wastes valuable screen real estate. The will un

Reply to Aston in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I've played with it a little, and wasn't too keen on it. As far as alternate shells go, it seems to be that Litestep is the best. The reason it's not supported here is that this site specializes in supporting a few products well, there are literally hundreds of skinnable apps out there, and if we supported them all, the navigability of the site would undoubtedly suffer. If you want to check out some themes for Aston, DeviantArt might be a good place to start. AJC

Reply to Why the new Star Wars toys won't sell in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

/me envisions Brad as "The comic bookstore guy" from The Simpsons... I agree with what you're saying in many respects, but a generation of kids that will buy Pokemon and watch that incomprehensible cartoon will buy and watch anything. Most of my star wars toys are long since dead, mostly by fire (I was a real pyro when I was a kid). I'm not sure what happened to the rest of them, I had the X-Wing, the Tie Fighter (with the wings that fell off when you pressed the button), Scout

Reply to the fall of customize? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I heard Brad's got a mean right hook. I reckon we should settle this the old fashioned way, and put all the custo admins in a ring with Brad, and a chainsaw. AJC

Reply to The day all Americans dread... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

If they charged 5% across the board then they probably would have more money, but it wouldn't be a fair system. The reason they'd have more money is because people who have filthy mounds of cash that they keep in a swimming pool ala Scrooge McDuck hire nice men such as those that work for Arthur Anderson to make sure that they don't have to part with too much of their money. While the current system is certainly very complex, and undoubtedly needs a great deal of work, does it seem fair that som

Reply to Windows XP - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Well, I'm back, and everything is at least holding the illusion of working well for now. Let's try and answer a few of those questions: Koasati: There comes a time in every person's life when they must reformat. I am cursed with an innate stupidity that makes me do it out of habit every few months. It's a habit carried forward from my win9x days, when such a thing was necessary. I find that after a reformat, there's less crap on my system that I don't actually need, and my machine runs

Windows XP - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Well, it's that time again, the magical season of reformatting that seems to have become all the more frequent since I moved to XP. It seems that for every 5 times I install it, one installation will be good, the others will disagree with programs I use, crash at random, or simply be full of weird glitches. I would make the move back to 2K, but XP has a lot of new stuff that I've got used to having, so I guess I'll just have to deal with it, hopefully this install will go right first time (curre

Reply to Its Friday and my brain don't work no more in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Yeah Pat, why don't you bugger off 10 minutes before I have my code finalized and make me wait until Monday? AJC

Reply to Happy Birthday, Davad70 in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Happy birthday davad AJC

Reply to Happy Birthday, AJCrowley in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Thanks everyone, I shall make every effort to consume much beer tonight, and to drag the Stardock staff down with me. I will not let the side down Cheers, AJC

Reply to April Birthdays in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

8th for me. This year I shall be spending my birthday terrorizing the Stardock crew.

Reply to New operating system from us and the skin is comming! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Hakemon, it's sounding good, and I'm also pretty excited about running software from all of those different platforms. Will it be a GUI shell as in WinNT, or a CLI? It would be really neat if you could add support for CLI emulation at least (WinNT style again), with options for choosing your CLI (bash is my favourite ). If it's implementing at least part of the windows DLL interface, Cygwin should provide y

Reply to The best WinAMP skin ever? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

While Nucleo NLog may look pretty, it doesn't have a proper shade mode, and it's really hard to read any of the text/controls, taking its rating with me down to a miserable 3/10. I frequently change WinAmp skins, but the one I always end up going back to is SpyAmp Pro. It's easy to use, pretty and just damn cool, for me, that's definitely the best skin out there.

Reply to Where can I download More DX Plugins? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

The binatries groups on nntp://news.stardock.com are particularly useful for that sort of thing. AJ

Reply to Rating in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Adni18, I personally don't like the wallpaper. Don't get me wrong, I know that you work hard and are one of the highest producing skinners here, but getting a bad rating occasionally is all part of the package. I wouldn't have rated the wallpaper a 1, I think that was unfair, but I wouldn't have gone much higher than 4 or 5. It's just the way the ratings system works, some people will rate high, some people will rate low, and just because a small number of people rate way too high or way too low