It's Thursday afternoon, the mid-afternoon sugar rush is wearing off and we start to get a bit fidgety.  Looking around for something to entertain us for a few minutes we spy an empty desk.  It turns out that T-Man took the day off.  Now, we don't know where he went or why, but we did know that his desertion needed to be punished in some way. Of course, we can't just hide his chair or PC monitors.  We've done that before (*glares at andrew_*).  We needed something ...

Today we announced that the subscription price for WinCustomize was going to go up $10/year from $20 to $30.  Now, of course we had to come up with a good justification for this, something that would fool the sheep of the forums into believing we did this for their own good and that they're getting the better end of the deal. But, just between you and me?  Complete BS.  As some of you may know, today's Angie's birthday, so as a gift the company bought her a new car... ...

As you've probably already noticed, we put out an update to the central Stardock Forum system today that comes packed with fixes, plus a handful of very useful new features.  Instead of letting you guess randomly at what's new and how it works, I thought I'd give everyone a quick run-down of the new features. Forum Announcements Return of the Report Button Go to Top of Thread Button The New Karma System Forum Announcements In the past, we've been unable to let everyone know wh...

Over the last few years, streaming music has grown in popularity as more and more people get high-speed Internet connections at home.  The convenience of opening up a web browser and hitting "Play" is hard to argue against.  No more sorting through CDs, or a massive MP3 collection.  And as time goes on, the sound quality has improved to the point where there's little discernable difference to the average user.

The next step beyond just having online radio stations of preset playlists was to let users select exactly what they wanted to listen to, or be able to intelligently suggest similar music based off a small amount of user input.

At the moment, there are many online radio services from folks like Yahoo, Napster, Last.fm etc.  But this article is about two services that compete on a more direct level:  Pandora and Deezer.

  What you're looking at is a live video stream of my desk here at Stardock World HQ.  We're playing around with some ideas on video content, and this is our live feed experiment.  Since the project is under my umbrella, the test gets done at my desk.   I had the camera pointed at DoctorNick earlier, but he didn't like that.  So for now you get to look at my white board, my Geek Action Figure, and my telephone.  I may write messages on the board for people pe...

As Apple gains in popularity, and as nerds the world over grow tired of the same old arguments, the whole Mac v PC debate has grown kind of quiet in recent months.  It's almost as if both camps have agreed to live in peace (or at least a cease-fire) with one another.  Well, we can't let that happen!  To help keep the bad blood flowing, Computerworld writer Scot Finnie has a two-part series on Mac v PC cost analysis.  In the first part he talked solely about hardware.  T...

In an economy focusing so heavily on tools to put the power of content creation in the hands of regular every-day people, one area that has been surprisingly underserved is that of book self-publishing.  Up until today, if you wanted to write a book, or make a movie and then have it semi-professionally printed/bound/packaged your only real option was a service called Lulu.com, which let users upload their content, format it, choose bindings and cover art etc and walk away with a very good ...

When it comes to social networking sites, Facebook is at the top of the list lately with it's powerful application platform and robust user pages.  Unfortunately one of its most promising features, Groups, seems to have been left in the dust. A lot of talk and attention has been directed towards Facebook lately, especially since the opening of the application platform so any user with a PC and an itch to code can add more or less any function they desire to the wildly popular social net...

This month, we continue our Skinner of the Month Interview series with November's selected member; SK Originals.  SK has been a member since early 2005, and is heavily involved with the community website Skinning.net.  He was gracious enough to take some time to answer a few questions I emailed him.   1. To start off, could you give us a quick summary of your background in skinning? SK: I started off skinning my PDA (pocket pc). I couldn't find any media player skins fo...

This month, we sit down and chat with icon artist, 47songs, about what exactly is involved in how she creates her icon sets, how she got started skinning, and a look at some of the interesting icons she's currently working on. How did you get your start in skinning? I honestly don’t remember what brought me here, or how or why I navigated online to Wincustomize.com. But I do remember that once I found it, I couldn’t leave. Like most, I started customizing my desktop with the different c...

In 1992, an English physicist , working in Switzerland made public this nifty little tech project he had been working on to share documents and data more easily within his research organization.  This little gadget he had invented was what we now know as the World Wide Web, that sprawling interconnected series of files that seems to dominate our lives now.  Everywhere you go, you see addresses for web sites plastered on billboards, book covers, newspapers etc.  It is a major ...

On a nearly daily basis many of us gather here at JU to post articles about whatever is currently on our minds, to argue over current events and politics, or to just post the latest joke etc.. Some of us have made a few friends (and maybe a few enemies) and email or instant message back and forth outside of JU. But as of yet there isn't really a spot for everyone to gather and chat in real time with one another... Until now! This article is to announce that JU has an IRC (Internet Rel...

Alright, I've been given a project at work to take a project management process (how to scale down our massive project methodology to fit projects of varrying sizes) and build an automated tool that asks a Project Manager a series of questions about their project, and spits out an evaluation and set of suggestions as to how best scale the methodology. It should also output this all in a mini-manual word document. Well, cool I thought, I know PHP, I know I can do this easily in PHP and get...