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...

We did a little bit of clean-up work on a few of the databases connected to JoeUser today.  Here at the office, it feels like the site has been snappier in pulling up articles. How does the site speed "feel" to everyone else now?  Were you even noticing any slowness the past few weeks?

Looking for a new, polished and snazzy suite to breathe some life back into your desktop?  Then you'll want to check out the new Texas Hold Em Suite from Stardock Design.  It's a playing card and poker chip themed suite with a slick new skin from Hippy, a Blackjack game gadget from CerebroJD, a set of six wallpapers, a bootskin, a LogonStudio skin and a matching set of icons by Voo! Texas Hold Em is available for $8.95 from our store, or $7.95 for  current ObjectDesktop owne...

You've talked about the features, seen the screenshots, voted on a poll or two and at long last we're in the final stretch with the new WinCustomize 2007 site redesign!  Now, in advance of switching over the site to the new system and layout we've been allowing select groups of users in to test the site and help find bugs and layout issues.  This is all in an effort to make sure the transition is as painless as possible for the community as a whole.  Now though, the time has come...

We're down to the wire now folks!  Last week we put out the winners of Most Usable and Most Original Visual Styles and now we've moved on to the Best Overall events.  Yesterday afternoon I posted the finalists in the following events: Best Overall Wallpaper Best Overall Icon Package Best Overall Visual Style These finalists are based on user voting and represent some of the best work that has been submitted to this year's competition.  Starting tomorrow, our judg...

This is a test post

Researchers at Penn State University in the College of Information Sciences & Technology have developed software that can automatically recognize image content and properly "tag" it in plain English.  This would present a significant improvement to image search engines that rely on manually entered tags to describe image content.  The article linked below uses an example of a photo of a polo match being tagged by the system with words such as "sport", "people", "horse", and "polo." ...

For WC visitors in the US, we're coming up on the 2006 mid-term elections in just 5 days.  Some of you in states like Florida with early-voting rules, have already voted, but many of us have not.  While everyone is concerned over the big issues of the economy, national security etc. something else worth looking at, and that is probably of interest to the sorts of people who frequent the site, is how do your state senators and representatives vote on technology issues?  Communicati...

Despite the fact that Vista and Office 2007 have not yet been declared "finished" and given the RTM seal of approval, Microsoft is still holding fast to its November 30th launch date for getting Vista and Office to business customers.  This will be the first time in over a decade that a new version of Windows and a new version of Office have been released together (the last time being Win95 and Office 95).  Some raise the question of why the products would be released to businesses bef...

Former CIA clandestine case officer Robert Steele planted a pretty big rumor the other day about Google.  He alleged that Google and The CIA (the US's foreign spy agency) have some sort of arrangement going.  Steele went on to say that it was hypocritical of Google to refuse the Department of Justice requests considering it has no issues with requests from the CIA.  No details are available.  No evidence has been provided, and neither the CIA nor Google have responded with co...

Today we put up the winners for the Most Usable Visual Style event!  Head on over to the GUI Champs website to check them out.  Most Original Visual Styles will be posted on Friday. Also, tomorrow we begin the user-voting phase on our final Best Overall events.  So be sure to stop by tomorrow to vote on what you feel are the absolute best wallpapers, icons and WindowBlinds submitted to this years competition!

Today Google picked up another Web 2.0 startup company and added them to their growing stable of coders and beta products.  The company gobbled up this time?  JotSpot, a maker of wiki software.  Details on the purchase are still unknown, but the JotSpot software, previously a for-pay product, will now be free.  Speculation runs that this purchase is a quick way to integrate wiki-like documentation and page linking technology into the stable of Google web apps such as Writely,...

oooOoOoOooooOOOOooo.... *waves hands in the air in a ghost-y fashion* Happy Halloween everyone.  Around the office here at Stardock today we've got some great costumes on display.  There's Napoleon Dynamite, a Bearded Biker Faery Chick, a Town[e] Marshall, a Vampire Priest, an Elf, a Witch, some Elizabethan dude that's armed with a sword (we're not messing with Paul today) and not everyone's into the office yet, so we'll probably have some more great costumes by the time we get ar...

Ok ok... maybe not that exactly.  Turns out Mark Shuttleworth, shepherd of the Ubuntu Linux Distribution last week posted to his personal blog on how Linux very much needs to become "pretty" to be more competitive.  His focus is on how Linux and Open Source software in general might be technically great,but it lacks the ability to connect with the average user who puts a high value on usability and general prettiness.  The visual example he provides is a very sleek Ubuntu logo des...

This year has been a bad one for privacy minded individuals, with numerous reports of laptops being stolen that contain thousands of social security numbers, medical records and other vital identity information.  It has resulted in a break-neck race by companies who deal with such information (insurance companies, hospitals, the government etc.) to encrypt all of their "at rest" data (Any data sitting on a disk.  Different from "in motion" data, or data being transferred over a network...