bakerstreet

Reply to Is the PC industry in trouble? in WinCustomize News WinCustomize Forums

Depends on what yo uare doing. If you are using an app like Photoshop or 3d studio max that will soak up any and all resources that you throw at it, sure, the high-end stuff has validity. I mean, faster rendering and more history are perks. But for the average user, buying a box that is 3 times the minimum requirements of the average software is a tad nutty. I have a 1.8 with a gig or ram, which puts me a whole gig behind 'cutting-edge', and I bet it'll be a long time before the minimum requir

Reply to Website Hosting in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

p.s. it doesn't have to be the size of the pipe, either. If you are buying one spot on a server with a hundred other sites on it, even a big pipe can screech to a halt. Your mileage may vary, but Caveat Emptor, I say.

Reply to Website Hosting in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Don't confuse transfer with 'band width '. Hosts often use the terms interchangably, but 25 gigs of transfer will mean *nothing* if you have a teeny pipe that only 2 or 3 people can use comfortably at a time. I have heard that many cut-rate hosts give you tons of transfer, and then plug you into a pipe so narrow that 3 or 4 simultaneous connections tap out the width and you are suddenly at dial-up speeds or worse. Of course it depends on what you are doing with the site, but if y

Reply to A new golden age for skinning? in WinCustomize News WinCustomize Forums

This is a great time for skinning, but the boom we are seeing is Lycos, AOL, MS and the other corporate elements online bringing out their newest flagship skinnables, generating interest. The usual modus operandi is not advancing the amount of 'choice' for the consumer, but dictating all the possible choices, and using marketing and legal strategies to steer us to a win-win situation for them. If MS, AOL, or one of the other oft-litigious entites try and stake out proprietary areas of UI cust

Reply to Where do old threadz go? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

It depends on how they lived their lives. You know where all the bad, blaspheming threads go... You raise them right, but then you catch them running around with threads from deviantart and hanging out in pr0n newsgroups... Or worse, they don't go anywhere, they stay and get a small comment once a week and shamble on and on. Zombie threads, not of theis world OR the next...

Reply to Legitimate reasons people get mad at commercial software companies in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Frogboy: I appreciate the things you point out and agree that Stardock is showing more differentiation between end-users and contributing skinners than they used to. I think that what has most contributed to this is accepting the semblance of 'business', and acknowleging the symbiotic, mutually-beneficial relationship. It's hard to put into words. Many times, I felt that the perception of Stardock as a 'member' of the skinning community removed some accountability, as though we would

Reply to Legitimate reasons people get mad at commercial software companies in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I agree with your MS comments, and their application to SD. MS has hedged in a bit onto your terrain, but it is the same thing others have said about SD, no? I would also, hesitantly, say that in addition to doing it 'better', Windowblinds kind of negates the need for other skinnable apps. I mean, why buy or even download an alternative notepad when WB skins the standard one? For a while windowblinds was not really for everyone (i.e. took a lot of resources). Now, WB takes less resources an

Reply to Is it easier to skin Winamp3 over Winamp2? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

p.s. Treetog is in the upper end of the other 10%...

Reply to Is it easier to skin Winamp3 over Winamp2? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Winamp 3 is harder to skin, i.e. you actually have to work at it, but it is actually easier to make a *nice* skin. The problem with Winamp 2.x was that it was hard to skin it *well*, but it was easy to skin, especially with skin generators. What you ended up with was a ton of half-ass skins that were cranked out in ten seconds, burying the small minority of good work. Winamp 2 was very confiing and difficult to make anything very 'new', due to its static components. Now with Winamp 3

Reply to deviantART down? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

*cough* gotta be expensive serving desktop babes to the masses...

Reply to What's the size of your hard drive??? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

lol... Doreen thought we were talking about computer hardware... silly womenzez, they know not da secret language da menzez...

Reply to CAN SOMEONE PLZ HELP ME?!?!?! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

/me hands Geggos a dictionary and yanks the caps key off his keyboard...

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

lol... yeesh... i'll make my two points again and quit. 1) promoting other people to do what is within their rights to do is perfectly fine. If others get excited enough about that screenshot that it makes them go rip apart your skin and make that composite skin for their own personal use, it is within their rights to do it. They can't give it away to others, though, just like the first guy couldn't. 2) Sure, you still own the copyright to the work if it is on a server in ano

Reply to horrible discovery in winamp 3....nullsoft cant be soooo stupid...REALLY!!! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

...huh? Yeah, the first thing I do is rip through an app to see what is in it, and yes, that dialog was in the resources... so? I mean if someone has found a way to spawn it, I might see a reason for outrage, but as far as i know there is no normal way to do it. I kind of assumed it was a poke in the eye to anyone who reversed engineered it. It was of such little importance to me I never bothered to see if there was any hidden way of making it appear... so this begs the ques

Reply to QUESTION about Masks in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

In relation to what? The concept of 'masks' are used in different contexts; Photoshop and other image editors use them to reference an area of an image, to hide it, prevent it from being edited,etc. Some applications use masks for transparency, or to map where different elements, like buttons should be drawn. Masks of the 'ski' variety are the choice of professionals in the robbing of banks, gas stations, convienence stores, etc, and the 'gas' variety are good to keep on hand as well.

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

afaiak... k should be C, i don't spell concerned with a 'k'... lol. Jafo just ignores my spelling and grammar these days... I think he has given up.

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

The really sad part is that only people who wouldn't steal will sit and argue points of law like this. In the amount of time it took us to write this, someone that didn't care that ripping is wrong probably took a dozen skins and uplaoded them somewhere else afaiak, everyone discussing this is Grade A, and every bit was philosophical discussion... No hard feelings to anyone concerned.

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Bill_Sawyer: Jafo already said it was alright in the post at 9:00:23 PM and again at 9:29: "A screenshot is not an 'actual skin'. If someone were to DL the screen and reverse-engineer a skin from the shot then THAT ... would be in violation..." (I wish these posts were numbered...)

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Greyhaze: The only way to protect yourself to the fullest extent of UK law would be to upload only to servers within your own country, where all the enforcement would take place under the control of the UK government. There is no way you can enforce UK law on servers outside the UK, unless you feel this is a situation where extradition or government intervention is necessary, like in the recent EU-US cheap wool and stinky cheese debate. That is why the music industry is suing

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Just to clarify, according to section 107 of the US copyright law: "...activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a l

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

p.s. this is a good site to start from: http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/ and when they say things like "How much of another person's work can I use..." they are referring to ditributed derivative works, NOT for personal use. You can take every appliance in your kitchen apart, put them together to form an evil, man-killing robot, and then even post an image of it on Slashdot. You can't sell them though. Skins are no different.

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

No, unfortunately you are wrong. There is no appliable use of a screenshot by those who you make it available to. It is like taking a picture of your house. Architecture is copyrightable, but there would be no violation by posting a a picture of your house, inside and out, on the internet. IF the person were posting the internal workings of the skin, a .ini or xml file for instance, I might agree with your blueprint analogy, but there is more to a skin than graphics. What you are

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Don't be. Simply state in your screenshot what people are looking at, and flatly refuse to distribute it until you have the permission of everyone whose stuff you used to make it. When you do, credit them to the fullest extent possible, both in the comments and the file itself. Easy enough, right? If you happen to get a omplaint from someone about a screenshot ( i doubt you ever would), use your best judgement, or ask advice. no one is gonna lynch ya, seriously, what is being debate

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I will say, though, that anyone who does so *should* state the provenance of the work they used. To my knowledge, though, there are no copyright laws limiting the personal use of an item one posesses, unless there is a EULA to that effect. Screenshots of mixed and matched skins, even mixed and matched elements (properly credited) do more to educate than harm, IMHO. If they are distributed without permission, then by all means make an example out of them in the harshest terms. The whole idea

Reply to Ripping question... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

grayhaze: no, i would have to disagree. The implication of a desktop screenshot has never been "I made this." There are countless websites, in and outside of our community, wherein people post screenshots of their current desktops, and none in my experience have ever required or implied that it was the uploader's work. In customization there are the artists and the users, and the screenshot section has always been the place for users to post their desktop customization. Screenshots are even