Forget batteries, scientists have developed tiny engines - no bigger than a fingernail - which should be able to power gadgets like mobile phones or laptop computers within a few years.

I love those acient Spectrum and Commodore games like "Jet Set Willy", "Pssst!" and "Atack of the Mutant Camels". I am in luck, because "new" games like that are produced again. Or am I? I have a cellular with a color LCD screen that accepts Java applications and games. Most of these games are between 30K and 64K. So, an almost forgotten art of gaming is revived. This week I bought 3 of them (at 4.40$ a piece). What struck me is that today's programmers actually lost the art of making qual...

I am not against ads on websites, but there are limits what I can handle. Popup ads are disgusting, but VeriSign goes one step further in irritating people. See the link below.

Have any of you seen http://news.google.com ? This Google site (in beta) is a fully automated news site. According to Google: "The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. This occasionally results in some articles appearing to be out of context." I like t...

Some days ago I stumbled upon http://www.bmwfilms.com . That site contains some short action movies directed by respected directors like John Woo. The movies are distributed on the internet by BMW of North America. In a lot of regular movies we see products being advertised. Although this isn't often very clear, until you realize that all cellulars used in the Matrix (for an example) were made by Nokia. It looks to me that BMW's short movies are the next step in commercials. Will we be seeing mo...

I've read _Martin_'s blog about how he loved his visit to the US and about how he thought Americans were lucky. That made me think. First I wanted to reply to his post, but that would take away the intention of his blog. We all think in stereotypes and have preoccupations when the people we meet or the views we encounter are unknown to us. Have you ever met an Eskimo? I didn't. The only thing I know about them them comes from TV, newspapers and comics. I vaguely know that the term Eskimo isn'...

The IRC and mail servers are down. There is some bad wheather near Livonia. Maybe the two events are connected and let's hope it doesn't ruin their 4th of July party. That means you might have trouble with IRC (chatting), newsgroups, support, ordering and retrieving your serial numbers. The guys are probably working on it right now. We apologize for any invonvenience this may cause.

All is well again. IRC freaks are strange people who love to ban, but randomly banning people in the #Stardock channel was too much. Often people come there for support and are visiting the channel for the first time. In the message board I'll describe how it was solved by... banning everyone in the channel. See the link for details.

DX 1.1 not only includes the new scripting facility, but also has a media player called StardockPlayer. Unlike other players it does not have its own skinning format. Instead it is skinned by DesktopX. Later on it can be skinned by ObjectBar and WindowBlinds too. The player supports various audio, MIDI, movie and image formats. It has a size of 170KB and will take up about 4.5 to 7MB RAM. It requires DirectX 8.x to run and can use regular Windows codecs. The player is in early deve...

For some time now Stardock has an IRC server. You can chat there with developers, skinners and WinCustomizers. It is probably the fastest way to get support when the right people are present there. If you don't have an IRC client then you can still visit us by using an applet you'll find at: https://www.stardock.com/stardock/chat/ We used to be on EFnet but that was too much of a hasle. If you have an IRC client then you can visit us at irc.stardock.com (port 6667) and join the #Stardock ...

CoolPlayer (by Niek Albers) will be Open Source. He is inviting programmers to co-develop future versions of this great player. Niek believes that he needs other programmers on his CoolPlayer project to compete with other players. At the moment he is cleaning of the code for the release.