I'm not sure where the myth began. But somewhere down the line, a false belief has turned into pseudo-fact amongst some people that customization software uses a lot of memory.  That's never been the case. Not even in the beginning.

At the dawn of Windows customization, software had to run on Windows 95 which only had 128K (that's kilobytes) of GDI resources. Customization software ate up a lot of those GDI resources since they were reserved for the user interface.  But even in 1995, 16K of memory was trivial. It's just that early versions of Windows were so limited in their GDI resources that it was a problem.

But Windows 2000 and Windows XP have never had any such problem.  And yet, we still see some uninformed, but vocal, user claim that <Program X> is "bloated" and uses a "ton" of memory.  Those people come in two forms:  The guy who really has no idea what he's talking about and the guy who thinks 10 megabytes of memory is a "ton" of memory.

The former guy is annoying because he matches his ignorance with his prolific posting.  The latter guy makes you wonder if their source of income is mom's allowance or something.  I can buy a 256 meg stick of memory for my PC for around $20. 

So let's get this out of the way: Desktop customization programs do NOT use much memory.

Here's WindowBlinds wbload.exe process use:

That's 576K.

Here's DesktopX:

That's only a couple megabytes of memory and it's running a useful object in this instance.

I could go on through a variety of programs both made by Stardock and made by third parties. None of them are "memory hogs".  You can certainly load up enough stuff with something like DesktopX to make it use a ton of memory.  Graphics, animation, etc. has to be stored somewhere.  But that's not the desktop customization's fault any more than it's Photoshop's fault if the user loaded a gigabyte sized image.

So next time someone tries to claim that some desktop customization program is "bloated" or something, point them here.

Today marks my 10th year of working at Stardock.  It's been 10 crazy years of learning the business and changing the business.

When I started, Stardock was *very* new.  I spent the first days before I was officially employed helping build furniture.  I was the first official employee of Stardock...my how things have changed.  I had no idea how much my life would change, or how much Stardock would change over the following 10 years.

We started out as an OS/2 ISV.  We didn't have a network in the building.  We went months with dial up before we could get an ISDN line installed.  We took all orders over the phone, and when "online order" technology came out, it meant that the online order was faxed to us. The "internet" was new, and it was a big deal to have free Compuserve accounts.

We quickly grew out of our first office, and found a new office where we currently are.  We grew...then we fell.  In 1998, the bottom dropped out of our market when IBM decided to drop OS/2.  We went from a dozen people down to 4 in a matter of months.  At this point, I took the most perfectly planned maternity leave and was away for 8 months.

But, Stardock didn't die.  Through the vision of our CEO Brad Wardell, and the brilliance of Neil Banfield (WindowBlinds only at the time), Stardock picked itself up and dusted itself off and was reborn as a Windows developer.  After seeing WindowBlinds in action, and being asked by Brad a few times: "so, when are you coming back?"  I rejoined the very small Stardock crew.  The day I came back, one of our staff members left (he returned a year or so later) and a new staff member started (who now works at Microsoft).  Things were really changing.

The Stardock that we now know is really only about 6 years old.  The Windows market is nothing like the OS/2 market was, and the staff that we have is a lot different (mainly, larger).  I can remember everyone that ever worked here, even Tamra who only worked here for one day back in 96, because we have such a low turn over rate.  We've lost a few to larger companies (mainly Microsoft) and we lost a few due to downsizing, but we still have managed to maintain our great company culture.

So, today I am remembering the past, and looking forward to the brilliant future that is ahead.  We are growing like crazy, and we are about to move into a new building (buying this time instead of renting).  It will be interesting to see what the next 10 years will hold.

Last week I had my first really bad experience with the power of JoeUser's automated category syndication.  You see, when you write an article on JoeUser.com, the system will look at what category you filed it under and then syndicate it out to other sites on the Stardock.net system.  So if I write a blog on politics, it will show up on JoeUser.com.  Write a blog on skinning and it shows up on WinCustomize.com.  The system does work both ways where those sites feed into JoeUser.com as well.  But those sites have much more restricted choices for what category something can be filed.

Well, back in April I wrote a couple blogs on gaming.  The first one was about Will Wright's Spore and how I think his concept could be revolutionary because it puts the player in the role of the content creator.  If developers can find clever ways to make the player part of the content creation team, costs can be reduced, quality kept high, and players made happy. 

I reposted my blog on a semi-private forum I hang out on called Quarter To Three where many gaming professionals hang out.  On there, one respondent indicated he worked at a major game developer and strongly disagreed with my points.  I debated the issue on there but also wrote a follow-up blog on JoeUser.com that quoted his material and mentioned what game developer he worked for.  That blog, categorized as a PC gaming article, got syndicated to several sites such as GalCiv2.com, SocietyGame.com, and TotalGaming.net.  And then got featured on TotalGaming.net by a forum moderator (along with the original).

The guy who worked at the game developer was ticked off (to an extreme) that I would put his comments on a "corporate" website.  I think he thought I was trying to get him into trouble or something, I'm not quite sure as the profanity-laiden emails did not make the exact issue very clear to me what exactly the issue was. 

But what I did learn is something I should have already known -- blogs ain't private. Whether it's via a auto-syndication engine or a search engine, what you write publicly is -- well public.  It's is the blessing and curse of the blogsphere.  A blog someone might toss off in 15 minutes one Saturday afternoon could end up one day being quoted 2 years later on some major site. 

While the incident definitely was unpleasant for me, it was a good wakeup call too to be more aware that what I write might be taken very differently than intended and may get out there a lot further and wider than I had ever thought.

So many games, so little time.  We've been at E3, the world's largest trade show for video games of all kinds.  And this year is a big year for games as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft announced their next-gen console plans.

Here are links to our TotalGaming.net coverage:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3