That seems to the common theme when an article showing even the hint of giving ancient peoples credit for knowing something was helping and were possibly able to track it down to a source that was providing a benefit.

Apparently only modern American humans are capable seeing that something has a beneficial aspect and tracking it down at the very least to a certain substance made in a certain way. Apparently we invented the scientific method, science, medicine, and everything else that represents the ability to comprehend it as something other than "magic". I'm rather sick of this crud. It smacks of cultural elitism when there is no evidence that such is not warranted. If this is the prevailing attitudes of the so-called elite, you can bet this will happen 2,000 years from now when they dig up our bones and discover the chemical cocktails that we ingest every single freakin' day from rBGH (meat, dairy products), (over)vaccinations, excessive use of anti-bacterial products and antibiotics.

God forbid we accept that a bunch of Nubians from nearly 2,000 years ago might have been on to something when they found that drinking their beer made from "moldy" grain had healing properties. I mean, it's not like they had brains and could work out a method for empirical testing. After all, they were only desert-dwelling Nubians.

You people make me sick.

First, I'd like to thank TheRealGrogan for this comment. Without it I'd still not have a fully updated and patched system. Stupid Windows.

So life in 2010 is going pretty good. On September 1st I start classes at TTCM in their industrial electricity program. Some people (here on /. none-the-less) look at this with some sort of derision, either because of my age or choice of training program. I could easily go into industrial electronics too, but I figure it's no good if you have no electricity.

Why is any trade looked upon with derision (aside from the criminal trades and prostitution), though? Especially here, where one would think that continuing education -- no matter where that leads -- would be looked upon as a good thing.

Life is good in 2010 so far, let's see how the rest of the year pans out.

I simply can't believe how awful Windows is, and (unfortunately) how gullible I am. [my laptop] came loaded with Vista Business, and a "fallback" DVD for XP Professional. I tried running Vista on it. I really tried, I really wanted it to work, and I said exactly that in my blog here. But it didn't. Every time I tried it, things started out looking promising, and after a month or two it would go belly-up. Three or four times I reloaded Vista from scratch and tried again, hoping that the latest Microsoft Updates would fix it. Eventually I gave up, reloaded one last time with XP Professional, and ran that with no problem for two years.

A month or so ago, through my own carelessness, I wiped the disk on this laptop. I had to reload everything from scratch, so (like a fool) I thought well, Vista SP2 is out, everyone says that it is "all fixed up now and works great, and reliably", so I'll try that again. I loaded Vista from scratch, added all the updates to SP2 and beyond, and I've been running it that way since. Until today. ... Windows is unreliable garbage, it always has been, it always will be, and if you use it you should be willing to accept that risk. I am no longer willing to accept that risk, even part-time as a secondary operating system on this laptop. Windows is gone, it has puked all over its disk for the last time here, and I will not reload it. I am in the process of transferring the data to one of the Linux partitions - yes, Linux is quite happy to read the partition that Windows says is hopelessly corrupted.

Please, PLEASE, unless you want to hear a very long string of words that I learned during my military service, do NOT tell me that the "solution" to this problem is to give Microsoft even more money and "upgrade" to Windows 7. ... if Vista is not stable, or reliable, then Microsoft should withdraw it and either offer a free "upgrade" to Windows 7 or offer a refund of the purchase cost. ... I absolutely don't believe the Windows 7 is any better, any more stable or any more reliable than Vista. They come from Microsoft, they are utter garbage...

This is a sign of things to come for Windows. Windows 7 was predictably just as bad as Vista was. People no longer are falling for Microsoft's promises of "this version fixes everything."

FAIL! :(

I'm wanting to organize several coding bounties to get several ports on FreeBSD updated (such as Java) yet the only bounty site I've found is Pledgie, which forces you to choose who it is going to before you begin collecting donations. That's all well and fine when a project has a defined maintainer, but something like a coding bounty, it's not so good. Does anyone out on /. use an escrow service for this purpose? If not, how do you collect and disperse funds for such a thing?

I have the beginnings of FreeBSD-8.0RELEASE on one computer.

Going to use it as a test server for slashcode and a few other things.

Still single.

Saved.

On Facebook.

I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.

Digitimes has another reason for Windows 7 sales to be low.

PC replacement demand is not driven significantly by the consumer market, but rather enterprise and government purchases ... most enterprises in Europe and North America are expected to start planning annual purchasing budgets for the year in March and April of 2010, actual replacement demand is not expected to spur until the second half of the year.

Companies and government might buy computers next year, but they should already be buying orders placed in March and April of this year. There are already accounts of corporate rejection of Windows 7, so that OS is not likely to have anything to do with corporate buying and government won't be a big market because UAC still does not meet government security standards . Back in January, retailers at CES remembered being "burnt by Vista" and saw nothing to change their minds about the contracting PC market. Perhaps OEMs and retailers could deliver the gnu/linux netbooks and desktops that people actually want to buy.

Who decided that all story submissions would be tagged with user email addresses? You might as well demand and publish people's real names.

This is a breach of trust that will drive away long standing users such as myself. Email addresses were collected under the promise of never being published. Now I have the choice of submitting things as AC, publishing my email address or just giving up. I'm leaning towards giving up. Boycott Novell has been more fun anyway.

We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.

Despite all the hype, it is easy to predict that Windows 7 will go the same way Vista did. Vista was a failure in every way, so a pretty new face was made to sell the same buggy and customer hostile core and the Microsoft hype machine was turned on full blast. Now that Vista 7 is RTM, we no longer have to make predictions, we can simply watch the results. Here is a collection of Vista 7 failures found on YouTube. Enjoy what I found in a few minutes:

• Counter Strike Fail
• Power Management Fail Hibernate seems to be broken. Any power management working would be an improvement over XP or Vista but we should not expect such miracles from non free software.
• Cracking Video shows how to p0wn "activation." Soothing music welcomes you to the botnet.
• Good rundown of Windows 7 problems by seasoned IT professional who has yet to give up on Windows. He's not correct about being able to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7.

Update 1/2/2011 Real users have been forced to buy Vista 7 with their new computers for more than a year and it's Vista all over again. They tell the story better than I can.

Here are videos that have collected at YouTube over the last year. Windows 7 is no less a pig and no more secure than Vista was, everything the Microsoft boosters say is a lie. All of these videos were made after the RTM date and most after the October 22nd, 2009 shelf date. The best have bold dates.

2009

• 07/28 - an amazing Windows 7 failure video. Ten minutes long but fun the whole time.
• 09/11 - buggy dual monitor action. It's funny how my PIII can correctly do this kind of thing with composting using E16 and Debian. Multitouch on Windows 7 has had a lot of high profile failure too.
• 10/22 - Fails the day it was released to the public. Man forced to wipe Vista to install Windows 7 and ends up with two dead computers.
• 12/29 - Windows 7 speech recognition, impressive and completely worthless.
• 12/31 - What Windows 7 OEM "support" is really like, explained by a former Gateway support tech. The techical issue was product activation but the video is a profoundly sad portrait of betrayed US tech workers.

2010

• 01/03 - A gamer hates Windows 7 performance and broken Steam
• 01/05 - Another user abandons the Windows world over Vista/Windows 7.
• 01/15 - Another tech and XP fans tell his users to go from XP to Mac OSX because Windows 7 is so poor
• 01/18 - This poor user thinks Vista was better, how pathetic.
• 04/19 - Hardware does not work with Windows 7, user hates it.
• 07/10/2010 - Excellent critique by long term Windows user fed up with Vista/Window7. After fighting "updates" for two years, user runs to Mac and vows to never purchase Windows again.
• 07/29 - Windows 7 ruins a netbook and lots of other hardware, user can't use CDs and is very frustrated.
• 8/21 - Infuriating general flakeyness, poor user wants his XP back.
• 09/04 - Poor battery life of Windows 7 graphically illustrated.
• 09/30 - Windows 7 broken so that user can't log in.
• 10/04 - User complains about poor performance and incomplete Vista facelift for Window 7. Thinks it works a little faster with "classic" 1995 like menu bar.
• 10/10 - Fake AV demonstrated, shows that Windows 7 is still insecure and preyed on by all sorts. The demonstrator should have actually used virtual machine if he really needed Windows.
• 10/31 - Slow shutdown ruins someone's day.
• 12/10 - Great demonstration of CPU usage in Windows 7 vrs GNU/Linux.

2011

• 02/01 - Bugs and clown music
• 02/11 - Microsoft Anna voice tells you how annoying Windows 7 is
• 02/13 - Windows 7 ruins $1,000 computer so user is unable to play games, make videos and whatnot.
• 03/16 - Five crashes a month belies hype for this man. He wanted an improvement over Vista and 64 bit OS, but thinks Windows 7 is worse than Vista, which he also thought suckes. Wants to go Linux but has a few programs holding him back.

This ZDNet opinion piece has got to be the worst defense of unethical business practices I've see to date. Basically, the author admits M$ bribes and punishes OEMs and that's AOK with him. Let's preserve this gem:

a company gets twice as much from a PC with their brand on it as one they make for someone else. MSI needs this money to survive in a world where its Chinese partners can undercut them. The margin justifies MSIs existence.

It is also true that Linux cannot afford a presence in the channel. Its not how we roll. You cant invest in retailing if your product costs nothing. There is nothing to invest. Thats why Linux and open source depend on the Internet.

A monopolistic practice occurs when two sides are offering the same deal and one side gets all the business. But in this case both sides were not offering the same deal. Microsoft offered channel support, Linux a hearty handshake and rhetoric about freedom.

... What Linux needs to succeed is a way to offer more than was offered MSI. The question is, how would you structure a deal?

Well, that's a good question. What besides an OS that works and costs zero dollars does free software offer? OK, it can cost up to half what Windows costs if you get it customized and maintained by a company like Xandros. "Channel Support" is just a code word for exclusion of competition by bribes and threats, the very definition of anti-trust conspiracy. Lately, "Channel Support" has come at a terrible cost to companies like Asus. Retail partners like CompUSA, Circuit City and others who got themselves channel stuffed with Vista. This is what Li Chang, vice president of the Taipei Computer Association, was complaining about and it's worth a DOJ investigation. People don't want Windows, they want computers that work. Retailers and OEMs that don't deliver are going the way of other M$ partners and M$ themselves.

Ordinarily, I don't pick on language and style but the phrase, "how we roll," references to his parents' national origin bring special disgrace on ZDNet and the Wintel press. It's hard to tell if he's being cynical or if M$'s culture has really degenerated so far. This single article earns Dana a place in my Poison Pen Collection.

Roger Grimes makes this startling admission of public perception:

Youll often read similar recommendations to dump Microsofts Internet Explorer (I work full-time for Microsoft) and use any other browser instead. To completely protect yourself, theyll advise moving off of Microsoft Windows all together.

He goes on to make some long winded excuses and insult users in a way that's completely torn apart in the comments. His readers sanely point out that Window's endless problems have been well demonstrated. What's interesting about this article is not the same old blame the user and "popularity" excuses, it's that M$ is no longer able to pretend to the general public that "computer experts" still trust Windows. They don't and neither does anyone else any more.