E-Dribble

The house parties have fizzled out and the paid advertisements in the form of reviews has come and gone. That’s right, Windows 7 has been released.  So what does everyone think? Well, if you’re looking for a calm and unbiased response, don’t ask these guys.

A growing number of people are getting locked into an endless reboot loop during upgrade, destroying their Vista installs and leaving them with no OS.

Woops.

Microsoft must be working day and night to try to resolve this issue, right? From TFA:

According to Microsoft’s head of support, however, the endless reboot problem isn’t on the company’s top list of concerns. “It’s very early in the process,” said Ben Bennett, the director of Microsoft’s Windows consumer global support group, in an interview Monday afternoon. “In terms of the top issues of customers who choose to upgrade, the XP-to-Windows 7 [upgrade] is up there on the list for lots of reasons. The netbook upgrade scenario — how do I upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 — is also a big one. And another is, ‘Where are my applications?’ after people have upgraded. They wonder what happened to e-mail and photo editing, for example. Those are the top issues so far.”

So, they’re more concerned with those upgrading from XP to 7.  Well, that makes sense.  I’m sure that was their plan all along.

At least I got to keep the paper hats and confetti.

My friend Mr. Lomas, just like AT&T seems to have had a failure during his copy/paste operation.  See, he used Yahoo Invite to send out his 419 Western Union notice, but due to the fact that hundreds of characters are strung together with no space, you can only read about a quarter of the “notice” without having to scroll.  Compound this with “You’re invited to: FROM WESTERN UNION POST OFFICE By your host: Steve Lomas” at the top of the email and “Will you attend? RSVP to this invitation” at the bottom and you have yourself one of the most pathetic scam efforts to date.

First, a screenshot:

Now, for the meat and potatoes of his attempt:

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AT&T has been in the news quite a bit recently for their humorous attempts at astroturfing their agenda on net neutrality.  Techdirt points us to their latest and most humorous endeavour.  AT&T releases a letter against net neutrality from a group of senior citizens but forgot to find/replace XYZ corporation.

I’m torn over which is more funny; the fact that they still haven’t figured out how to draft one of these fake letters in support of their agenda in spite of how often they do it or the fact that nobody can confirm the existence of the Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition.

Subject: Proposal
From: Song Lile <song@sngmail.com>

Reply-To: songlildesk@live.com

I have a fund proposal of $19,500,000,00 in my bank For info:songelildesk@live.com

I will see his proposal and raise him a counter-proposal.

I have a fun proposal to ass rape you after shooting you in the face at close range. For info: schwims_spam@schwim.net

You’ve got to give them props for at least using an event that happened in the recent past.  I’ve been linked to plane crashes that occurred 17 years ago.

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If you check the archives, you’ll see a letter identical to this in almost every way.  The author didn’t even bother to change the names, in an effort to keep his prospective victims from realizing he’s a spamming incompetent via Google.

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Just in case you thought I overlooked some incredible insight that the Gartner symposium provides to the person that pays them almost $4,000.00 to attend:

Brace yourself for cloud computing.

If you send me $2,500.00, I will tell you about this upcoming technology called Twitter that’s going to turn the cloud on it’s head!

The Gartner Symposium, a large gathering of people stating the obvious for other people that need to hear in a location other than the office water cooler must be hurting for numbers.  How bad are they hurting?  Well, they’re advertising that they’re giving a free copy of Windows 7 to all people that come to the conference.

The cost of attending the conference? $3,695.00.

So we’re clear, Gartner, the entity that wants you to look to them for cutting edge trends and intelligent discussion concerning all things technological, hopes that you believe that if you pay almost four thousand dollars to attend their conference, the copy of Windows 7 you receive will be free.

In fairness, if there’s anyone that will believe they’re receiving a free copy of Windows 7, it’s the very type of person that would pay four thousand dollars to listen to these blowhards.

I settled on Ubuntu for my first attempt at linux on the new machine.  To end the suspense, I’ll just say that everything is working as it should and MY GOD, THIS COMPUTER IS FAST!

After getting everything installed, set up and tested, I moved over all the important stuff in my home directory and replaced the old work machine.  Then I got to reflect upon the install.  I can say that I still would never think of handing a linux disk to a Windows user and telling them to try it as their OS.  At the same time, I’m astounded at how far linux has come in regards to the desktop.  Here’s the highs and lows:

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Yesterday, I pulled the plug on my open source script effort.  I had provided php scripts free of charge for more than four years.  For years I helped people that didn’t know how to find their server path, ending all my posts with a smiley.  In exchange for the hundreds of hours of development coupled with the hours of troubleshooting and install assistance, I merely exposed the visitors to a donation button on the left side of the page.  I figured that with the number of people downloading the script, I would surely have a few people that felt compelled to thank me via the most common method, that being bucks.  Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.

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