Time for a downgrade?

Is it just me or are people getting so frustrated with Vista that they are seriously thinking of going back to XP, and I am not talking about expert users only, I am seeing more average users complaining about Vista being a resource hog and how its all a 'con$piracy' to make them buy more memory. Take my dad for example, he is an accountant and uses Quickbooks often. 7 months ago he got an HP laptop and since day 1 he didn't like Vista. Now he is asking me (I am kind of the techie guy in the family) if I have a copy of XP so I can 'downgrade' his OS. Two more family members have asked me the same exact thing and several friends complain about how Vista's flaws are more than its benefits. I myself haven't upgraded to Vista. I had the opportunity to beta test Vista's RC1 & RC2 and have used Vista Premiun quite a lot but there hasn't been anything to sway me to change. In fact I am hoping I can wait until Microsoft's next OS or maybe I will just make the change to Ubuntu.
In any case I hope more retailers realize this and start offering XP as an option again, dream on, right. It is obvious more and more PC's are running Vista but that is because they all come preloaded. I really wonder, would Vista be profitable for Microsoft if they gave the consumer the choice? Enough with my Vista rant. The market will speak.
Benchmarks speak louder than words.
Check out this comprenhensive Benchmark from Tom's Hardware.

A.I. learned financial modeling

The holy grail for certain financial analysts is to be able to develop a comprehensive economic model that will take-in massive amounts of data and improve their odds at making forecasts. In order for this models to be meaningful we must enter the world of AI. Neural networks, genetic algorithms and extensive data mining are some of the tools needed to build such a daunting application. Typically it is very expensive to develop something meaningful, but there are some alternative options out there for the serious individual investor. Recently I found an application called RapidMiner which seems to be very powerful, modular and Open Source. I am currently trying to figure it out and brushing up my XML & JAVA in order to understand some of the concepts. It is very interesting, for example you can feed it data from TraderXL in order to construct your models.
Although it is not very encouraging that Goldman Sachs darling, the Global Alpha fund(9 billion) which trades are determined by computers and mathematical models, is down 16% for the year last time I checked, I have faith that computer modeling is a valuable tool for conducting meaningful forecasting.

Looking for a HIT (or to SCORE)

Hitwise is a powerful and valuable online marketing tool. It allows the researcher to analyze online usage data from 25 million people interacting with over 1 million websites in 160+ industries.
Among its many products, it offers :
'Rankings lists' which track market share of visits.
'Charting' allow for customizable chart based on online usage data.
'Clickstream' which analyzes where users come from and go to.
'Search intelligence' let's you explore successful keyword driven traffic.
'Demographic and lifestyle' helps you understand profiles of Internet audiences.
I find it extremely interesting and exciting that businesses can have almost real time information about consumer behavior, usage and searching patterns. It definitely helps those businesses looking for an additional edge in their industry. If properly used, this information will pay for itself time and time again. It will help you solidify your online presence, it will help you understand what the competition is doing, it will give you and idea of where you stand in your industry and it will give you many other benefits that should be part of your SWOT strategy.
Comscore is another company that 'measures the digital world' and is apparently somewhat more extensive than Hitwise. In any case they both offer services that will definitely be an asset to have.