Sword's Tavern

I was watching a TV show earlier this evening, that was discussing various things about handicapped people, the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), and many various things that affect and effect the folk that need the help, like handicap parking.  OK, to get to the point, there was this one town (and I am sure there’s lots more like it) where people without the blue placard or handicap plates were parking in handicap spaces and no one was doing anything about it.  Not the police, or business owners, concerned citizens, etc.  With the exception of one brave lady, everyone pretty much ignored it and didn’t give a damn.  So it went, and this lady would confront people or take a picture of the car and license plate, etc.  But what got me was how the people who were parking illegally acted.  I mean they shouted obscenities, shoved this poor woman, grabbed her at times, verbally assaulted her and on and on.  I couldn’t help but think about what HUGE assholes these people were.  All this over a f***ing parking space, and one they shouldn’t be in anyways.  It is really sad that so many people were so lazy that they can’t be bothered to park a few extra feet away to ensure that someone who really needed to park close actually could.  Then, on top of that, when this lady politely called them out about it,  they act like such jerks.  I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the way they were acting.  This has always been a pet peeve of mine anyway, but on top of that, the lady doing this had a legitimate need for those parking places which is what drove her to try and police them herself since no one else would.  Her daughter is 21 years old, is autistic, blind and non-verbal.  I would think she deserves to NOT have to cross the damn street, you know?  Step up and be a real human being for once, leave the blue spaces for the handicapped people.  I know, I know, no one reading this would do such a thing, but maybe you can stop someone else from being a jerk.

Maybe it’s me, and please feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.  In fact, I am asking you to comment or hit the feedback button/contact form and let me know your thoughts.  I have working with what seems like a bazillion different operating systems over the years, to varying degrees of proficiency and intimacy.  I don’t just mean various versions of Windows either, I have worked with BeOS, DOS, Linux, MacOS, MenuetOS, NetWare, OS/2, SkyOS, UNIX, and Windows to name a reasonable sampling.  That list then breaks down into further releases, variations, versions and more.  The point I am trying to make here is that aside from the fact that I enjoy tinkering with operating systems, I have a pretty wide field of experience with many, many different ways to boot a computer.

The one big thing that I notice as a glaring difference between practically all of the operating systems I have tried and Windows is multitasking.  I mean true, let us do more than one thing at a time multitasking.  Not just do a little here and do a little there, the “hand off a lot, back and forth, and it’s real slow but we’re gonna call it multitasking while we entertain you with pretty pictures” kind of stuff.

My two primary operating systems these days are Windows and Linux, Windows 7 and Debian to be more precise.  Depending on where I am and what I am working on those can vary, but here at home, I tend to stick to those two as much as I can.  I have gone all Linux before and I loved it, and to be honest I’d love to do it again, but there are games I want to play and some development and music recording/production software that I can only run on Windows that I just don’t want to give up.  Therefore I run both.

Now, on to the crux of this long winded diatribe.  It seems like I can run many applications, daemons, processes and whatnot on my Linux boxen and it is happy to do so all day long.  In fact, I can overload it to the extreme and it will still function, albeit quite slowly.  No crash, no fuss, no muss, and once I stop some surplus processes it will come back and to a more or less normal state.  Except maybe if I am running Oracle, there seems to be no way to recover from running Oracle.

Compare this though, to my Windows box, where I can literally bring it to it’s knees with two … maybe three processes.  And I don’t just mean performance knees either, I mean the box will sometimes lock up, or even if not it never quite recovers (I suspect memory leaks maybe).  This gets especially if not exponentially worse if these two or three processes are attempting to access files on the same disk or partition.  It’s like Windows cannot stand the thought of sharing disk I/O with anyone, even itself.

Now, all that being said, let me make another note, this is not another Windows bashing article that are aplenty all around the ‘net these days.  These are my observations and frustrations that make me shake my head and wonder why slick marketing and strong arm business techniques always supersede quality and performance when it comes to sales (Beta versus VHS comes to mind).

What do you think?  Am I crazy?  Getting senile in my middle age? Or have any of you out there noticed similar things?

Look out!  The NAACP is going after those evil racist folk at Hallmark because they have an inspirational card for Graduates that talks about there being no limits on your future and that you can do anything you want.  The card is one of those electronic audio cards that plays a funny greeting or tune when you open it.  In this case, it’s a couple of cartoon characters talking about the uplifting message of nothing stopping you from achieving your dreams.  They go so far as to say that you could even take over the solar system.  I don’t think they meant that literally, they are just trying to make a point and inspire.

There is one phrase though, where the cartoon characters say “You black holes, you’re so ominous! [Other character laughs and says 'Ooooo!'] And you planets? Watch your backs.”  Kinda silly, right?  Yeah, but hardly racist though.  Now, I have listened to the audio from the card, and though it’s noisy and cartoony sounding, it sounds just like it is supposed to.  However, the NAACP has now come out and blasted Hallmark over this card (that has been out for over three years by the way) saying that what it really says is “whores” instead of “holes” and that it’s telling black people to “watch your backs”.  The president of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP specifically stated that it sounds like “a group of children, laughing and joking about blackness … again”.  She says this with a straight face, and a very serious looking black woman behind her nodding her head with her eyes closed.  She then goes on to say that the card is “intentionally demeaning African-American women, by first calling them prostitutes and then threatening them”.  Threatening them?  Calling them prostitutes??  What planet is she from???

Folks, this is stupid and insane.  There is nothing on the card that even remotely resembles a black person, they are cartoon characters.  It even says stuff about graduates and the solar system all over the card.  How in the hell do these morons get to come out and claim racism?  Plus, if it’s so freakin’ evil, why didn’t they do something before now?  Where have they been for the last three years???  These moonbats ought to be locked up and thrown in jail for reading something into nothing and wasting everyone’s time.  It’s stupid crap like this that makes real racism claims that much harder prove and justify when they happen.

Thanks Consumerist for letting me know about this atrocity …

Well, here we are in 2010 almost a year and a half after B. Hussein Obama took the reigns as President of the United States of America, promising change we can believe in.  Little did we know it was all of our change, spare change, and he was planning on taking as much of it as he could to finance socialist programs and pork projects.  Everyone complained like mad about how much George Bush spent while he was in office, over a term of eight years.  Here we have Obama who has already spent more in his first year than Bush did in his entire eight, and no one seems to say a word.  Kind of strange, but alas, I digress.  The main reason for my diatribe is that Nancy Pelosi, Queen of the Moonbats has now come out and said that the oil spill/disaster in the gulf was caused by none other than former President George W. Bush. Yeah, that was my reaction too.  I do however, want to know where ol’ W is hiding the time machine

Support your indie game developers and get some way cool cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) games with NO DRM included.  I am talking about the Humble Indie Bundle Experiment where you can buy a cool bundle of games and name your price in doing so.  Plus, a portion of the monies goes to charity.  How much better does it get, cool games, supporting indie game developers and donating to charity all at once.  Did I mention the games are cross platform and not locked down with DRM crap too?  Oh yeah!  Let’s get over there and get some good while we are doing some good!

Not that all people from Texas are morons, far from it.  However, the folks at Brazos Elementary School in Wallis, Texas sure are morons.  A ten year old third grader received a piece of candy, a lone Jolly Rancher from a friend while at school.  The teacher, staff, principal, even school board agreed that giving the child a weeks worth of detention (during lunch and recess) was appropriate because she was in “possession of a contraband substance”.  Ok, really, Jolly Ranchers are good, but they ain’t that good.  WTF kind of moron makes a punishment like this over a piece of candy, it’s ridiculous.  Boy I’d hate to see the lockdown the school would go into over a starburst!  So, here’s to you Wallis, Texas, keeping us safe from candy lovers everywhere.