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?

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 …

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From here naturally I turned to Google, but everything I came across talked about installing iFuse and some kind of ipod-convenience package or said it couldn’t be done, or my favorite that you had to have a jail-broken phone in order to do it.  Now, I didn’t want to install a bunch of packages I wasn’t familiar with just for this, and I darn sure didn’t want to jail-break my phone either.  If for no other reason than because I was convinced that if I could do it in Windows (connect to my iPhone and copy my pics off), there had to be a way to do it in Linux too, without having to alter the device.  I am hard headed that way, but in this case it worked.

Now this might be obvious and simple to everyone else, and if so I am sorry to bore you, but it wasn’t something I was familiar with.  I did have an inspiration though, something so simple I just knew it wouldn’t work but I decided to try it out anyway.  I fired up gthumb which was conveniently installed already, and is a tool for doing just what I wanted to do, importing pictures from a digital camera among other things.  I then plugged in my iPhone and gthumb picked it up immediately and started pulling up a list of all my pics on the phone.  From there I could import, rotate, delete originals and more, easy as pie.  It worked perfect, and was very simple, just like it should be.

In the end, I found that I didn’t have to install any software hacks or jail-break my phone, just use the right tool for the job.  Ain’t Linux grand?