Did you get rid of your 5.25 drive while you still had data left of the disks? I didn't.
I even set my Apple2 up, just three years ago, hooked up a serial cable and copied all the data off of the 140k floppies, before I gave it to the local users group.
Why would you assume that someone would throw away their last CD-reader without thinking of the box of CDs in the closet, all of which could be reduced to fitting on 10 DVD[RW+-] disks, or a quarter of a small HD... And why do you assume that people in the future won't be able to decode old storage that hasn't decayed? With people like you describe, I've got a perfect business model... I'll maintain a Pentium with CD reader and copy disks made in the '90s for people too stupid to have done it for themselves.
And yet if we go too far towards complexity we got tyrannical and fascist as well.
I submit that as soon as it becomes factually correct to say "The law is too complex to understand without a law degree", that it is too complex to exist in its current form. If I can be convicted for breaking a law that I've never heard of, despite not having lived in the Montana wilderness all my life, that law is too obscure. When laws get passed (or repealed) and the people aren't made aware of them in a form that is reasonably expected to be understood by those people, those laws shouldn't be binding.
It might be hard to write a complex legal system in such a way that the Average Joe with a high-school education can understand it, but I don't think we can call ourselves a free country until we can either come up with a simple legal system, or a smarter Average Joe. The legal system could be simplified a lot. Remove obsolete laws. When new laws are provided, if they overlap old laws, just rewrite the old laws, ideally. If the laws aren't written in language that everyone can understand, they won't be able to obey the law, so don't bother passing it until it's written in plain english.
And one thing that would help, write the entire legal code in a hyperlinked form. Let people start at simple overviews and unfold more detail as they go. A heading about as basic as "Thou shalt not kill" could eventually fold out into the laws against euthenasia, with links to other laws that are relevant in the discussion.
This way people could start to understand the system without being handed a huge book and told to flip through it. It'd actually let people look up the laws in a specific area to get a quick idea. They'd still (in today's system) need a lawyer if it was a gray area, but at least they could find out enough to ask the right questions and provide background.
Your rituals don't mean anything to people who didn't grow up with them. You obviously wouldn't appreciate the plastic clicking of a keyboard as you write, or appreciate the grinding noises of old-style 5.25 floppy drives, as you listen to them seeking and can tell from the sound the pattern they're using. Some of the old-school crackers could listen to a game load and tell you how it was protected, right more often than not.
But hard drives are better for any practical purpose. For nostalgia, no. But for their intended purpose, storage, they're a million times better.
Anyways, the art is the art. Old photographers shot film because it's what they had. When better films came out, they used them. I'm sure they'd have appreciated grainless ISO 3200 film if they'd had it, it would have let them capture their intended image without jumping through hoops.
And in the end, art that makes obvious and unpleasant use of its medium (Hiss on records is a good this claim audiophiles, it's "warmth". Grain in pictures is good, it makes them "real" claim die-hard film fans.) tends to be mental masturbation, doing something just to prove you can, despite the attractiveness of the results. It's often a good learning exercise, but it doesn't have any more value to the world for having been created in difficult conditions.
It all boils down to, a flower is a flower, by any other name. It's also just as artistic regardless of how it's taken.
For an example of people trying to be "Artistic", check out www.dpchallenge.com, some challenges are art, some are just fun.
Yeah, painting is dead. Point to the thriving community of professional portrait painter.
Blacksmithy is dead. Fact. There are some blacksmiths, but the industry is dead.
Film is dead. Some diehards will use it, but for all practical purposes 35mm and smaller is dead. MF has been mortally wounded. Large Format's relatives are taking out large life-insurance policies.
Face it, digital provides better pictures than color 35mm film hands down. B&W film has a higher dynamic range, but only barely, and digital can bracket the shot and comine the two pictures for a much higher range.
Semi-pro is generally known as someone who makes money off of it, but doesn't try to make a living from it. If "Pro" is such a hard line, what's the defintion? Anyone who pays all their bills? Anyone who has ever taken money for a picture? Or anyone who shoots as if they were getting paid, regardless of ability to pay the bills? How about someone who makes money with a disposable camera?
And yes, you should throw your vinyl out. Or rather, sell it on EBay, some gullible fool there has been conned into calling static noise "Warmth" and will snap it up. You can either buy the music in digital form or record it yourself before you get rid of it, though a record sounds so lousy you might as well download a 128mbps MP3 for all the fidelity you'll get.
That's completely different than what most pros say to newbies. The ones I've heard all say "Shoot as if film were free". Obviously you don't care to see certain things, so don't shoot them, but things you do want to see, shoot a few shots of them. Not only do you minimize accidents like blinking, but you also get to try different shots.
I have very few duds. Sure, there's three pictures of someone instead of one, but I toss the two less-good shots into a "Dupes" directory and I just show off the best.
You go on, shooting your artists shots, and I'll shoot pictures of what happens around me while you try to find the compelling mesage in something.
And yes, a good photographer will pick the right tools for the job, just as a programmer will. But how often is COBOL really relevant outside specialty jobs? Same with film...
The.CRW (Canon RAW) isn't 30MB, the TIFF is generates is. Canon (and Nikon's high-end, I think) use lossless compression on the raw sensor output, it tends to be about.75MB / MegaPixel, my Canon Powershot G2, a 4MP camera, generates 3MB CRW files, or 1MB JPGs (In Large/Fine). Based on this, the EOS 1Ds should produce CRW files around 9-10 MB.
Much nicer.
Actually, many "pro-sumer' cameras already write 10+MB files because they do plain TIFF files. So the 11MP cameras will be generating smaller files, and because they have 256+ MB of buffer, they'll keep shooting even while writing, at least for 10-20 shots.
There's a lot of talk about this, but really if you think about it, it's not that big of a deal.
Preserving data used to be expensive. If you wanted to copy a book you paid a scribe to write it out, and paid another one to check the work of the first. Later, if you wanted a picture copies for backup you had to get it photographically reproduced at considerable cost and lack of quality.
These days if you want your (digital) documents reproduced you simply drag them onto another media, if you want analog documents reproduced you still lose quality but you can reproduce a whole book for a few dollars.
My family has lost many pictures over the years by house fires, lost luggage, theft, etc. If we'd been able to simply zip up a copy and send a CD to grandma for safe-keeping, we wouldn't have lost anything.
I already send CDs of all of my photos to relatives. If I lose anything I could just ask for get a copy from them. Many of them copy the pictures further, sending CDs to their immediate family or putting them on the hard drive.
Also, CDs aren't expected to have a great life span, no more than 50 years. But that's the expected lifespan, individual disks will last much longer and shorter times. I'm sure archeologists will pick up CDs from landfills in a few hundred years, toss them on very good scanners, and expect a grad student to read them out.
In fact, the Exif data in the pictures will probably be more useful to them than anything on a paper picture, especially as some companies are talking about including a GPS port on the camera to allow tagging where a picture was taken. Actually, the idea I heard was to include a compass in the camera, it takes its distance from the tethered GPS, it takes the focus distance, and its facing, allowing you to record exactly what was shot, from where.
I just buy new drives, they're cheap like candy these days. I expect to buy a bottle of coke and get a free 80GB drive soon.
They fit nicely in the standard small safe-deposit box. I use a 20gb for little stuff, and weekly backups. Sometimes I just leave it at work, if I go away I leave it at the bank. For big stuff, we've got an 80 that we filled up with all our picstures, data, etc. When the 20 is always full I'll buy another drive, a 160 I imagine, and I'll bring the 80 home, move everything from it onto the 160 and start using the 80 as a shuttle drive, etc.
I can already get 700+gb in a safe-deposit box. That's a lot of photos, and HDs have a much better shelf life in the near term than CDs do. (And as long as I keep copying them onto something new every few years, easy as the capacity keeps going up, they're future-proof.)
I've heard that AFS, Andrew File System, is remote and fairly secure, but it also looks a little bizarre.
I want something like Reiserfs (ie, full unix privs and soon ACLs) that just happens to work wonderfully over a network and is protected by SSH.
But, the solution might not be in the filesystem. Perhaps we shouldn't waste time securing that when it's just the network that needs securing. NFS is perfectly secure on a two-computer network, so maybe we need to use VPNs (with SSH-level security) and simply run NFS over them).
I'm looking into this same thing right now. I want to store all my files on a server machine and pull them from any of the client machines, without letting anyone else on the switch sniff them. SMB is a bit more secure, with a password and all, but it sends the data in plaintext, and doesn't properly support Linux permissions, let alone ACLs. (That I know of.)
Yeah... So MS isn't terrified of losing a customer that big and setting a precedent like that. Sure.
They'd box monkey box up and send him off even if he wasn't already heading that way. The fact that he was is simply going to affect the timing a little.
This is good, companies can see that if you want to yank MS's chain, and to have them dance for you (as wacky a monkey-dance as it might be) you just need to discuss Linux solutions. We'll either cut into MS's cash flowor we'll take desktops away. Either will hurt them and what hurts them makes it harder for them to force DRM on everyone.
But, Mozilla works. That's the big difference. If I open Konq and go browsing it'll likely crash in the first two minutes. Honestly, click, click, read, click, crash. I dunno what the problem was, but in Mandrake 8.2, the last time I used it, it could stay stable enough to use as a file browser.
And why on earth are they still writing a browser? Hello, there's a better alternative that you can bundle for free, and with XUL+etc you can write your file manager in it pretty easily.
Konq was the big reason I went to investigate Gnome. Nautilus is beautiful and seems more functional. (Except for KDE's better support of protocol:// browsing to my camera, smb shares, etc, but that's a seperate issue from the program they display it in.)
All KDE, or Gnome is to me, or should be, are the widget sets and underlying structure. I don't want KOffice with OpenOffice available. Choice is good, when someone would actually want to use what you're offering.
If you don't do the "life + xx" you don't run into the unfair situation where two one-hit-wonder authors write a book to support their family (spouse + baby) and one of them gets run over by a car.
It's a contrived example, but still reasonable I think. Why should my work be worth less because I'm old, or if I happen to have inoperable cancer?
No other type of work lets you do one thing and retire on it if it's popular. If you make a beautiful chair and get famous, you still have to make and sell more chairs. And the person who owns the famous chair can let other people sit in it. It if was a book people somehow expect to be able to coast through life on an old success. (Which is unreasonable, very very few works are still bringing in useful royalty cheques sixty years after publishing.)
Then there's the idea that someone might want to unfairly influence the "life" part of a copyright. A little "accident" and some expensive artist's copyright will expire fifty years earlier than it might have. Or, keep W. Disney cryonically suspended and his copyright will never die.:)
Personally, I think almost all the benefit will come from the first 10 years. Make copyrights 10, with two optional five year extentions if you can show cause. (Has to be commercially or artistically viable, not just to keep someone else from having it.) However, a fifty year 'no for-profit reproduction' limit might be reasonable. If the author can still sell it, give them the right, but let people freely copy it amongst themselves. And if you want to give a very long (100+ year) moral copyright, such that misatributions aren't allowed, that's reasonable.
I called you a nut because you're not arguing with me, you're arguing with some "Liberal", whatever that really means to you. You're attributing to me things that I didn't say.
You wanted a list of people who got rich through criminal acts, I provided one. I *KNOW* it's fraud. It's what you asked for. The children of Ken Lay will be rich even though neither them nor their father did anything to deserve it. This is to show that the criminal acts in the past are still here today. You said that a vanishingly small number of rich people got there through fraud, I think I illustrated that a fairly significant number did. A large percentage? Who knows. But certainly more than statistical noise.
Next, you go on about Liberals, as if they're directly opposed to Libertarians... In the USA it's conservatives who want to pass laws requiring religion in school, forbidding the teaching of evolution, etc, etc... You really need to look at the two-dimensional political chart. "Liberal" and "Conservative" (the tags are pretty silly because they don't represent the views of those labelled that way) are on the left and right side. Libertarians are on the top, fascists on the bottom. The left-right axis is sort of social freedom, the vertical axis is economic freedom. It's a lot more accurate because liberal/conservative have nothing to do with people's economic views. A quick google search should find this.
I say this because I want to say of "... kennedy's (liberals mind you)..."; What the hell does it matter? Ghandi could commit a crime and it'd still be a crime.
And then. You say I'm anti-corporation... I only mentioned two corporations on my "conspiracy list" as you call it. It's purely a list of those who broke or skirted the law (often with the help of bribes). You asked for the list and I went to compile data on it, don't you dare call it a conspiracy list.
Your example of the racist shopkeeper is a bit beyond my example. The people I named had often pursued more personal vendettas, breaking individuals by threatening people who would deal with them. Few companies are big enough to dangerously discriminate against a whole class of people, but against a few "troublemakers" is easy. You built a strawman that resembled my argument superficially, but you didn't adress the actual issue which is a very rich person taking actions directly against a single poor person. It has been done, you provide no reason to believe that a Libertarian system would prevent it from happening.
Draw a logic chain in your next post. Say "Fact..." and make it a fact, not opinion, make it something you could back up. Then say "Conclusion...", show how it's a reasonable conclusion from the facts. That's logic, and proving something with it. Calling me a commie liberal isn't logic.
Go read *my* posts. Don't label me a Liberal, don't tell me I hate corporations. Answer *my* points without resorting to straw-men or misdirection.
Even if IBM and everyone else stop supporting Linux it'll still go on the way it always has, as a hobbyist project keeping hobbyists happy. They'll no more go broke doing it than a model airplane enthusiast will doing his not-for-profit hobby.
But that won't happen. IBM, Oracle, Corel, Sun, they've all had a taste of freedom from a demanding OS provider and their pet monopoly. Microsoft won't ever go away, DataGeneral is still with us even, in a way, but their market dominance will fade and people will realize that their stock price will never climb again. Even if they start to pay dividends they'll never regain their former glory. They've created the image of sustainable exponential growth for so long that when people realize they've slowed down for good, not just as a result of the dot-com collapse, they'll lose their 'Buy' rating.
btw, as for that charity crap, most of what they give is licenses. Check me out, I just wrote a "Hello World" program, priced it at $1B and donated six copies to the Red Cross. Now I'm more generous than Bill. Can I claim this on my taxes like they do?
You're a nut. This is a religious issue for you and you can't see that it's completely cracked. You make as much sense as a guy standing on the street corner waving a "JESUS" sign screaming about how perfect the world will be when we all follow his ideas.
Non-physical force is all too common, that fact that you don't admit to the blatant truth shows that you're afraid of it. It's a hole in your argument. The world wouldn't be any better off under your little scheme because the people with money would still be free to abuse those without. It's no worse than right now, but you can't claim it to be a perfect system while it's got gaping holes.
You also really need to settle the fuck down and try to understand that I'm not advocating anything. Nothing at all. *YOU* are pushing an agenda. Me, I'm just telling you that it's not as perfect as you think. I'm not advocating passing any laws, or ushering in any new social order.
If you want examples of corporate crime look at Enron. If you want historical examples, search for "Robber Baron", "Company Town", and "Land Grant". Cornelius Vanderbilt, the real-world inspiration for Rearden (he invented Steel rails which revolutionized the industry) prefered to ruin opponents financially rather than fight court battles. The Hearst empire was largely funded by the "shady" aquisition of land grants after the civil war and the publishing empire was built into a monopoly by ruining anyone who supported other newspapers. The Kennedy empire has many ties to organized crime and a lot of their money comes from borderline-legal stock manipulation in the period after the '29 crash.
Bill Gates today has simply stolen products from competing companies (Stacker) and waited them out in court until they've died, or sabotaged Windows in such a way as to not work over DR DOS in such a way as to make it appear to be the fault of DR DOS. And there's a reason the saying "DOS ain't done with Lotus don't run" was coined.
None of that is legal, but when you can afford to drag court battles out for ten years or more you find that nobody can afford to sue you, or as the DoJ found out, punish your illegal activities.
As I pointed out, these guys weren't very nice to workers. When you've got a worker hundreds of miles from the nearest city and dependent on you for food and shelter you can fuck him over a fair bit, especially if you have enforcers to deal with anyone trying to unite the workers.
The fact that Jimmy Hoffa used similar rough tactics doesn't invalidate my point that businesses have often done the same or worse. I'm not arguing for any one system, you can't simply point out Jimmy Hoffa and watch my argument crumble.
It doesn't take much of a stretch to find "force that libertarians allow", they allow anything that defends their interests, expecting anything that hurts them to of course be a violation of their human rights.
Look at the hollywood blacklists of McCarthy, where careers were ruined because nobody, anywhere, would hire them. This has happened in many other cases, often non-governmentmal. Piss off one of the robber barons and you'd find out that you couldn't get a job anywhere, literally. If you did, someone would come along and "explain the situation" to your boss who would then fire you or suffer "accidents" or perhaps just be blacklisted themselves.
It wasn't possible to just "go to the next town" because the reach of these guys was basically unlimited and they felt that by making examples of people who pissed them off they'd avoid that sort of thing in the future.
Of course your reading materials, from Forbes and similar places, won't admit this. I'm not saying you need to read socialist newsletters or anything, but as long as you read certain sources only, you're going to get a biased view.
Look at the ammount of old money backing up "new money". Sure, the Kennedy kids made their own money, but would they have if they'd had to start from scratch and pay for their university education? Would some anonymous factory worker have been in a dead-end job if he didn't have to get a job at a young age just to support the family because he dad was killed in a mining collapse, or because the family's savings were wiped out by the bank collapse?
Truly, many people are where they deserve to be. Many rich people did get where they are by working harder and smarter. Many poor people are where they are because they don't try as hard. But not all. Not enough to base a moral philosophy on.
You claim that rich people wouldn't have more power than the poor, basing this on the lack of government, which your statement implies is the sole source of this uneven power. I have shown how power can be based directly on money without government, that means your original point is wrong. You made a connection that wasn't supported by the facts, which seems all too common in your "logic".
Tell me, if you were a business owner in the early 1900s and you spoke out against illegal practices, would you not feel "forced" if your suppliers and customers were compelled to avoid you. If once your business died, nobody would hire you and you couldn't buy anything with your savings? And if the situation would be exactly the same even if you did manage to get to another town... Imagine it with a family and tell me that you wouldn't be forced to back down.
Bah, you festering cretin. You didn't invoke Godwin's law, if anyone did it was the poster who mentioned Hitler. Godwin's law just states that eventually a thread will mention Hitler if it goes long enough.
The thread-ending you allude to isn't part of Godwin's law. It's merely tradition that the person mentioning Hitler loses the argument. It doesn't say anything about ending the thread.
You need to get out of business when the sale value of your assets is greater than your total profit in the future.
Sometimes you can't predict this, short term market swings can make or break you. But if your company makes buggy whips maybe you should consider closing shop when the car starts to get big, instead of waiting until your lack of orders has forced you to borrow money and mortgage your assets just to stay in business a little longer.
Really, a big business is no different than a sole proprietorship consulting firm. If I start to run out of jobs I'd better find new work, or quit running my own business and find a full-time job. It's easy to see this, so why is it hard to see that a big company facing the same lack of future profits would break up, selling assets and returning money to the investors letting them do something else with it, instead of burning every penny pretending they're healthy until the day they lock the doors?
Who cares about the desktop that a program was written for? If it works, use it. I use Konsole because it was easy and I like it, I use GCombust because it seems to work the best.
But if they renamed it Combust, I think it'd be better. It'd drop the irrelevant tag and thus probably a whole lot of baggage and still retain the functionality.
It's silly for the makers of a desktop to be doing anything but making a desktop. If they really want a K-themed browser, write a XUL skin for Mozilla, ditto with email. If they want Kmp3, draw a skin for xmms maybe. But don't reinvent the wheel just to add another checkbox to a list that nobody cares about, because of a silly contest with someone.
The whole desktop thing is silly. All the user sees (and cares about) is a theme. Just some pretty icons and a cascading menu. This is worth a religious war?
You probably think the Republicans and the Democrats differ in a meaningful way too. (Insert whatever parties dominate politics where you live.)
What's wrong with replacing Konq? In a system where you can borrow code and applications at will, why not use Mozilla? It only takes a second or two longer to start than Konq and where Konq crashes every few minutes (literally, I restarted it five times in twenty minutes once, and it's worse as a file browser) Mozilla is stable for weeks. (I actually rarely see it crash, I usually reboot once a month or so for hardware tweaking and it's still going strong at that point, the initial instance I opened minutes after reboot.)
What does Konq possibly offer?
Besides, your're missing the point. If someone installed Redhat, obviously they want merged desktops. If they don't, they can download and install a seperate KDE that puts it in/opt and isn't integrated at all.
Personally this whole multiple desktops thing seems weird. I use KDE because it's the default, but I use Gnome apps a lot. If they all looked alike, it wouldn't bother me one bit.
And I'll be there to point and laugh when your investment fails.
If you had invested in something that didn't exploit others though I might care and give you a helping hand. I know people like you who took sleazy jobs with spammers writing the first address gathering tools. Nobody talks to them, nobody mentions neat job openings to them. They got a fairly large short term gain but they blew their credibility to hell by selling everyone else down the river.
So buy your dirty stock, but if it doesn't make enough for you to live happily on you've screwing yourself if anyone finds out.
The last place I saw that message, and the broken counter, was when I was copying a friend's MP3s to a backup drive before wiping their main HD and installing Linux.
They weren't much of a gamer and they didn't really notice the difference, except that it crashes a bit less. They're clued enough to handle a few instructions so I gave them Mandrake, not a baby-proofed distro, and they seem happy.
XP didn't like their computer, they were told it was their hardware, but Linux recognized it all and uses it just fine...
If you ignore licensing issues, and ignore the "problem" Windows boxes have in accepting connections from more than a few other boxes at once (without the server version), it's about equal. A talented C programmer can open a socket and start pumping data around in about the same way on either OS. The processing programs are usually written in-house so they can be compiled for either OS.
Any skilled programmer will have used a bit of everything in university and will be fairly comfortable in either OS.
(A cheap MCSE may not, but then I'm assuming that we're talking skilled employees, the ones HR looks for "with 6 years programming experience and a BS in Comp Sci", not a graduate of Devry Institute, or whatever. This does increase the TCO, but chances are you'll need these people for either system to actually make the code that makes it do real work.)
The hardware is the same, except that with Linux it's a bit easier to boot from the network without another proprietary solution. Going this way saves the HD in every system and saves you from having to image an OS onto them.
So then you "just" buy a few 100mbps switches and draw up a decent topology. ("Just", heh, this is the hard part but it's OS-independent.) Buy some racks, hook up the machines, and go.
The TCO difference is pretty much all OS, and if you don't get remote booting working properly on Windows, included 1 HD/system, but it's a fairly trivial cost.
The more annoying thing about the licensing crap is that it doesn't work properly. My old work had a 10-license Win2k server because some software required it, so we decided to actually use the machine to file serve. We loaded it up with drives and tossed everything on it.
And then something happened that the unix programs had never seen before. It refused to accept connections, it'd work fine for a while and then suddenly refuse to talk to anyone, though it'd ping just fine.
Turns out is would only share files with ten clients at once!? (We didn't know about that ten-licenses things at this point.) Worse was that the 9x machines didn't seem to work with it, they'd connect and hold a connection even after you closed explorer. If you didn't reboot they counted as one of the ten.
We'd have had to buy four more licenses to let all the developers connect at once, assuming nobody connected from an extra machine (everyone had test networks at their desk) and this was assuming that machines would let go of their slot when not using it.
I assume there's an MCSE way to fix this. Nothing immediately obvious presented itself, so Win2k went away and we threw Redhat on there. A few minutes of tweaking, and samba was up and running. Despite the common view it was easier to find a Samba HOWTO on google than finding a Win2k HOWTO (not that it takes a lot of howto, it's pretty straight forward) and we were up and running. I dunno if 9x machines have the same issue and won't close a connection, samba doesn't run out of licenses. It was even faster because we could tweak how often it advertised itself, etc. Great when you're trying to connect from a just-rebooted test machine.
That was our foray into licensing. It was annoying enough that the company switched all the hardware test beds to Linux even though it involved some rewrites to the test scripts.
End result, faster and better networking, more stable test boxes (they only crash when the hardware does something flaky (with devel hardware this is common)) so we get better results, and less hassle.
But, we could have hired an MCSE consultant to come in, tell us to buy a bunch of licenses, and leave us with a still substandard system.
This gets even more obvious with big networks. A friend of mine in university set up a distributed computing package (running in user-space, thus any OS was an option) on a 200+ machine network. They got all the machines for $600 each with 1U case, software was free with Linux and would have been $100/machine for windows even with edu pricing. Imagine that not at a university and it'll be about half the price of the hardware. 300 computers w/ Linux, or 200 w/ Windows.
Besides, who knows if they'd see each other as clients and refuse to allow more connections, or some silly thing? (They used a multi-linked network topology, each machine sustained connections to a fair number of computers.)
We get the religious wars. Mac users flame PC users a bit, PC users flame back, BeOS users were insuferable (because they were right!) and so on.
And then someone comes up with a huge holy war, saying that our mere existance is undesirable and they're going to use their combined might to squash us, not just out-doing us, but making it impossible and illegal for us to exist, probably suing a bunch of us along the way for good measure.
That's a totally different type of holy war, it's a jihad. That's what I don't get.
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Did you get rid of your 5.25 drive while you still had data left of the disks? I didn't.
I even set my Apple2 up, just three years ago, hooked up a serial cable and copied all the data off of the 140k floppies, before I gave it to the local users group.
Why would you assume that someone would throw away their last CD-reader without thinking of the box of CDs in the closet, all of which could be reduced to fitting on 10 DVD[RW+-] disks, or a quarter of a small HD... And why do you assume that people in the future won't be able to decode old storage that hasn't decayed? With people like you describe, I've got a perfect business model... I'll maintain a Pentium with CD reader and copy disks made in the '90s for people too stupid to have done it for themselves.
And yet if we go too far towards complexity we got tyrannical and fascist as well.
I submit that as soon as it becomes factually correct to say "The law is too complex to understand without a law degree", that it is too complex to exist in its current form. If I can be convicted for breaking a law that I've never heard of, despite not having lived in the Montana wilderness all my life, that law is too obscure. When laws get passed (or repealed) and the people aren't made aware of them in a form that is reasonably expected to be understood by those people, those laws shouldn't be binding.
It might be hard to write a complex legal system in such a way that the Average Joe with a high-school education can understand it, but I don't think we can call ourselves a free country until we can either come up with a simple legal system, or a smarter Average Joe. The legal system could be simplified a lot. Remove obsolete laws. When new laws are provided, if they overlap old laws, just rewrite the old laws, ideally. If the laws aren't written in language that everyone can understand, they won't be able to obey the law, so don't bother passing it until it's written in plain english.
And one thing that would help, write the entire legal code in a hyperlinked form. Let people start at simple overviews and unfold more detail as they go. A heading about as basic as "Thou shalt not kill" could eventually fold out into the laws against euthenasia, with links to other laws that are relevant in the discussion.
This way people could start to understand the system without being handed a huge book and told to flip through it. It'd actually let people look up the laws in a specific area to get a quick idea. They'd still (in today's system) need a lawyer if it was a gray area, but at least they could find out enough to ask the right questions and provide background.
Your rituals don't mean anything to people who didn't grow up with them. You obviously wouldn't appreciate the plastic clicking of a keyboard as you write, or appreciate the grinding noises of old-style 5.25 floppy drives, as you listen to them seeking and can tell from the sound the pattern they're using. Some of the old-school crackers could listen to a game load and tell you how it was protected, right more often than not.
But hard drives are better for any practical purpose. For nostalgia, no. But for their intended purpose, storage, they're a million times better.
Anyways, the art is the art. Old photographers shot film because it's what they had. When better films came out, they used them. I'm sure they'd have appreciated grainless ISO 3200 film if they'd had it, it would have let them capture their intended image without jumping through hoops.
And in the end, art that makes obvious and unpleasant use of its medium (Hiss on records is a good this claim audiophiles, it's "warmth". Grain in pictures is good, it makes them "real" claim die-hard film fans.) tends to be mental masturbation, doing something just to prove you can, despite the attractiveness of the results. It's often a good learning exercise, but it doesn't have any more value to the world for having been created in difficult conditions.
It all boils down to, a flower is a flower, by any other name. It's also just as artistic regardless of how it's taken.
For an example of people trying to be "Artistic", check out www.dpchallenge.com, some challenges are art, some are just fun.
Yeah, painting is dead. Point to the thriving community of professional portrait painter.
Blacksmithy is dead. Fact. There are some blacksmiths, but the industry is dead.
Film is dead. Some diehards will use it, but for all practical purposes 35mm and smaller is dead. MF has been mortally wounded. Large Format's relatives are taking out large life-insurance policies.
Face it, digital provides better pictures than color 35mm film hands down. B&W film has a higher dynamic range, but only barely, and digital can bracket the shot and comine the two pictures for a much higher range.
Semi-pro is generally known as someone who makes money off of it, but doesn't try to make a living from it. If "Pro" is such a hard line, what's the defintion? Anyone who pays all their bills? Anyone who has ever taken money for a picture? Or anyone who shoots as if they were getting paid, regardless of ability to pay the bills? How about someone who makes money with a disposable camera?
And yes, you should throw your vinyl out. Or rather, sell it on EBay, some gullible fool there has been conned into calling static noise "Warmth" and will snap it up. You can either buy the music in digital form or record it yourself before you get rid of it, though a record sounds so lousy you might as well download a 128mbps MP3 for all the fidelity you'll get.
That's completely different than what most pros say to newbies. The ones I've heard all say "Shoot as if film were free". Obviously you don't care to see certain things, so don't shoot them, but things you do want to see, shoot a few shots of them. Not only do you minimize accidents like blinking, but you also get to try different shots.
I have very few duds. Sure, there's three pictures of someone instead of one, but I toss the two less-good shots into a "Dupes" directory and I just show off the best.
You go on, shooting your artists shots, and I'll shoot pictures of what happens around me while you try to find the compelling mesage in something.
And yes, a good photographer will pick the right tools for the job, just as a programmer will. But how often is COBOL really relevant outside specialty jobs? Same with film...
The .CRW (Canon RAW) isn't 30MB, the TIFF is generates is. Canon (and Nikon's high-end, I think) use lossless compression on the raw sensor output, it tends to be about .75MB / MegaPixel, my Canon Powershot G2, a 4MP camera, generates 3MB CRW files, or 1MB JPGs (In Large/Fine). Based on this, the EOS 1Ds should produce CRW files around 9-10 MB.
Much nicer.
Actually, many "pro-sumer' cameras already write 10+MB files because they do plain TIFF files. So the 11MP cameras will be generating smaller files, and because they have 256+ MB of buffer, they'll keep shooting even while writing, at least for 10-20 shots.
There's a lot of talk about this, but really if you think about it, it's not that big of a deal.
Preserving data used to be expensive. If you wanted to copy a book you paid a scribe to write it out, and paid another one to check the work of the first. Later, if you wanted a picture copies for backup you had to get it photographically reproduced at considerable cost and lack of quality.
These days if you want your (digital) documents reproduced you simply drag them onto another media, if you want analog documents reproduced you still lose quality but you can reproduce a whole book for a few dollars.
My family has lost many pictures over the years by house fires, lost luggage, theft, etc. If we'd been able to simply zip up a copy and send a CD to grandma for safe-keeping, we wouldn't have lost anything.
I already send CDs of all of my photos to relatives. If I lose anything I could just ask for get a copy from them. Many of them copy the pictures further, sending CDs to their immediate family or putting them on the hard drive.
Also, CDs aren't expected to have a great life span, no more than 50 years. But that's the expected lifespan, individual disks will last much longer and shorter times. I'm sure archeologists will pick up CDs from landfills in a few hundred years, toss them on very good scanners, and expect a grad student to read them out.
In fact, the Exif data in the pictures will probably be more useful to them than anything on a paper picture, especially as some companies are talking about including a GPS port on the camera to allow tagging where a picture was taken. Actually, the idea I heard was to include a compass in the camera, it takes its distance from the tethered GPS, it takes the focus distance, and its facing, allowing you to record exactly what was shot, from where.
It'll revolutionize geo-caching.
I just buy new drives, they're cheap like candy these days. I expect to buy a bottle of coke and get a free 80GB drive soon.
They fit nicely in the standard small safe-deposit box. I use a 20gb for little stuff, and weekly backups. Sometimes I just leave it at work, if I go away I leave it at the bank. For big stuff, we've got an 80 that we filled up with all our picstures, data, etc. When the 20 is always full I'll buy another drive, a 160 I imagine, and I'll bring the 80 home, move everything from it onto the 160 and start using the 80 as a shuttle drive, etc.
I can already get 700+gb in a safe-deposit box. That's a lot of photos, and HDs have a much better shelf life in the near term than CDs do. (And as long as I keep copying them onto something new every few years, easy as the capacity keeps going up, they're future-proof.)
I've heard that AFS, Andrew File System, is remote and fairly secure, but it also looks a little bizarre.
I want something like Reiserfs (ie, full unix privs and soon ACLs) that just happens to work wonderfully over a network and is protected by SSH.
But, the solution might not be in the filesystem. Perhaps we shouldn't waste time securing that when it's just the network that needs securing. NFS is perfectly secure on a two-computer network, so maybe we need to use VPNs (with SSH-level security) and simply run NFS over them).
I'm looking into this same thing right now. I want to store all my files on a server machine and pull them from any of the client machines, without letting anyone else on the switch sniff them. SMB is a bit more secure, with a password and all, but it sends the data in plaintext, and doesn't properly support Linux permissions, let alone ACLs. (That I know of.)
Yeah... So MS isn't terrified of losing a customer that big and setting a precedent like that. Sure.
They'd box monkey box up and send him off even if he wasn't already heading that way. The fact that he was is simply going to affect the timing a little.
This is good, companies can see that if you want to yank MS's chain, and to have them dance for you (as wacky a monkey-dance as it might be) you just need to discuss Linux solutions. We'll either cut into MS's cash flowor we'll take desktops away. Either will hurt them and what hurts them makes it harder for them to force DRM on everyone.
But, Mozilla works. That's the big difference. If I open Konq and go browsing it'll likely crash in the first two minutes. Honestly, click, click, read, click, crash. I dunno what the problem was, but in Mandrake 8.2, the last time I used it, it could stay stable enough to use as a file browser.
And why on earth are they still writing a browser? Hello, there's a better alternative that you can bundle for free, and with XUL+etc you can write your file manager in it pretty easily.
Konq was the big reason I went to investigate Gnome. Nautilus is beautiful and seems more functional. (Except for KDE's better support of protocol:// browsing to my camera, smb shares, etc, but that's a seperate issue from the program they display it in.)
All KDE, or Gnome is to me, or should be, are the widget sets and underlying structure. I don't want KOffice with OpenOffice available. Choice is good, when someone would actually want to use what you're offering.
If you don't do the "life + xx" you don't run into the unfair situation where two one-hit-wonder authors write a book to support their family (spouse + baby) and one of them gets run over by a car.
:)
It's a contrived example, but still reasonable I think. Why should my work be worth less because I'm old, or if I happen to have inoperable cancer?
No other type of work lets you do one thing and retire on it if it's popular. If you make a beautiful chair and get famous, you still have to make and sell more chairs. And the person who owns the famous chair can let other people sit in it. It if was a book people somehow expect to be able to coast through life on an old success. (Which is unreasonable, very very few works are still bringing in useful royalty cheques sixty years after publishing.)
Then there's the idea that someone might want to unfairly influence the "life" part of a copyright. A little "accident" and some expensive artist's copyright will expire fifty years earlier than it might have. Or, keep W. Disney cryonically suspended and his copyright will never die.
Personally, I think almost all the benefit will come from the first 10 years. Make copyrights 10, with two optional five year extentions if you can show cause. (Has to be commercially or artistically viable, not just to keep someone else from having it.) However, a fifty year 'no for-profit reproduction' limit might be reasonable. If the author can still sell it, give them the right, but let people freely copy it amongst themselves. And if you want to give a very long (100+ year) moral copyright, such that misatributions aren't allowed, that's reasonable.
I called you a nut because you're not arguing with me, you're arguing with some "Liberal", whatever that really means to you. You're attributing to me things that I didn't say.
..."; What the hell does it matter? Ghandi could commit a crime and it'd still be a crime.
..." and make it a fact, not opinion, make it something you could back up. Then say "Conclusion ...", show how it's a reasonable conclusion from the facts. That's logic, and proving something with it. Calling me a commie liberal isn't logic.
You wanted a list of people who got rich through criminal acts, I provided one. I *KNOW* it's fraud. It's what you asked for. The children of Ken Lay will be rich even though neither them nor their father did anything to deserve it. This is to show that the criminal acts in the past are still here today. You said that a vanishingly small number of rich people got there through fraud, I think I illustrated that a fairly significant number did. A large percentage? Who knows. But certainly more than statistical noise.
Next, you go on about Liberals, as if they're directly opposed to Libertarians... In the USA it's conservatives who want to pass laws requiring religion in school, forbidding the teaching of evolution, etc, etc... You really need to look at the two-dimensional political chart. "Liberal" and "Conservative" (the tags are pretty silly because they don't represent the views of those labelled that way) are on the left and right side. Libertarians are on the top, fascists on the bottom. The left-right axis is sort of social freedom, the vertical axis is economic freedom. It's a lot more accurate because liberal/conservative have nothing to do with people's economic views. A quick google search should find this.
I say this because I want to say of "... kennedy's (liberals mind you)
And then. You say I'm anti-corporation... I only mentioned two corporations on my "conspiracy list" as you call it. It's purely a list of those who broke or skirted the law (often with the help of bribes). You asked for the list and I went to compile data on it, don't you dare call it a conspiracy list.
Your example of the racist shopkeeper is a bit beyond my example. The people I named had often pursued more personal vendettas, breaking individuals by threatening people who would deal with them. Few companies are big enough to dangerously discriminate against a whole class of people, but against a few "troublemakers" is easy. You built a strawman that resembled my argument superficially, but you didn't adress the actual issue which is a very rich person taking actions directly against a single poor person. It has been done, you provide no reason to believe that a Libertarian system would prevent it from happening.
Draw a logic chain in your next post. Say "Fact
Go read *my* posts. Don't label me a Liberal, don't tell me I hate corporations. Answer *my* points without resorting to straw-men or misdirection.
Because the more it strangles MS, the less money they have to put into Palladium and strangle the industry.
Even if IBM and everyone else stop supporting Linux it'll still go on the way it always has, as a hobbyist project keeping hobbyists happy. They'll no more go broke doing it than a model airplane enthusiast will doing his not-for-profit hobby.
But that won't happen. IBM, Oracle, Corel, Sun, they've all had a taste of freedom from a demanding OS provider and their pet monopoly. Microsoft won't ever go away, DataGeneral is still with us even, in a way, but their market dominance will fade and people will realize that their stock price will never climb again. Even if they start to pay dividends they'll never regain their former glory. They've created the image of sustainable exponential growth for so long that when people realize they've slowed down for good, not just as a result of the dot-com collapse, they'll lose their 'Buy' rating.
btw, as for that charity crap, most of what they give is licenses. Check me out, I just wrote a "Hello World" program, priced it at $1B and donated six copies to the Red Cross. Now I'm more generous than Bill. Can I claim this on my taxes like they do?
You're a nut. This is a religious issue for you and you can't see that it's completely cracked. You make as much sense as a guy standing on the street corner waving a "JESUS" sign screaming about how perfect the world will be when we all follow his ideas.
Non-physical force is all too common, that fact that you don't admit to the blatant truth shows that you're afraid of it. It's a hole in your argument. The world wouldn't be any better off under your little scheme because the people with money would still be free to abuse those without. It's no worse than right now, but you can't claim it to be a perfect system while it's got gaping holes.
You also really need to settle the fuck down and try to understand that I'm not advocating anything. Nothing at all. *YOU* are pushing an agenda. Me, I'm just telling you that it's not as perfect as you think. I'm not advocating passing any laws, or ushering in any new social order.
If you want examples of corporate crime look at Enron. If you want historical examples, search for "Robber Baron", "Company Town", and "Land Grant". Cornelius Vanderbilt, the real-world inspiration for Rearden (he invented Steel rails which revolutionized the industry) prefered to ruin opponents financially rather than fight court battles. The Hearst empire was largely funded by the "shady" aquisition of land grants after the civil war and the publishing empire was built into a monopoly by ruining anyone who supported other newspapers. The Kennedy empire has many ties to organized crime and a lot of their money comes from borderline-legal stock manipulation in the period after the '29 crash.
Bill Gates today has simply stolen products from competing companies (Stacker) and waited them out in court until they've died, or sabotaged Windows in such a way as to not work over DR DOS in such a way as to make it appear to be the fault of DR DOS. And there's a reason the saying "DOS ain't done with Lotus don't run" was coined.
None of that is legal, but when you can afford to drag court battles out for ten years or more you find that nobody can afford to sue you, or as the DoJ found out, punish your illegal activities.
As I pointed out, these guys weren't very nice to workers. When you've got a worker hundreds of miles from the nearest city and dependent on you for food and shelter you can fuck him over a fair bit, especially if you have enforcers to deal with anyone trying to unite the workers.
The fact that Jimmy Hoffa used similar rough tactics doesn't invalidate my point that businesses have often done the same or worse. I'm not arguing for any one system, you can't simply point out Jimmy Hoffa and watch my argument crumble.
It doesn't take much of a stretch to find "force that libertarians allow", they allow anything that defends their interests, expecting anything that hurts them to of course be a violation of their human rights.
Look at the hollywood blacklists of McCarthy, where careers were ruined because nobody, anywhere, would hire them. This has happened in many other cases, often non-governmentmal. Piss off one of the robber barons and you'd find out that you couldn't get a job anywhere, literally. If you did, someone would come along and "explain the situation" to your boss who would then fire you or suffer "accidents" or perhaps just be blacklisted themselves.
It wasn't possible to just "go to the next town" because the reach of these guys was basically unlimited and they felt that by making examples of people who pissed them off they'd avoid that sort of thing in the future.
Of course your reading materials, from Forbes and similar places, won't admit this. I'm not saying you need to read socialist newsletters or anything, but as long as you read certain sources only, you're going to get a biased view.
Look at the ammount of old money backing up "new money". Sure, the Kennedy kids made their own money, but would they have if they'd had to start from scratch and pay for their university education? Would some anonymous factory worker have been in a dead-end job if he didn't have to get a job at a young age just to support the family because he dad was killed in a mining collapse, or because the family's savings were wiped out by the bank collapse?
Truly, many people are where they deserve to be. Many rich people did get where they are by working harder and smarter. Many poor people are where they are because they don't try as hard. But not all. Not enough to base a moral philosophy on.
You claim that rich people wouldn't have more power than the poor, basing this on the lack of government, which your statement implies is the sole source of this uneven power. I have shown how power can be based directly on money without government, that means your original point is wrong. You made a connection that wasn't supported by the facts, which seems all too common in your "logic".
Tell me, if you were a business owner in the early 1900s and you spoke out against illegal practices, would you not feel "forced" if your suppliers and customers were compelled to avoid you. If once your business died, nobody would hire you and you couldn't buy anything with your savings? And if the situation would be exactly the same even if you did manage to get to another town... Imagine it with a family and tell me that you wouldn't be forced to back down.
And you think you live in the real world.
Bah, you festering cretin. You didn't invoke Godwin's law, if anyone did it was the poster who mentioned Hitler. Godwin's law just states that eventually a thread will mention Hitler if it goes long enough.
The thread-ending you allude to isn't part of Godwin's law. It's merely tradition that the person mentioning Hitler loses the argument. It doesn't say anything about ending the thread.
Get it right next time.
You need to get out of business when the sale value of your assets is greater than your total profit in the future.
Sometimes you can't predict this, short term market swings can make or break you. But if your company makes buggy whips maybe you should consider closing shop when the car starts to get big, instead of waiting until your lack of orders has forced you to borrow money and mortgage your assets just to stay in business a little longer.
Really, a big business is no different than a sole proprietorship consulting firm. If I start to run out of jobs I'd better find new work, or quit running my own business and find a full-time job. It's easy to see this, so why is it hard to see that a big company facing the same lack of future profits would break up, selling assets and returning money to the investors letting them do something else with it, instead of burning every penny pretending they're healthy until the day they lock the doors?
Who cares about the desktop that a program was written for? If it works, use it. I use Konsole because it was easy and I like it, I use GCombust because it seems to work the best.
But if they renamed it Combust, I think it'd be better. It'd drop the irrelevant tag and thus probably a whole lot of baggage and still retain the functionality.
It's silly for the makers of a desktop to be doing anything but making a desktop. If they really want a K-themed browser, write a XUL skin for Mozilla, ditto with email. If they want Kmp3, draw a skin for xmms maybe. But don't reinvent the wheel just to add another checkbox to a list that nobody cares about, because of a silly contest with someone.
The whole desktop thing is silly. All the user sees (and cares about) is a theme. Just some pretty icons and a cascading menu. This is worth a religious war?
You probably think the Republicans and the Democrats differ in a meaningful way too. (Insert whatever parties dominate politics where you live.)
What's wrong with replacing Konq? In a system where you can borrow code and applications at will, why not use Mozilla? It only takes a second or two longer to start than Konq and where Konq crashes every few minutes (literally, I restarted it five times in twenty minutes once, and it's worse as a file browser) Mozilla is stable for weeks. (I actually rarely see it crash, I usually reboot once a month or so for hardware tweaking and it's still going strong at that point, the initial instance I opened minutes after reboot.)
/opt and isn't integrated at all.
What does Konq possibly offer?
Besides, your're missing the point. If someone installed Redhat, obviously they want merged desktops. If they don't, they can download and install a seperate KDE that puts it in
Personally this whole multiple desktops thing seems weird. I use KDE because it's the default, but I use Gnome apps a lot. If they all looked alike, it wouldn't bother me one bit.
And I'll be there to point and laugh when your investment fails.
If you had invested in something that didn't exploit others though I might care and give you a helping hand. I know people like you who took sleazy jobs with spammers writing the first address gathering tools. Nobody talks to them, nobody mentions neat job openings to them. They got a fairly large short term gain but they blew their credibility to hell by selling everyone else down the river.
So buy your dirty stock, but if it doesn't make enough for you to live happily on you've screwing yourself if anyone finds out.
The last place I saw that message, and the broken counter, was when I was copying a friend's MP3s to a backup drive before wiping their main HD and installing Linux.
They weren't much of a gamer and they didn't really notice the difference, except that it crashes a bit less. They're clued enough to handle a few instructions so I gave them Mandrake, not a baby-proofed distro, and they seem happy.
XP didn't like their computer, they were told it was their hardware, but Linux recognized it all and uses it just fine...
If you ignore licensing issues, and ignore the "problem" Windows boxes have in accepting connections from more than a few other boxes at once (without the server version), it's about equal. A talented C programmer can open a socket and start pumping data around in about the same way on either OS. The processing programs are usually written in-house so they can be compiled for either OS.
Any skilled programmer will have used a bit of everything in university and will be fairly comfortable in either OS.
(A cheap MCSE may not, but then I'm assuming that we're talking skilled employees, the ones HR looks for "with 6 years programming experience and a BS in Comp Sci", not a graduate of Devry Institute, or whatever. This does increase the TCO, but chances are you'll need these people for either system to actually make the code that makes it do real work.)
The hardware is the same, except that with Linux it's a bit easier to boot from the network without another proprietary solution. Going this way saves the HD in every system and saves you from having to image an OS onto them.
So then you "just" buy a few 100mbps switches and draw up a decent topology. ("Just", heh, this is the hard part but it's OS-independent.) Buy some racks, hook up the machines, and go.
The TCO difference is pretty much all OS, and if you don't get remote booting working properly on Windows, included 1 HD/system, but it's a fairly trivial cost.
Linux wins easily.
The more annoying thing about the licensing crap is that it doesn't work properly. My old work had a 10-license Win2k server because some software required it, so we decided to actually use the machine to file serve. We loaded it up with drives and tossed everything on it.
And then something happened that the unix programs had never seen before. It refused to accept connections, it'd work fine for a while and then suddenly refuse to talk to anyone, though it'd ping just fine.
Turns out is would only share files with ten clients at once!? (We didn't know about that ten-licenses things at this point.) Worse was that the 9x machines didn't seem to work with it, they'd connect and hold a connection even after you closed explorer. If you didn't reboot they counted as one of the ten.
We'd have had to buy four more licenses to let all the developers connect at once, assuming nobody connected from an extra machine (everyone had test networks at their desk) and this was assuming that machines would let go of their slot when not using it.
I assume there's an MCSE way to fix this. Nothing immediately obvious presented itself, so Win2k went away and we threw Redhat on there. A few minutes of tweaking, and samba was up and running. Despite the common view it was easier to find a Samba HOWTO on google than finding a Win2k HOWTO (not that it takes a lot of howto, it's pretty straight forward) and we were up and running. I dunno if 9x machines have the same issue and won't close a connection, samba doesn't run out of licenses. It was even faster because we could tweak how often it advertised itself, etc. Great when you're trying to connect from a just-rebooted test machine.
That was our foray into licensing. It was annoying enough that the company switched all the hardware test beds to Linux even though it involved some rewrites to the test scripts.
End result, faster and better networking, more stable test boxes (they only crash when the hardware does something flaky (with devel hardware this is common)) so we get better results, and less hassle.
But, we could have hired an MCSE consultant to come in, tell us to buy a bunch of licenses, and leave us with a still substandard system.
This gets even more obvious with big networks. A friend of mine in university set up a distributed computing package (running in user-space, thus any OS was an option) on a 200+ machine network. They got all the machines for $600 each with 1U case, software was free with Linux and would have been $100/machine for windows even with edu pricing. Imagine that not at a university and it'll be about half the price of the hardware. 300 computers w/ Linux, or 200 w/ Windows.
Besides, who knows if they'd see each other as clients and refuse to allow more connections, or some silly thing? (They used a multi-linked network topology, each machine sustained connections to a fair number of computers.)
We get the religious wars. Mac users flame PC users a bit, PC users flame back, BeOS users were insuferable (because they were right!) and so on.
And then someone comes up with a huge holy war, saying that our mere existance is undesirable and they're going to use their combined might to squash us, not just out-doing us, but making it impossible and illegal for us to exist, probably suing a bunch of us along the way for good measure.
That's a totally different type of holy war, it's a jihad. That's what I don't get.