they have no chance of ever getting elected, as some of their prominent members let it be known that they are religious, which is political death in Canada.
Having religion isn't political death in Canada, most PM's went to church (don't think Trudeau did).
What is political death in Canada, and rightly so, is theocratic statements. That's why you have politicians saying things like they personally oppose gay marriage, but it's not their job description to worry about it. No-one's going to cram their faith down our laws any more...or so we hope.
You may love your NDP party, but the people in BC probably don't.
Look, BC'ers don't want their drunk-drivin' pseudo-plaid connin' Campbell leadership any more than they wanted Clark and his wannabe-Teamster style thuggery. Face it, BC politics has been hosed since long before the boozy Bennett regimes. What a cartoon! Remember Vander Zalm? The guy lived in a theme park palace called Fantasy Gardens, and acted the part! Every single premier there in living memory has been implicated in some scandal... well, hapless Harcourt was a nice guy and took the fall for his party, but he wasn't really responsible for... Bingogate! Ahaha!
No, BC is the only jurisdiction in the world where the pot smokin' party makes more sense (no pun intended) than the 'serious' candidates.
But seriously, because of this, BC waffles from one 'wing' to another, and in the last election, the Liberals appeared to be reasonable (they aren't, they turned out to be extremists). But remember in the 'first past the post' system, while they won almost all the seats, they had a bare majority of the votes.
"There is substantial difference between fascism and communism."
True, in theory. I was being flip by saying there's no diff, but I was serious too, because we've never really seen communism, it's always a disguised variation on fascism, usually a form of state monopoly capitalism. Gramsci and his captors were birds of a feather: assh*les.
"The ridiculous assertion that all people are equal in every way"
I don't ever recall an avowed communist or a fascist stating that seriously, much less a socialist. You're trolling.
"anarchy reigns"
Oh, that's ripe! You do get the irony of that statement, right? Military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, and all that?
However, there's a useful point buried there, in that someone should look hard at iDVD and make a kDVD or such. I'm a DVD Studio Pro user, wonderfully fast & powerful tool, but the other day I decided to try out iDVD, and without a manual, in under 20 minutes I had a very unique and nice looking project burning. A simple project, that's why I wanted to use the 'free-as-in-loss-leader' stuff, but the main menu had a mixture of looping video buttons and audio, with slick fonts and layout. It was effortless, drag, drop, double click, select popups, all obvious from the interface.
I think that a good start for a Linux project would be to emulate iDVD, not Studio Pro. 'Q' DVD-Author is just a long ways off.
One thing that Apple has going for it in this respect is the flexibility of Quicktime, and a great team of designers to lay out templates. Getting the equivalent going in Linux will be tough.
We remember 1812 and 54/40 or fight!, believe me. Deep down, especially among those canadians who don't have deep ties (family, jobs, etc.) to the U.S., we're just waiting for the tanks to roll across the border and secure oil and water pipelines.
OK, maybe not. But we have the largest coastline in the world, and we have alliances with other nations that lead to obligations overseas.
Then there's the national role in "Aid to the Civil Power" -- which means that if there's unrest in a region, like the Oka crisis or the October crisis, they want to be able to roll in and maintain that appearance of canadian civility. Actually there's a lot more tension in this big happy nation than outsiders realize, especially since the conquest of the First Nations isn't complete. In other words, the military unfortunately seems to be primarily there to keep us in line.
That said, chances are that the bored military administrators screwed up and HP took huge advantage of it.
Left, Right, what a lot of Bunk! Communists and Fascists, not much difference in the end. Canadians float around in the middle. Ultimately not as socialist as many nations in the industrialized world, and more so than the USA. We're under considerable pressure to align our policies with the Republican agenda, however, and there's a groundswell of resistance around sovereignty issues.
The Liberals aim to appear just that, generally liberal. They purport to support a social safety net, and a large federal government that ensures equality in many areas, including in distribution of services between the civil powers, i.e. the provinces. Note I said "purport," because while they make these noises and a mixture of real gestures and superficialities in that direction, they're also busy working on moving power and resources over to the corporate sector under the guise of trade liberalization.
The various conservative voices, now mostly under the banner of the new-ish Conservative Party, are social individualists and fiscal corporatists (not as ravenously domineering or overtly theocratic as the Republicans, but close). The powers in the party actually want to be more like the Republicans, but strategically can't pull it off (most of us wouldn't stand for it).
The New Democratic Party is out-and-out socialist in platform, and many of its members are easily identified as such, but as a whole they don't always vote in that direction, and don't instil much confidence in most voters at the federal level. However, they have occasionally been brilliant in opposition (a voice for accountability) and often do well on the provincial level, forming many provincial governments over the years.
And the Bloc Quebecois? Well, you'd have to ask a Quebecker to really get a grasp of what they're about, it seems to be a mix of all of the above with a large dash of Quebec semi-nationalism, it's a powerful strategic alliance really.
Anyway, you can vote early and vote often, but the government still gets in. Much of the power really lies one level down from the Cabinet Ministries, in the top-level bureaucrats, many of whom are graft appointees. We have marginally more choice than the republic to the south, but it's still a first-past-the-post system, and so is questionably democratic, as people wind up voting strategically (or lazily) instead of for the representatives they really want.
In Canada, you have paid for it in advance, whether you download or not, so long as you've bought goods with the levy on it. Downloading is legal and ethical, so is copying a friend's CD. Redistributing it en masse is neither.
True enough, I stand corrected about IT intensive production systems, though there's a huge advantage in the pro workstation midrange to plopping a new machine on a desk, and 20 minutes later it's running photoshop-shake-pixlet with minor configuration; plug in your tablet, connect to servers and go. I wonder just how much configuration Pixar will have to do to make an OS X workstation play nicely with their internal backbone and servers.
I'm building a turnkey editing system right now and though it's more labour-intensive than most setups, I'm just glad it's OS X based since the computer/SAN/LAN config is easy, the labour is mostly in the custom cabling and making the A/V signal path clean and happy.
If I remember correctly, that was System 6 (multiFinder) vs. DOS, and 386/486 vs. '030/040, and the price differences were justifiable. In '99, price differences weren't quite as justifiable (though I'm typing on a '99 clamshell iBook that has been banged around a whole lot without repairs while running constantly, runs onboard wireless, firewire/usb, the latest OS and a large collection of up-to-date pro software, so in retrospect it was a great deal).
Why is the parent modded up? RTFA, they're desktop workstations. Maybe it's so they can run photoshop, maya, shake, renderman and pixlet, and still open excel files, without any config time.
For many years, Apple's core business at the high end has been driven by just this decision: give the artists the best machines on the desktop that they can handle. The annual upgrade cycle for design and graphics industry makes sense, since any second wasted is expensive, and faster machines mean better ROI. Upgrading is ultimately cheaper.
G5's with optimized software being slower for production work is debatable. You haven't seen the next generation of hardware yet, they already have a 1GHz bus, and these production machines have enormous internal bandwidth requirements. Use one for video or 3D work sometimes, then come back here and complain about their speed.
more expensive platform
Since these are production machines, they need to be very reliable and plug-it-in and go. Make me a machine with the same level of reliability, quiet, power requirements, speed, connectivity, and production capabilities with equivalent warranty then let's compare pricing. Never mind, I just finished a committee-based 3-week shopping grind for similar production requirements and I already know the answer: apple hardware wins by about 5% on price alone, and still spec's out better for multimedia production. Oh, and ROI in terms of productivity, support, and longevity.
and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
RTFA. They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd, mmm... hey, you're not an artist, are you?
Anyway, for the ROI alone, this is good for shareholders, especially if creativity flows better.
I think it's fair to assume that Jobs gives a substantial discount on Apple stuff to Pixar
Just as likely not, he may want to keep clean hands on this one for credibility. Remember that the high-profile VirginiaTech project had tons more marketroid benefits for Apple but the whole deal was basically retail. They wouldn't have to get discounts for this decision fo fly anyway, the price/performance&quality ratio is favourable.
Well, Pixar can afford to buy Apple stuff, *and* Apple have someone on the inside....
I think it'll work out alright, Apple doesn't make bad stuff, just stuff that isn't worth what they are charging...
Oh puhleez, that's so 1999! Have you priced out performance / price ratios for tier 1 manufacturers? G5's do smackingly well, especially against Dells and the like, often coming out much cheaper before considering things like support costs and reliability and resale. Pixar isn't going to build their own bargain bin beige boxes. Look at VirginiaTech's shopping research, they paid full price to Apple and it was still cheaper/faster than Dell.
I've been waiting for this, since it signals an inside scoop on the maturity of the hardware/software synergy for multimedia. Perhaps the rumours about soon-to-be-released better access to the GPU by applications for rendering etc. are true. The article is slim on timeline hints, though.
I imagine, among many other reasons, that China has something to say about it. Remember the last war there.
Not only that game, but maintaining tensions in the region is a good geopolitical strategy, ennabling the stationing of a huge number of troops, equipment, and general political pressure on the region backed by force. In the event of Korean unification, it is likely that US forces would remain on the peninsula (see Project for a New American Century).
First, it isn't a tax, it's a levy, which makes it a prepaid fee for copying privileges.
Canadians who've paid this levy (and who hasn't?) have paid for the copyright provisions that allow anyone to make a copy of someone else's licensed/owned copy of a musical work, LEGALLY.
How it works is this: I buy a CD. I can then loan that CD to any friend, and they can make one copy for personal use. Ad infinitum. They cannot, however, pass that 2nd gen. copy or a copy of that copy on to anyone else.
What it means in the online world is that it is perfectly okay for a canadian to download one copy of an audio work for personal listening. It is NOT okay to then upload a copy of that copy (yes, that breaks the normal practice of P2P networks).
So, canadians, leech on, you paid for it. And loan your CD's around to one person at a time, please. Otherwise, work to squash the levy, and we can move to the US IP laws version (why not we're dropping sovereignty everywhere else, eh! OK I'm bitter).
True enough, the article is puff and glosses over any really useful detail... assuming, of course, that Bull's work is more sophisticated than indicated.
Anyway, it's old news on top of obvious, the World Soundscape Project dealt with this decades ago when it wasn't so obvious.
No, you don't need a degree to study this, it is pretty obvious. But we haven't read the source material, have we? Just a news website article.
What comes out of studies like this are things that are finer points, and lead to more significant conclusions. Eg.: the effect of personal music players on listening ability (as opposed to hearing, which any audiologist can tell you is obvious), the role of listening ability in a cultural setting, the role of listening ability in adaptability and overall health, the effect of various usage patterns of PLD's on our emotional state, etc.
Studies like that CAN be empirical to a degree, and can result in engineering, marketing, health policy decisions, and overall trends, so they aren't insignificant. Maybe even more significant, than, say, the difference between gentoo and *bsd.
Since this is a rerun story, I'm going to repost myself from a few weeks back:
Hildegard Westerkamp wrote about Walkmans and personal audio space as a key part of her 1988 thesis "Listening and Soundmaking-A Study of Music-as- Environment", but the World Soundscape Project generally had a pretty good analysis of this right from the beginning of the phenomenon.
The composer R. Murray Shafer's concept of "schizophonia" became used to describe an effect of electroacoustic tech: essentially something you hear that happens in another place and time. Barry Truax's definitive book Acoustic Communication develops the whole idea further.
The thing about PLD's is that they supplant the actual soundscape with a soundtrack, often a remedy to noise and stress but usually just fun. There may be a long-term chronic danger from extreme schizophonia, but I don't think it's been studied empirically. Soundscape studies is fringe, most of the work being done in the area is engineering and psych.
Now I don't know that Bull has ignored soundscape studies in general, but it is the true home of sound nerds who move beyond the engineering and get into the social, psychophysics, and ecological aspects of sound, and the article should have mentioned it at least. If you're interested in the field at all, you need to check out the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, where this stuff is hashed out on many levels.
Not trying to 'apologize' for Microsoft, but do you think you fairly represented the systems as a whole in that case history?
Oh, no, though it is a common shortcircuit to assume that an anecdote is anything but a special case instance. Anecdotes are always interesting, because life is full of special cases. In this example, I merely wanted to note that system 8.1 on a 1st-gen PowerMac small dual-purpose server turned out to be amazingly stable and useful, so I installed a bunch of those, and they're mostly maintenance-free to date.
My more general experience indicates that both win9x and systems 7-9 were crashy or adequately stable, depending on the use and software installed. Imagine my joy the first time I discovered win95 wouldn't run even as a simple file server for more than about 40 days, a bug, and registry-rummaging and dll-dithering are puzzles I'm glad to have gone away (mostly); and I've worked on fixing many hosed installs of any classic mac system. They both suck.
For heaven's sakes. Why didn't you install Linux on it??
I suggested Linux as a file server, but it quickly became obvious:
1. Filemaker server required (dual purpose)
2. 56K modems and no distro CD's on the island, well, one mandrake (dubiously newfangled - this was 1999)
3. I only had 3 hours and I was a relative newbie to linux (any *nix skills were from the time of gopher, mainframes, giant printer centers, and Tex to write school papers)
In the end setting up the replacement 8100 Mac (including fresh install, timed backup scripts, autoreboot (regular power outages), and getting a non-threaded app to cooperate with file sharing) took about an hour--and that's the last I heard of it, still working I'd expect. System 8.1 has proven to be very stable if you don't mess with extensions. Only 6 clientstations, though one of them is at the end of 400 ft of faded blue cat5 draped over branches through the woods to the top of a cliff(!).
There's a fileserver/database host pizzabox mac I set up in 1998 for a network-noob arts collective that ran sans reboot for two years, daily (even weekend) moderate use, until a power failure forced the issue. Some dude just changed the jaz disks every couple of days. I used to check up on them but it just worked, and finally I checked back a couple of years ago and it still chugged along, only a few reboots over the 4 years.
System 8.1, filemaker 4 solution with 45 related files and 600K+ records, and 20K+ word and excel and email files, a cheap old headless mac. Set that config up a few times over the years, for small organizations, a lifeline to them, hassle free and useful.
When I tried the same thing three years ago with an old win98 box (not enough cpu muscle for Win2k, and no budget, nada, zero), well, let's just say that after getting a few frantic phone calls ['it just shut down' - 'why do the fonts suddenly look all funny'] I went out and got another crusty old mac to do the job, problem solved. Not bad for a non-server OS, when scaled down properly.
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Having religion isn't political death in Canada, most PM's went to church (don't think Trudeau did).
What is political death in Canada, and rightly so, is theocratic statements. That's why you have politicians saying things like they personally oppose gay marriage, but it's not their job description to worry about it. No-one's going to cram their faith down our laws any more...or so we hope.
Look, BC'ers don't want their drunk-drivin' pseudo-plaid connin' Campbell leadership any more than they wanted Clark and his wannabe-Teamster style thuggery. Face it, BC politics has been hosed since long before the boozy Bennett regimes. What a cartoon! Remember Vander Zalm? The guy lived in a theme park palace called Fantasy Gardens, and acted the part! Every single premier there in living memory has been implicated in some scandal... well, hapless Harcourt was a nice guy and took the fall for his party, but he wasn't really responsible for... Bingogate! Ahaha!
No, BC is the only jurisdiction in the world where the pot smokin' party makes more sense (no pun intended) than the 'serious' candidates.
But seriously, because of this, BC waffles from one 'wing' to another, and in the last election, the Liberals appeared to be reasonable (they aren't, they turned out to be extremists). But remember in the 'first past the post' system, while they won almost all the seats, they had a bare majority of the votes.
"Which apparently includes such highly important duties as clearing snow in Toronto!"
Darn tootin'. Make 'em useful.
"There is substantial difference between fascism and communism."
True, in theory. I was being flip by saying there's no diff, but I was serious too, because we've never really seen communism, it's always a disguised variation on fascism, usually a form of state monopoly capitalism. Gramsci and his captors were birds of a feather: assh*les.
"The ridiculous assertion that all people are equal in every way"
I don't ever recall an avowed communist or a fascist stating that seriously, much less a socialist. You're trolling.
"anarchy reigns"
Oh, that's ripe! You do get the irony of that statement, right? Military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, and all that?
You're right, the grandparent is a nasty gloat.
However, there's a useful point buried there, in that someone should look hard at iDVD and make a kDVD or such. I'm a DVD Studio Pro user, wonderfully fast & powerful tool, but the other day I decided to try out iDVD, and without a manual, in under 20 minutes I had a very unique and nice looking project burning. A simple project, that's why I wanted to use the 'free-as-in-loss-leader' stuff, but the main menu had a mixture of looping video buttons and audio, with slick fonts and layout. It was effortless, drag, drop, double click, select popups, all obvious from the interface.
I think that a good start for a Linux project would be to emulate iDVD, not Studio Pro. 'Q' DVD-Author is just a long ways off.
One thing that Apple has going for it in this respect is the flexibility of Quicktime, and a great team of designers to lay out templates. Getting the equivalent going in Linux will be tough.
OK, maybe not. But we have the largest coastline in the world, and we have alliances with other nations that lead to obligations overseas.
Then there's the national role in "Aid to the Civil Power" -- which means that if there's unrest in a region, like the Oka crisis or the October crisis, they want to be able to roll in and maintain that appearance of canadian civility. Actually there's a lot more tension in this big happy nation than outsiders realize, especially since the conquest of the First Nations isn't complete. In other words, the military unfortunately seems to be primarily there to keep us in line.
That said, chances are that the bored military administrators screwed up and HP took huge advantage of it.
Left, Right, what a lot of Bunk! Communists and Fascists, not much difference in the end. Canadians float around in the middle. Ultimately not as socialist as many nations in the industrialized world, and more so than the USA. We're under considerable pressure to align our policies with the Republican agenda, however, and there's a groundswell of resistance around sovereignty issues.
The Liberals aim to appear just that, generally liberal. They purport to support a social safety net, and a large federal government that ensures equality in many areas, including in distribution of services between the civil powers, i.e. the provinces. Note I said "purport," because while they make these noises and a mixture of real gestures and superficialities in that direction, they're also busy working on moving power and resources over to the corporate sector under the guise of trade liberalization.
The various conservative voices, now mostly under the banner of the new-ish Conservative Party, are social individualists and fiscal corporatists (not as ravenously domineering or overtly theocratic as the Republicans, but close). The powers in the party actually want to be more like the Republicans, but strategically can't pull it off (most of us wouldn't stand for it).
The New Democratic Party is out-and-out socialist in platform, and many of its members are easily identified as such, but as a whole they don't always vote in that direction, and don't instil much confidence in most voters at the federal level. However, they have occasionally been brilliant in opposition (a voice for accountability) and often do well on the provincial level, forming many provincial governments over the years.
And the Bloc Quebecois? Well, you'd have to ask a Quebecker to really get a grasp of what they're about, it seems to be a mix of all of the above with a large dash of Quebec semi-nationalism, it's a powerful strategic alliance really.
Anyway, you can vote early and vote often, but the government still gets in. Much of the power really lies one level down from the Cabinet Ministries, in the top-level bureaucrats, many of whom are graft appointees. We have marginally more choice than the republic to the south, but it's still a first-past-the-post system, and so is questionably democratic, as people wind up voting strategically (or lazily) instead of for the representatives they really want.
In Canada, you have paid for it in advance, whether you download or not, so long as you've bought goods with the levy on it. Downloading is legal and ethical, so is copying a friend's CD. Redistributing it en masse is neither.
I'm building a turnkey editing system right now and though it's more labour-intensive than most setups, I'm just glad it's OS X based since the computer/SAN/LAN config is easy, the labour is mostly in the custom cabling and making the A/V signal path clean and happy.
If I remember correctly, that was System 6 (multiFinder) vs. DOS, and 386/486 vs. '030/040, and the price differences were justifiable. In '99, price differences weren't quite as justifiable (though I'm typing on a '99 clamshell iBook that has been banged around a whole lot without repairs while running constantly, runs onboard wireless, firewire/usb, the latest OS and a large collection of up-to-date pro software, so in retrospect it was a great deal).
Why is the parent modded up? RTFA, they're desktop workstations. Maybe it's so they can run photoshop, maya, shake, renderman and pixlet, and still open excel files, without any config time.
For many years, Apple's core business at the high end has been driven by just this decision: give the artists the best machines on the desktop that they can handle. The annual upgrade cycle for design and graphics industry makes sense, since any second wasted is expensive, and faster machines mean better ROI. Upgrading is ultimately cheaper.
G5's with optimized software being slower for production work is debatable. You haven't seen the next generation of hardware yet, they already have a 1GHz bus, and these production machines have enormous internal bandwidth requirements. Use one for video or 3D work sometimes, then come back here and complain about their speed.
more expensive platform
Since these are production machines, they need to be very reliable and plug-it-in and go. Make me a machine with the same level of reliability, quiet, power requirements, speed, connectivity, and production capabilities with equivalent warranty then let's compare pricing. Never mind, I just finished a committee-based 3-week shopping grind for similar production requirements and I already know the answer: apple hardware wins by about 5% on price alone, and still spec's out better for multimedia production. Oh, and ROI in terms of productivity, support, and longevity.
and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
RTFA. They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd, mmm... hey, you're not an artist, are you?
Anyway, for the ROI alone, this is good for shareholders, especially if creativity flows better.
Just as likely not, he may want to keep clean hands on this one for credibility. Remember that the high-profile VirginiaTech project had tons more marketroid benefits for Apple but the whole deal was basically retail. They wouldn't have to get discounts for this decision fo fly anyway, the price/performance&quality ratio is favourable.
Oh puhleez, that's so 1999! Have you priced out performance / price ratios for tier 1 manufacturers? G5's do smackingly well, especially against Dells and the like, often coming out much cheaper before considering things like support costs and reliability and resale. Pixar isn't going to build their own bargain bin beige boxes. Look at VirginiaTech's shopping research, they paid full price to Apple and it was still cheaper/faster than Dell.
I've been waiting for this, since it signals an inside scoop on the maturity of the hardware/software synergy for multimedia. Perhaps the rumours about soon-to-be-released better access to the GPU by applications for rendering etc. are true. The article is slim on timeline hints, though.
I imagine, among many other reasons, that China has something to say about it. Remember the last war there.
Not only that game, but maintaining tensions in the region is a good geopolitical strategy, ennabling the stationing of a huge number of troops, equipment, and general political pressure on the region backed by force. In the event of Korean unification, it is likely that US forces would remain on the peninsula (see Project for a New American Century).
First, it isn't a tax, it's a levy, which makes it a prepaid fee for copying privileges.
Canadians who've paid this levy (and who hasn't?) have paid for the copyright provisions that allow anyone to make a copy of someone else's licensed/owned copy of a musical work, LEGALLY.
How it works is this: I buy a CD. I can then loan that CD to any friend, and they can make one copy for personal use. Ad infinitum. They cannot, however, pass that 2nd gen. copy or a copy of that copy on to anyone else.
What it means in the online world is that it is perfectly okay for a canadian to download one copy of an audio work for personal listening. It is NOT okay to then upload a copy of that copy (yes, that breaks the normal practice of P2P networks).
So, canadians, leech on, you paid for it. And loan your CD's around to one person at a time, please. Otherwise, work to squash the levy, and we can move to the US IP laws version (why not we're dropping sovereignty everywhere else, eh! OK I'm bitter).
Recipe for the non-boring morning rush:
Fair-trade shade-grown espresso beans
electric bean grinder
stovetop steel espresso maker
hot milk (~60 C)
an aerolatte frother (I'm not shilling, google it if you care)
That way I have a rockin' cappucino in about 4 minutes, and no restaurant or barista can match it.
True enough, the article is puff and glosses over any really useful detail... assuming, of course, that Bull's work is more sophisticated than indicated.
Anyway, it's old news on top of obvious, the World Soundscape Project dealt with this decades ago when it wasn't so obvious.
No, you don't need a degree to study this, it is pretty obvious. But we haven't read the source material, have we? Just a news website article.
What comes out of studies like this are things that are finer points, and lead to more significant conclusions. Eg.: the effect of personal music players on listening ability (as opposed to hearing, which any audiologist can tell you is obvious), the role of listening ability in a cultural setting, the role of listening ability in adaptability and overall health, the effect of various usage patterns of PLD's on our emotional state, etc.
Studies like that CAN be empirical to a degree, and can result in engineering, marketing, health policy decisions, and overall trends, so they aren't insignificant. Maybe even more significant, than, say, the difference between gentoo and *bsd.
Oh, no, though it is a common shortcircuit to assume that an anecdote is anything but a special case instance. Anecdotes are always interesting, because life is full of special cases. In this example, I merely wanted to note that system 8.1 on a 1st-gen PowerMac small dual-purpose server turned out to be amazingly stable and useful, so I installed a bunch of those, and they're mostly maintenance-free to date.
My more general experience indicates that both win9x and systems 7-9 were crashy or adequately stable, depending on the use and software installed. Imagine my joy the first time I discovered win95 wouldn't run even as a simple file server for more than about 40 days, a bug, and registry-rummaging and dll-dithering are puzzles I'm glad to have gone away (mostly); and I've worked on fixing many hosed installs of any classic mac system. They both suck.
I suggested Linux as a file server, but it quickly became obvious:
1. Filemaker server required (dual purpose)
2. 56K modems and no distro CD's on the island, well, one mandrake (dubiously newfangled - this was 1999)
3. I only had 3 hours and I was a relative newbie to linux (any *nix skills were from the time of gopher, mainframes, giant printer centers, and Tex to write school papers)
In the end setting up the replacement 8100 Mac (including fresh install, timed backup scripts, autoreboot (regular power outages), and getting a non-threaded app to cooperate with file sharing) took about an hour--and that's the last I heard of it, still working I'd expect. System 8.1 has proven to be very stable if you don't mess with extensions. Only 6 clientstations, though one of them is at the end of 400 ft of faded blue cat5 draped over branches through the woods to the top of a cliff(!).
There's a fileserver/database host pizzabox mac I set up in 1998 for a network-noob arts collective that ran sans reboot for two years, daily (even weekend) moderate use, until a power failure forced the issue. Some dude just changed the jaz disks every couple of days. I used to check up on them but it just worked, and finally I checked back a couple of years ago and it still chugged along, only a few reboots over the 4 years.
System 8.1, filemaker 4 solution with 45 related files and 600K+ records, and 20K+ word and excel and email files, a cheap old headless mac. Set that config up a few times over the years, for small organizations, a lifeline to them, hassle free and useful.
When I tried the same thing three years ago with an old win98 box (not enough cpu muscle for Win2k, and no budget, nada, zero), well, let's just say that after getting a few frantic phone calls ['it just shut down' - 'why do the fonts suddenly look all funny'] I went out and got another crusty old mac to do the job, problem solved. Not bad for a non-server OS, when scaled down properly.