A complete by-chance, creation-free belief in existence (as best I understand it) still has the problem that if you go back far enough, something had to come from nothing, or its existence has to be taken as a given in order to progress. It also assumes that the laws of physics that created the Big Bang were in force before matter came into existence, so at some point the fundamental mathematical principles of the universe had to 'always exist'. To me, the difference between that and a Supreme Deity isn't all that far of a stretch. I've also yet to see (and it could simply be that I haven't looked in the right places yet) an observable, measurable, repeatable method by which live could stem from non-living matter. Even a belief completely independent of God has some challenging questions that science has yet to answer. Is it not still faith to say "there is an answer...we just don't have it yet"?
While I'm aware of some very minor translation errors, my understanding is that the scribes of antiquity were EXTREMELY painstaking when they copied their manuscripts. While a few minor translation errors set in over the millenia, I'd consider it analogous to having a miniscule scratch on an iPhone and thus completely discarding the phone as unusable. If you're asking which parts are factual vs. metaphorical, you'll ask 10 different Christians and get 20 different answers, but here's mine: Certain areas (Job, Psalms, etc.) are written in a highly poetic, highly metaphor-driven tone. It doesn't take too far to read them to see that there is plenty of metaphor in those verses. The laws of Leviticus, for example, were given to Moses for the expressed intent of governing the nation of Israel with them. While their role in the lives of the 21st century Christian is an internal debate, it was safe to say that at the time of their writing they were intended to be taken literally by the people to whom they were writing. With regards specifically to the four gospels, what is metaphorical (the parables) is generally pretty clearly contrasted to the recordings of the life of Jesus.
Where do I stand on the Genesis account with regards to metaphor vs. literal? My answer is probably going to kill my Slashdot karma (lol), but them's the breaks...It doesn't matter much to me. I believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful God created everything in the observable universe. Does it matter to me much whether the creation took place in six periods of 24 hours, or whether it was six lengthier periods of time? Ultimately no, because my faith in my Creator isn't contingent upon my understanding of His methods. I know that I don't have the mental capacity to fully understand how God managed to start with nothing and end up with a whole lot of something. I do my best to pick up tidbits whenever I can, but if I believed in a God small enough to be completely understood, then by definition I'd be believing in a God who wasn't worth worshiping. I don't have to understand or comprehend every facet of God in order to have faith in Him. Also, your post seems to make a very easy mistake that I myself have wrestled with over the past few years (in part due to Slashdotters like yourself) in that God and the church are two different things. God is a being beyond my understanding. The church is a group of human beings who bear His name. Sometimes, they do things that are perfectly in line with what God has called us to do (more on that in a bit). Other times though, the church acts in a way that is contrary to how God calls us to act. A disbelief in God due to the errs of humans who state that they're acting in His name despite not doing so is disingenuous.
Unfortunately, it seems that the general Slashdot consensus is that everyone who is a Christian, by definition, is either a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, considers Sheldon's Mom from the Big Bang Theory to be a good example of our faith (instead of a caricature of extremism), and consider it our duty to make the five minutes you're
Genuine question here. No, I didn't read TFA, but TFS indicates that it'd be an astronomical chance that all the genetic diversity in humans that we see today came from a single pair of humans. The alternative to that seems to be that there were multiple sets of humans who evolved into humans during a similar period of time on an evolutionary scale. Given the complexity of a human being as-is, the gradual change of humans over a period of several thousand years (assuming a Creation-based timetable of 10,000-50,000 years, no I don't believe the 6,000 number either) into the genetic diversity we see today seems no more remote a possibility than (switching gears to evolution and TFS) having multiple apes each independently evolving into human beings that have sufficiently equivalent DNA and reproductive systems compatible enough to themselves reproduce.
...but I have a sneaky suspicion there's more to it than this. Yes, Apotheker is a CEO, and as much as we all like to look condescendingly upon those in upper management as being out of touch, HP has been trading Dell for the #1 and #2 slots as far as PC shipment numbers for the past decade. I find it seriously difficult to believe that the board, the shareholders, or even the 'yes men' will say "dump the second most profitable division of our company, excellent idea, sir!".
Yes, you can dismiss my crystal ball (it also said that by this time next year, the touchpad would have had a respectable minority share in the tablet market), but I'd dare say that there has to be more to this story than simply a change of heart whereby the CEO no longer wants to gun for the number two slot in the tablet market simply because he doesn't feel like it anymore or because it failed to make a mint in less than two months. I reckon there's either a problem with some accounting ledgers somewhere, he got a C&D from Apple (who clearly has no qualms about doing so if Samsung is any indication), or...something else that would make more sense than what we presently know.
I think for my first Android software project I'm going to come up with a text message like program that uses your data plan. I could make a killing on something like that if it took off. Although I'll probably get my ass sued off by patent trolls so I may not bother.
Pingchat. Kik Messenger. LiveProfile. WhatsApp. eBuddy. BBM (in the case of Blackberry). iMessage (in the case of iOS).
And that's the ones I know off the top of my head, that are cross platform (unless otherwise stated), and doesn't even include dedicated IM clients like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo.
You're a bit late to the party, dude. The single biggest problem is the lack of uniformity. BBM had a massive following; they could have leveraged that and for $2 a month given iOS and Android customers a BBM pin and made a mint...but instead there's a bunch of different IP-based BBM clones. In my case, the de facto standard among my friends is PingChat, but that's only because we all basically agreed upon it and for no other reason.
What I would like to see, though, are touch screens in the middle of the steering wheel so you don't have to turn your head to navigate through the menus.
yes...because a touch screen is EXACTLY what I want sitting on top of an airbag, ready to fly at me at 200 miles an hour when I'm in an accident.
The reason why most people I know who have Verizon have it are as follows:
-Verizon has been traditionally known for having among the best reception available, and this isn't without merit. The USA is a fairly large country with regards to the geographic region that needs to be blanketed with towers. Verizon has traditionally been the service most available to the most people. Similarly, Verizon's use of CDMA actually has a lick of merit in this regard - CDMA can route a single call through multiple towers simultaneously, so if one tower's signal drops the others can hold the call. GSM is one tower at a time, and as a T-Mo subscriber this is a pain since my house is equidistant from three separate towers. The call gets handed off between the three towers like a hot potato, which causes the calls to drop at an annoying rate. Everywhere else besides my home it's great, but it's an unfortunate limitation of the system.
-Verizon usually has the best rates and service regarding corporate accounts, so it's very common for people with company phones to have them Verizon issued. AT&T has gotten better in this regard, but again I'll berate T-Mo for being about the only carrier to exclusively cater to consumers.
-Verizon has the most subscribers nationwide. Since each network has 'in' calling where calls to other subscribers of the same company are free, it can create a situation where it's possible to sign up for a 600 minute/month plan instead of a 1,200 minute or unlimited plan if half the calls you make don't run the meter.
-When I compared the speedtest.net results from my T-Mobile phone and my Verizon phone (both running Android, both with full bar 3G reception), the scores were pretty close. T-Mobile had a bit better speed (chalk it up to fewer people on the tower), but Verizon had a sub-100ms ping, which is impressive for a cell carrier.
Trust me, I'm NO fan of Verizon. I have stuck by T-Mobile despite living in dropped call central so that I don't have to deal with AT&T or Verizon (though Sprint is my next move the day the Death Star takes over). At the same time, I do have some respect for the reasons why other people choose them.
We haven't even gotten encryption right yet. Certainly they had to "cut corners" on encryption to make it computationally feasible. When they get this working with 65000 bit encryption (not 256 or 1024) THEN I'll take them seriously. Until that day I can't trust encryption and I won't trust people who claim it is "secure".
Because the alternative is trusting unencrypted data. None of us are under the delusion that anything, digital or physical, is 100% secure and completely impenetrable. However, properly encrypted data is MORE secure than unencrypted data. Then, there's also the "outrunning the bear" aspect. If you and I both have data sets of equal value to a data thief, mine is encrypted and yours is not, my database doesn't have to be 65,000 bit encrypted in order to be the less desirable target.
Read through most of the thread, including your response above to the guy whose response ultimately boiled down to "Why not surrender to the corporate gods? because he doesn't have to, that's what he's asking, so deal with it".
First off, it was a bit unclear in your initial question whether you were looking for just an e-mail server and ONLY an e-mail server, or if you were looking for as much of the Google ecosystem as could be self-hosted. If you're looking for the former, there were several good suggestions on the thread. The Turnkey Linux flavor of Zimbra is a great idea, and I saw recommendations for Smartermail and AtMail listed on the thread as well. I have no experience with either one, but both of them appear to have shiny screenshots, so I do intend to look closer at them soon.
If you're looking for the latter, I'm going to diverge from the Slashdot logic that M$ iS tEh eViL and say that Windows Live is actually a pretty nice platform. Live Mail is actually a LOT more spam free than Hotmail was in the 90's (and you can get a Live.com e-mail address so you don't have the Hotmail stigma), you get Office Web Apps and 25GB of Skydrive for free. If you're on Windows, the SDExplorer essentially mounts your Skydrive like any other network storage area, so you could store whatever you wanted in password protected 7zip archive spans if you wanted. If you're a Linux guy, you'll likely appreciate the fact that the majority of these services use CSS and HTML5, so Opera and Firefox will work well with them (they actually demo the video using Firefox and Chrome). This is one area where Microsoft's size and business model benefits the users: the ad department is so far away from the hosted apps department that the majority of ads they run are for first party products or generic ad providers anyway. I know it's not generally accepted to like MS products, but as far as their competition to Google Apps and Gmail, it's actually worth a look.
If both Google and Microsoft are not to be trusted, then what about a third party vendor? Hostgator's "hatchling" web hosting plan costs $7.16 a month (less if you pay for a year or three of service in advance), and gives you a domain name, webmail, and "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth...plus obviously a place to host a website if you want. Alternatively, Rackspace offers e-mail hosting for $3 a month (generic webmail), and $10 a month for an Exchange mailbox that includes a starter Sharepoint workspace. Since Rackspace and Hostgator are both selling their services to you directly, they both have a vested interest in keeping you happy since you're the customer (instead of the product in the case of Google and Microsoft in the Live Mail scenario). While I'm sure both would ultimately succumb to a subpoena, I'd wager that they're more likely to ask to see the paperwork instead of trusting Uncle Sam's "Pretty Please". Since the hardware upkeep, software licensing and configuration, disaster planning, spam filtering, and intrusion prevention are bundled into your monthly bill, it's one less thing to worry about. The classic argument to this is "but they don't care about my data like I do", and you're absolutely right. However, in both cases, you're likely sharing server space with a few to a few hundred other people. If the server gets hacked, that's hundreds of paying customers whose information got hacked, and THAT kind of data breach is much less for them to brush off. Also, in this scenario, at the very least you don't have to worry about your data being scrubbed for demographic information from the people providing you the service, since you're paying for it instead of an advertising agency.
Reader's Digest version:
-If your issue is with Google specifically and you want the full Gmail/Google Apps ecosystem, Microsoft's Live service is a really solid alternative if you consider them the lesser evil.
-If your issue is with the principle of "free personal e-mail" in general, a web hosting company like Hostgator/Justhost/1&1 may fit
I run an Exchange server at work and have no intrinsic issues with it other than one major problem: cost.
I'll pretend for a moment that the copies of Exchange 2007 and MS Server 2003 being sold on eBay are 100% legitimate (a serious question given the nature of the software being sold). The cheapest copy of Exchange 2007 w/5 CALs was $326.04. The cheapest copy of Server 2003 on eBay that didn't look too shady was $499. Thus, I'm presuming the OP wasn't quite looking for a software solution that would cost $725.04 to implement for five users, and some serious extra bucks if additional mailboxes were necessary, and that's assuming that a machine powerful enough to run JUST those two applications was already possessed.
One thing: Zimbra requires 2 GB of RAM, which is high for an email server. You must have this though, or it will run slow as dirt.
Clearly you haven't used Exchange in any real capacity. Our Exchange server handles about 100 users at work, and is more or less happy with 4GB of RAM. The new 2010 server got 16GB. If we tried running Exchange 2007 on 2GB of RAM, those hard disks would never stop paging.
Yes, except I can't get FiOS where I live, so Verizon can't get me VoIP if they wanted to. Even if they did, I'd be hesitant to sign up for one reason:
Land lines are among the most heavily regulated, heavily redundant services provided. The northeastern US had a three day long blackout in 2003. Awesome time, actually (except the driving; none of the traffic lights worked). Between the time the power went out and the time it came back, I never lost a dial tone. I remember reading somewhere that the PSTN has nine nines of reliability (99.9999999% uptime). Not even the power grid can match that.
So yes, I'm a bit trigger shy at the thought of moving to a fiber optic system that has a 6 hour UPS installed, when the advantages are minimal over the PSTN on my side of the demarc.
...And according to the Democrats, all of our problems are the Republicans' fault.
Ultimately, the problem is career politicians. No one in D.C. is willing to forego a re-election in order to make unpopular decisions that are ultimately for the good of the country.
The GP's point is that saying that to the automated system is about the most guaranteed way to get to speak to an actual person, instead of trying to appease the voice activated command line whose list of commands are terribly documented. Presumably the GP isn't intending to actually cancel the contract, the idea is that companies don't jerk around with customers intending to cancel, and will immediately forward the customer to a live person whose job is to avoid having the customer cancel their service.
The article's general argument (I know, I know) is that adding in all the whizbang features like Bluetooth connectivity and HD Radio, and the licensing fees involved has eaten up all the money to the point where there's little left for R&D for clearer audio. I think the problem is simpler than that, and twofold.
First, people by and large no longer actively listen to music. We listen while doing something else. Whether that 'something else' is driving, jogging, cleaning, working, or whatever else...it's no longer a sit-down activity like it was in the past. I'd argue that the most common audio output device is the iPod earbuds. They sound pretty decent for bundled earbuds, but that's like congratulating Apple for making the prettiest Terminal window for OSX. Point is, even a $500 Sony receiver with its bundled speakers is going to sound better than/that/. It's actually going to sound a LOT better than that. The floor is much lower than it was 30 years ago, therefore, it doesn't take the same amount of audio quality to greatly surpass it.
Second, most people when stereo shopping are looking for something that sounds "very good". Being as the majority of said consumers are pretty easy to please in that regard according to point #1, now Sony has to distinguish itself between Yamaha and Denon and Onkyo when they're shown next to each other. How do you do that in a way that prints well on shelf tags? Answer: good luck. That's where the arms race of having 1,001 connectors, bluetooth, XM, Pandora, laser light shows on the front, spiffy animations, 1,000,001 EQ settings, pseudo-surround from the stereo speakers, etc. all comes in to play: Bluetooth vs. no Bluetooth is very easy to distinguish. Wattage numbers are very easy to compare. "Sounds better than..." is both subjective and difficult to determine, so fighting over it would ultimately put everyone on a similar playing field. While the Slashdot Cynicism would say that it's because no one wants to have next quarter's numbers suffer on account of "doing it right", to be fair to them, how many Best Buy employees - even the ones in the home theater department - would YOU trust to accurately showcase the difference between how the different receivers sound? Have you EVER been in one where the routing panel buttons actually routed the signal properly? I haven't.
I'll use myself as a perfect example. I spend enough time in my car to replace the perfectly working stock stereo with an aftermarket one. When it came time to shop, I at least went to a store that specializes in auto and marine audio and skipped over Wal-Mart and Best Buy. I got Boston Acoustic speakers and a Kenwood deck. What attracted me to the deck was its price tag ($200 was about what I was looking to spend; the higher priced units were closer to $500-$600 and had the in-dash flat panels and navigation, etc), and its feature set. It was really nice to have a USB port and an aux in; I could charge my phone and recognize music stored on it, and I could play Pandora and make hands-free phone calls with the aux in jack. It was beautiful. A friend of mine who is one of those "Boom Car" owners - you know the type, the ones who you wouldn't exactly want leading the charge in a "surprise attack" that give you a back massage at a red light, even though you're in the opposite lane and three cars back. He had a Pioneer deck that he sold me for $60, and even did the installation for me (I installed the Kenwood, I just couldn't be bothered this time around lol). It doesn't have the USB port, the FM radio reception is mediocre on a good day (I swear that Kenwood could pick up a transmission from Mars), and I still haven't figured out how to set the preset stations for which it has no buttons (the presets are cycled through the general purpose knob, which can require a bit extra nudge at times). Every time I'm in my car I debate going back to the Kenwood deck because the Kenwood does basically everything I want it to do (except bluetooth, but neither does the Pioneer). I still haven't
I don't know the first thing about Chinese building codes, but comparing stereotypes to stereotypes...
--New York high-rises would likely be SO dense with computing devices that you'd likely need to invest in half a central office in the basement of the high-rise just to handle the backhaul. You'd need a stack of permits so high you'd likely need a consulting firm just to oversee that they're followed. You'd need to convince the building owners to let you run cable in the building, and those guys are usually so tight-fisted that stereotypically they'd need to have a lawsuit filed against them for a tenant's child drowning to have them fix a burst pipe. All of that assumes that you're not in the "territory" of your direct competitor, who didn't somehow weasel the zoning ordinances in such a way that you can't possibly make the requirements anyway.
--Even in a Chinese high rise, mobile internet connectivity outnumbers stuff requiring a cable to connect, so less backhaul gear would likely be needed. Wires would be stapled to the wall in a week and no one would care, including the building owner and the local zoning board, if there is one.
Like I said, I'm comparing stereotypes here, so there's probably plenty of case-by-case examples where permits are easy to acquire in New York and an impossible to deal with high rise owner in Bejing. However, it stands to reason that overall, there's simply less red tape in China to deal with than there is in America when it comes to the kind of infrastructure building being discussed here..Personally, I can't get FiOS where I live because Cablevision has such a death grip on my local township that it's prohibitively expensive for Verizon to run the fiber.
To send Ubisoft the clearest possible message, I feel that a four-tiered approach needs to happen:
1.) Don't buy the game, and tell all your friends not to buy the game, even the console versions. 2.) Buy the game, but return it three weeks later, unopened. The logic: Best Buy and Gamestop will have replenished their inventory after three weeks; they'll be none too thrilled with having twice that inventory taking up shelf space and will be pressuring Ubisoft's distributor to curtail production runs. 3.) Comment and rate down the game on Amazon, Steam, Metacritic, and wherever else you can. 4.) This is the tricky one: all the release groups that crack games like this need to agree to withhold their releases. Searches for "Driver San Fransisco cracked" need to come up either nil or with green pastures of fake/falsely named files, for the first three months of release.
If sales are terrible AND there's no viable pirated copy circulating the internet, then the bean counters at Ubisoft will be forced to conclude that it can't be pirated copies cutting into sales. Yes, I'm certain that we like to think that the people at Ubisoft have exchanged their brains for turnips, and I'm certain that there's some truth to that. However, if the legal department is stuck twiddling their thumbs because there's no one to send a takedown notice to, the distribution liaison is stuck recommending that the next run of disc pressings be halted due to overstock in the retail channel, while the PR department adds a third shift to handle all the e-mail volume they're getting in between cleaning up the Amazon page and drawing up press releases to handle the outcry that could quite possibly hit mainstream media if it's large enough.
The key here is that the response has to be CONSISTENT. This is not a boycott that will send the correct message to Ubisoft. It needs to be loud, consistent, and affect their bottom line every time.
I'm guessing that 40MBytes is the limit for install packages for the Apple App Store that it will let you download via 3G. After that, you can still install, but only on a Wifi connection, which can limit the number of impulse purchases (and by extension revenue generated). Even if it's not a true limit, it's not worth losing sales over to most developers....if I'm right; if anyone else wishes to confirm or dispute this hypothesis I welcome it.
Well, my personal fave router that I'm saving up for is this nifty ASUS one. At $129 it isn't from the cheap end of the spectrum, but even the one I have now supports dual band and USB at a more wallet-friendly $90, fully half the cost of the Apple kit, and comes with DD-WRT stock.
In either case, the most blaring flaw in your logic is that if the backups don't work, you'll know it VERY quickly at the backup phase. This is extremely preferable when contrasted with finding out in the restore phase. See, if there's an issue at the network or configuration level, the backup software won't be able to point to it in the first place, so when you perform your backup, it'll generally error out immediately, or not begin the backup process in the first place.
Personally, I've already done the bleeding obvious steps in this article - I've got a 3.5TByte FreeNAS where Acronis is humming along and backing up my household computers just wonderfully. It cost more than $200, but it greatly exceeds the capabilities of Time Machine in that it is also a great centralized management unit and is fault tolerant...plus all the ZFS wonderfulness of snapshotting, block level deduplication, etc.
I'd dare say that the ultimate issue with the article is that it wasn't designed for the slashdot crowd. It was designed for the general populous who isn't as acutely aware that there are alternatives to Time Machine. On the other side, the steps were very generic and broad, so it isn't really written for them, either:/
I think there was more to it than that. First and foremost, the media was extremely expensive. Second, there was no real bundling anywhere - few if any car stereos had them built in, nor did stereo minisystems, and no desktops or laptops could use them outside of the player (if you don't believe this is important, do you know anyone who's burnt an audio CD within the past decade? any of those people burn 'em on a standalone CD deck?). Third, the expensive media and players never paid off as being anything except a digital audio player - no data, no digital cameras, no video games. Costly and cost effective are two different things. Minidisc had the former down to a science.
Yes, while that largely reiterates what you stated above, I don't think it was that the public understood that this was the case as much as the fact that going Minidisc required a conscious effort. Customers had to decide to buy a portable minidisc player, as well as a home stereo minidisc player, and then transfer all their CDs to that format. By contrast, by time one or two friends had a minidisc player in my circle, CD-RW drives were standard fare in desktops (and in all but the most bottom level laptops), cars and home stereos had CD players, portable CD players had a median price of $50-$60 (higher for the Sony and Panasonic ones, but Chinese no-names were easily $25). All we had to do was either buy CDs and play them, or buy blank media and...play them. At a quarter a pop, blank CDs didn't need the rewriteability that Minidisc had. It wasn't that consumers said "they're proprietary", they said "CD is everywhere, so switching is pointless".
Those cameras I don't think went beyond 2 Megapixels, so fitting a dozen images on a floppy was possible. It was generally cheaper to buy a 100 pack of floppies than 144MBytes of flash memory, and at that it came with the added bonus of having a box of floppies handy for data storage. Finally, if someone wanted a picture, all you had to do was put in a fresh floppy, take the photo, and give it to them. Floppies were cheap and easy to give away. No one was going to part with a CompactFlash card or keep one around to hand out. If you were away, you could immediately view photos on any computer without a card reader or special cable. On the spot photo sharing is common place now with camera phones, but even now there's the caveat of having to provide someone with your cell number or e-mail address.
There wasn't much in the way of a guarantee that flash memory would be a race to the bottom, or which format would win. Seen any SmartMedia cards on a shelf recently?
While the Sony batteries were expensive, they still lasted longer than most digital camera batteries of their day. Most would eat through a pair of batteries after 40-50 pictures, so it wouldn't take too long for even wholesale packs of batteries to exceed the cost of the Sony battery, and having an 8-pack was essential. Yes, NOW we can get 200-300 photos out of a pair of AA batteries, but that wasn't the case during the era of the floppy camera.
None of this is true anymore, but floppy disk photos made hella lot of sense in 1999.
The one thing Dell did right was to make a deal with Stardock. The Dell Dock is really nice, to the point where I wish I had it despite having paid the $20 for ObjectDock Plus. Dell has had the notoriety of bloatware, but it's come down quite a bit recently. Unless you get a really cheap laptop, you'll get your machine basically shipped with Windows, drivers, Dell Dock, Roxio burning software, PowerDVD, and a McAfee demo...and little else (possibly one or two desktop shortcuts). About the only thing I'd consider to be Dell bloatware anymore is the McAfee trial, but whether it's a good idea to bundle the first two months of virus protection instead of baking a year subscription into the cost (or loading with Avast, AVG, etc.) is a whole different topic entirely. But even in their consumer line, Dell provides mostly-untouched, pre-activated Win7 discs and driver discs in the box.
The real king of bloatware these days is HP, who will ship laptops with 40GB of used space, for a machine whose msconfig list requires a scroll bar out of the box. It takes less time to find an untouched OEM copy of Win7 that takes HP keys on $TORRENT_TRACKER, download it, burn it, and install it, then install the drivers manually, than it does to decrapify the damn things. HP doesn't ship recovery media anymore, they have recovery partitions, that require the end user to burn discs themselves (a process that can take over three hours) that slipstream all the bloatware into the disc. God help you if you actually have to use them, since THAT process can take hours as well. Their printer driver discs require half a gig, and the 'custom' install basically lets you choose whether you get a desktop icon for the registration program or not, instead of actually giving you the choice of leaving half the crap on the disc. Curiously enough, Epson and Canon can fit their drivers into 10MBytes, and even HP themselves can make a 15MB driver stack - IF your printer speaks PCL or PostScript. If not, there's the obligatory msconfig scrub for the three services and five executables that add themselves to startup for a PRINTER. ugh. The sad part is...I generally like their laptops.
Denon really has two mostly-distinct arms. Their home theater side is, well, a home theater gear company, for which I am unable to speak for one way or the other. Their professional audio side though, I *can* say is "real DJ gear". In my circle of DJ friends, gear ultimately has one test: what happens when you throw it down a flight of stairs. Crown and QSC amps fit the bill (as do some of the older carver amps). American Audio and Gemini don't. Technics 1200 turntables fit the bill, most Stanton and Numark don't (though my TTXs are damn close). Denon mixers, CD decks, and digital controllers are generally on par with Rane and Pioneer in the stairwell test, and lots of jocks I know who have Denon decks have had them for years without ever having an issue. The HD-2500 unit I've got in my rack is among the most innovative digital controllers I've ever used; it's the poster child for the phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to"; it was one of the few that had an internal hard disk. Their 3700 decks are pretty well regarded for several innovative features along with the fact that they, for the most part, pass the stairwell test.
I don't work for Denon, but decrying their DJ gear for the snake oil tactics of their home theater department is unwarranted.
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To answer your question the best that I can...
A complete by-chance, creation-free belief in existence (as best I understand it) still has the problem that if you go back far enough, something had to come from nothing, or its existence has to be taken as a given in order to progress. It also assumes that the laws of physics that created the Big Bang were in force before matter came into existence, so at some point the fundamental mathematical principles of the universe had to 'always exist'. To me, the difference between that and a Supreme Deity isn't all that far of a stretch. I've also yet to see (and it could simply be that I haven't looked in the right places yet) an observable, measurable, repeatable method by which live could stem from non-living matter. Even a belief completely independent of God has some challenging questions that science has yet to answer. Is it not still faith to say "there is an answer...we just don't have it yet"?
While I'm aware of some very minor translation errors, my understanding is that the scribes of antiquity were EXTREMELY painstaking when they copied their manuscripts. While a few minor translation errors set in over the millenia, I'd consider it analogous to having a miniscule scratch on an iPhone and thus completely discarding the phone as unusable. If you're asking which parts are factual vs. metaphorical, you'll ask 10 different Christians and get 20 different answers, but here's mine: Certain areas (Job, Psalms, etc.) are written in a highly poetic, highly metaphor-driven tone. It doesn't take too far to read them to see that there is plenty of metaphor in those verses. The laws of Leviticus, for example, were given to Moses for the expressed intent of governing the nation of Israel with them. While their role in the lives of the 21st century Christian is an internal debate, it was safe to say that at the time of their writing they were intended to be taken literally by the people to whom they were writing. With regards specifically to the four gospels, what is metaphorical (the parables) is generally pretty clearly contrasted to the recordings of the life of Jesus.
Where do I stand on the Genesis account with regards to metaphor vs. literal? My answer is probably going to kill my Slashdot karma (lol), but them's the breaks...It doesn't matter much to me. I believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful God created everything in the observable universe. Does it matter to me much whether the creation took place in six periods of 24 hours, or whether it was six lengthier periods of time? Ultimately no, because my faith in my Creator isn't contingent upon my understanding of His methods. I know that I don't have the mental capacity to fully understand how God managed to start with nothing and end up with a whole lot of something. I do my best to pick up tidbits whenever I can, but if I believed in a God small enough to be completely understood, then by definition I'd be believing in a God who wasn't worth worshiping. I don't have to understand or comprehend every facet of God in order to have faith in Him. Also, your post seems to make a very easy mistake that I myself have wrestled with over the past few years (in part due to Slashdotters like yourself) in that God and the church are two different things. God is a being beyond my understanding. The church is a group of human beings who bear His name. Sometimes, they do things that are perfectly in line with what God has called us to do (more on that in a bit). Other times though, the church acts in a way that is contrary to how God calls us to act. A disbelief in God due to the errs of humans who state that they're acting in His name despite not doing so is disingenuous.
Unfortunately, it seems that the general Slashdot consensus is that everyone who is a Christian, by definition, is either a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, considers Sheldon's Mom from the Big Bang Theory to be a good example of our faith (instead of a caricature of extremism), and consider it our duty to make the five minutes you're
Genuine question here. No, I didn't read TFA, but TFS indicates that it'd be an astronomical chance that all the genetic diversity in humans that we see today came from a single pair of humans. The alternative to that seems to be that there were multiple sets of humans who evolved into humans during a similar period of time on an evolutionary scale. Given the complexity of a human being as-is, the gradual change of humans over a period of several thousand years (assuming a Creation-based timetable of 10,000-50,000 years, no I don't believe the 6,000 number either) into the genetic diversity we see today seems no more remote a possibility than (switching gears to evolution and TFS) having multiple apes each independently evolving into human beings that have sufficiently equivalent DNA and reproductive systems compatible enough to themselves reproduce.
...but I have a sneaky suspicion there's more to it than this. Yes, Apotheker is a CEO, and as much as we all like to look condescendingly upon those in upper management as being out of touch, HP has been trading Dell for the #1 and #2 slots as far as PC shipment numbers for the past decade. I find it seriously difficult to believe that the board, the shareholders, or even the 'yes men' will say "dump the second most profitable division of our company, excellent idea, sir!".
Yes, you can dismiss my crystal ball (it also said that by this time next year, the touchpad would have had a respectable minority share in the tablet market), but I'd dare say that there has to be more to this story than simply a change of heart whereby the CEO no longer wants to gun for the number two slot in the tablet market simply because he doesn't feel like it anymore or because it failed to make a mint in less than two months. I reckon there's either a problem with some accounting ledgers somewhere, he got a C&D from Apple (who clearly has no qualms about doing so if Samsung is any indication), or...something else that would make more sense than what we presently know.
I think for my first Android software project I'm going to come up with a text message like program that uses your data plan. I could make a killing on something like that if it took off. Although I'll probably get my ass sued off by patent trolls so I may not bother.
Pingchat.
Kik Messenger.
LiveProfile.
WhatsApp.
eBuddy.
BBM (in the case of Blackberry).
iMessage (in the case of iOS).
And that's the ones I know off the top of my head, that are cross platform (unless otherwise stated), and doesn't even include dedicated IM clients like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo.
You're a bit late to the party, dude. The single biggest problem is the lack of uniformity. BBM had a massive following; they could have leveraged that and for $2 a month given iOS and Android customers a BBM pin and made a mint...but instead there's a bunch of different IP-based BBM clones. In my case, the de facto standard among my friends is PingChat, but that's only because we all basically agreed upon it and for no other reason.
What I would like to see, though, are touch screens in the middle of the steering wheel so you don't have to turn your head to navigate through the menus.
yes...because a touch screen is EXACTLY what I want sitting on top of an airbag, ready to fly at me at 200 miles an hour when I'm in an accident.
The reason why most people I know who have Verizon have it are as follows:
-Verizon has been traditionally known for having among the best reception available, and this isn't without merit. The USA is a fairly large country with regards to the geographic region that needs to be blanketed with towers. Verizon has traditionally been the service most available to the most people. Similarly, Verizon's use of CDMA actually has a lick of merit in this regard - CDMA can route a single call through multiple towers simultaneously, so if one tower's signal drops the others can hold the call. GSM is one tower at a time, and as a T-Mo subscriber this is a pain since my house is equidistant from three separate towers. The call gets handed off between the three towers like a hot potato, which causes the calls to drop at an annoying rate. Everywhere else besides my home it's great, but it's an unfortunate limitation of the system.
-Verizon usually has the best rates and service regarding corporate accounts, so it's very common for people with company phones to have them Verizon issued. AT&T has gotten better in this regard, but again I'll berate T-Mo for being about the only carrier to exclusively cater to consumers.
-Verizon has the most subscribers nationwide. Since each network has 'in' calling where calls to other subscribers of the same company are free, it can create a situation where it's possible to sign up for a 600 minute/month plan instead of a 1,200 minute or unlimited plan if half the calls you make don't run the meter.
-When I compared the speedtest.net results from my T-Mobile phone and my Verizon phone (both running Android, both with full bar 3G reception), the scores were pretty close. T-Mobile had a bit better speed (chalk it up to fewer people on the tower), but Verizon had a sub-100ms ping, which is impressive for a cell carrier.
Trust me, I'm NO fan of Verizon. I have stuck by T-Mobile despite living in dropped call central so that I don't have to deal with AT&T or Verizon (though Sprint is my next move the day the Death Star takes over). At the same time, I do have some respect for the reasons why other people choose them.
We haven't even gotten encryption right yet. Certainly they had to "cut corners" on encryption to make it computationally feasible. When they get this working with 65000 bit encryption (not 256 or 1024) THEN I'll take them seriously. Until that day I can't trust encryption and I won't trust people who claim it is "secure".
Because the alternative is trusting unencrypted data. None of us are under the delusion that anything, digital or physical, is 100% secure and completely impenetrable. However, properly encrypted data is MORE secure than unencrypted data. Then, there's also the "outrunning the bear" aspect. If you and I both have data sets of equal value to a data thief, mine is encrypted and yours is not, my database doesn't have to be 65,000 bit encrypted in order to be the less desirable target.
Hey OP,
Read through most of the thread, including your response above to the guy whose response ultimately boiled down to "Why not surrender to the corporate gods? because he doesn't have to, that's what he's asking, so deal with it".
First off, it was a bit unclear in your initial question whether you were looking for just an e-mail server and ONLY an e-mail server, or if you were looking for as much of the Google ecosystem as could be self-hosted. If you're looking for the former, there were several good suggestions on the thread. The Turnkey Linux flavor of Zimbra is a great idea, and I saw recommendations for Smartermail and AtMail listed on the thread as well. I have no experience with either one, but both of them appear to have shiny screenshots, so I do intend to look closer at them soon.
If you're looking for the latter, I'm going to diverge from the Slashdot logic that M$ iS tEh eViL and say that Windows Live is actually a pretty nice platform. Live Mail is actually a LOT more spam free than Hotmail was in the 90's (and you can get a Live.com e-mail address so you don't have the Hotmail stigma), you get Office Web Apps and 25GB of Skydrive for free. If you're on Windows, the SDExplorer essentially mounts your Skydrive like any other network storage area, so you could store whatever you wanted in password protected 7zip archive spans if you wanted. If you're a Linux guy, you'll likely appreciate the fact that the majority of these services use CSS and HTML5, so Opera and Firefox will work well with them (they actually demo the video using Firefox and Chrome). This is one area where Microsoft's size and business model benefits the users: the ad department is so far away from the hosted apps department that the majority of ads they run are for first party products or generic ad providers anyway. I know it's not generally accepted to like MS products, but as far as their competition to Google Apps and Gmail, it's actually worth a look.
If both Google and Microsoft are not to be trusted, then what about a third party vendor? Hostgator's "hatchling" web hosting plan costs $7.16 a month (less if you pay for a year or three of service in advance), and gives you a domain name, webmail, and "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth...plus obviously a place to host a website if you want. Alternatively, Rackspace offers e-mail hosting for $3 a month (generic webmail), and $10 a month for an Exchange mailbox that includes a starter Sharepoint workspace. Since Rackspace and Hostgator are both selling their services to you directly, they both have a vested interest in keeping you happy since you're the customer (instead of the product in the case of Google and Microsoft in the Live Mail scenario). While I'm sure both would ultimately succumb to a subpoena, I'd wager that they're more likely to ask to see the paperwork instead of trusting Uncle Sam's "Pretty Please". Since the hardware upkeep, software licensing and configuration, disaster planning, spam filtering, and intrusion prevention are bundled into your monthly bill, it's one less thing to worry about. The classic argument to this is "but they don't care about my data like I do", and you're absolutely right. However, in both cases, you're likely sharing server space with a few to a few hundred other people. If the server gets hacked, that's hundreds of paying customers whose information got hacked, and THAT kind of data breach is much less for them to brush off. Also, in this scenario, at the very least you don't have to worry about your data being scrubbed for demographic information from the people providing you the service, since you're paying for it instead of an advertising agency.
Reader's Digest version:
-If your issue is with Google specifically and you want the full Gmail/Google Apps ecosystem, Microsoft's Live service is a really solid alternative if you consider them the lesser evil.
-If your issue is with the principle of "free personal e-mail" in general, a web hosting company like Hostgator/Justhost/1&1 may fit
I run an Exchange server at work and have no intrinsic issues with it other than one major problem: cost.
I'll pretend for a moment that the copies of Exchange 2007 and MS Server 2003 being sold on eBay are 100% legitimate (a serious question given the nature of the software being sold). The cheapest copy of Exchange 2007 w/5 CALs was $326.04. The cheapest copy of Server 2003 on eBay that didn't look too shady was $499. Thus, I'm presuming the OP wasn't quite looking for a software solution that would cost $725.04 to implement for five users, and some serious extra bucks if additional mailboxes were necessary, and that's assuming that a machine powerful enough to run JUST those two applications was already possessed.
One thing: Zimbra requires 2 GB of RAM, which is high for an email server. You must have this though, or it will run slow as dirt.
Clearly you haven't used Exchange in any real capacity. Our Exchange server handles about 100 users at work, and is more or less happy with 4GB of RAM. The new 2010 server got 16GB. If we tried running Exchange 2007 on 2GB of RAM, those hard disks would never stop paging.
Yes, except I can't get FiOS where I live, so Verizon can't get me VoIP if they wanted to. Even if they did, I'd be hesitant to sign up for one reason:
Land lines are among the most heavily regulated, heavily redundant services provided. The northeastern US had a three day long blackout in 2003. Awesome time, actually (except the driving; none of the traffic lights worked). Between the time the power went out and the time it came back, I never lost a dial tone. I remember reading somewhere that the PSTN has nine nines of reliability (99.9999999% uptime). Not even the power grid can match that.
So yes, I'm a bit trigger shy at the thought of moving to a fiber optic system that has a 6 hour UPS installed, when the advantages are minimal over the PSTN on my side of the demarc.
...And according to the Democrats, all of our problems are the Republicans' fault.
Ultimately, the problem is career politicians. No one in D.C. is willing to forego a re-election in order to make unpopular decisions that are ultimately for the good of the country.
The GP's point is that saying that to the automated system is about the most guaranteed way to get to speak to an actual person, instead of trying to appease the voice activated command line whose list of commands are terribly documented. Presumably the GP isn't intending to actually cancel the contract, the idea is that companies don't jerk around with customers intending to cancel, and will immediately forward the customer to a live person whose job is to avoid having the customer cancel their service.
The article's general argument (I know, I know) is that adding in all the whizbang features like Bluetooth connectivity and HD Radio, and the licensing fees involved has eaten up all the money to the point where there's little left for R&D for clearer audio. I think the problem is simpler than that, and twofold.
First, people by and large no longer actively listen to music. We listen while doing something else. Whether that 'something else' is driving, jogging, cleaning, working, or whatever else...it's no longer a sit-down activity like it was in the past. I'd argue that the most common audio output device is the iPod earbuds. They sound pretty decent for bundled earbuds, but that's like congratulating Apple for making the prettiest Terminal window for OSX. Point is, even a $500 Sony receiver with its bundled speakers is going to sound better than /that/. It's actually going to sound a LOT better than that. The floor is much lower than it was 30 years ago, therefore, it doesn't take the same amount of audio quality to greatly surpass it.
Second, most people when stereo shopping are looking for something that sounds "very good". Being as the majority of said consumers are pretty easy to please in that regard according to point #1, now Sony has to distinguish itself between Yamaha and Denon and Onkyo when they're shown next to each other. How do you do that in a way that prints well on shelf tags? Answer: good luck. That's where the arms race of having 1,001 connectors, bluetooth, XM, Pandora, laser light shows on the front, spiffy animations, 1,000,001 EQ settings, pseudo-surround from the stereo speakers, etc. all comes in to play: Bluetooth vs. no Bluetooth is very easy to distinguish. Wattage numbers are very easy to compare. "Sounds better than..." is both subjective and difficult to determine, so fighting over it would ultimately put everyone on a similar playing field. While the Slashdot Cynicism would say that it's because no one wants to have next quarter's numbers suffer on account of "doing it right", to be fair to them, how many Best Buy employees - even the ones in the home theater department - would YOU trust to accurately showcase the difference between how the different receivers sound? Have you EVER been in one where the routing panel buttons actually routed the signal properly? I haven't.
I'll use myself as a perfect example. I spend enough time in my car to replace the perfectly working stock stereo with an aftermarket one. When it came time to shop, I at least went to a store that specializes in auto and marine audio and skipped over Wal-Mart and Best Buy. I got Boston Acoustic speakers and a Kenwood deck. What attracted me to the deck was its price tag ($200 was about what I was looking to spend; the higher priced units were closer to $500-$600 and had the in-dash flat panels and navigation, etc), and its feature set. It was really nice to have a USB port and an aux in; I could charge my phone and recognize music stored on it, and I could play Pandora and make hands-free phone calls with the aux in jack. It was beautiful. A friend of mine who is one of those "Boom Car" owners - you know the type, the ones who you wouldn't exactly want leading the charge in a "surprise attack" that give you a back massage at a red light, even though you're in the opposite lane and three cars back. He had a Pioneer deck that he sold me for $60, and even did the installation for me (I installed the Kenwood, I just couldn't be bothered this time around lol). It doesn't have the USB port, the FM radio reception is mediocre on a good day (I swear that Kenwood could pick up a transmission from Mars), and I still haven't figured out how to set the preset stations for which it has no buttons (the presets are cycled through the general purpose knob, which can require a bit extra nudge at times). Every time I'm in my car I debate going back to the Kenwood deck because the Kenwood does basically everything I want it to do (except bluetooth, but neither does the Pioneer). I still haven't
I don't know the first thing about Chinese building codes, but comparing stereotypes to stereotypes...
--New York high-rises would likely be SO dense with computing devices that you'd likely need to invest in half a central office in the basement of the high-rise just to handle the backhaul. You'd need a stack of permits so high you'd likely need a consulting firm just to oversee that they're followed. You'd need to convince the building owners to let you run cable in the building, and those guys are usually so tight-fisted that stereotypically they'd need to have a lawsuit filed against them for a tenant's child drowning to have them fix a burst pipe. All of that assumes that you're not in the "territory" of your direct competitor, who didn't somehow weasel the zoning ordinances in such a way that you can't possibly make the requirements anyway.
--Even in a Chinese high rise, mobile internet connectivity outnumbers stuff requiring a cable to connect, so less backhaul gear would likely be needed. Wires would be stapled to the wall in a week and no one would care, including the building owner and the local zoning board, if there is one.
Like I said, I'm comparing stereotypes here, so there's probably plenty of case-by-case examples where permits are easy to acquire in New York and an impossible to deal with high rise owner in Bejing. However, it stands to reason that overall, there's simply less red tape in China to deal with than there is in America when it comes to the kind of infrastructure building being discussed here. .Personally, I can't get FiOS where I live because Cablevision has such a death grip on my local township that it's prohibitively expensive for Verizon to run the fiber.
To send Ubisoft the clearest possible message, I feel that a four-tiered approach needs to happen:
1.) Don't buy the game, and tell all your friends not to buy the game, even the console versions.
2.) Buy the game, but return it three weeks later, unopened. The logic: Best Buy and Gamestop will have replenished their inventory after three weeks; they'll be none too thrilled with having twice that inventory taking up shelf space and will be pressuring Ubisoft's distributor to curtail production runs.
3.) Comment and rate down the game on Amazon, Steam, Metacritic, and wherever else you can.
4.) This is the tricky one: all the release groups that crack games like this need to agree to withhold their releases. Searches for "Driver San Fransisco cracked" need to come up either nil or with green pastures of fake/falsely named files, for the first three months of release.
If sales are terrible AND there's no viable pirated copy circulating the internet, then the bean counters at Ubisoft will be forced to conclude that it can't be pirated copies cutting into sales. Yes, I'm certain that we like to think that the people at Ubisoft have exchanged their brains for turnips, and I'm certain that there's some truth to that. However, if the legal department is stuck twiddling their thumbs because there's no one to send a takedown notice to, the distribution liaison is stuck recommending that the next run of disc pressings be halted due to overstock in the retail channel, while the PR department adds a third shift to handle all the e-mail volume they're getting in between cleaning up the Amazon page and drawing up press releases to handle the outcry that could quite possibly hit mainstream media if it's large enough.
The key here is that the response has to be CONSISTENT. This is not a boycott that will send the correct message to Ubisoft. It needs to be loud, consistent, and affect their bottom line every time.
I'm guessing that 40MBytes is the limit for install packages for the Apple App Store that it will let you download via 3G. After that, you can still install, but only on a Wifi connection, which can limit the number of impulse purchases (and by extension revenue generated). Even if it's not a true limit, it's not worth losing sales over to most developers. ...if I'm right; if anyone else wishes to confirm or dispute this hypothesis I welcome it.
Clearly you are, which explains posting as Anon. I, however, proudly remember seeing that in an episode and thinking "*SO* want to play that!"
Charging Stallman vs. Chair Throwing Steve Ballmer...
for all the crap we give "SyFy" for airing professional wrestling, THAT is a match that I'd be perfectly fine watching.
they probably used a Pentium III chip to do the calculations...
Well, my personal fave router that I'm saving up for is this nifty ASUS one. At $129 it isn't from the cheap end of the spectrum, but even the one I have now supports dual band and USB at a more wallet-friendly $90, fully half the cost of the Apple kit, and comes with DD-WRT stock.
In either case, the most blaring flaw in your logic is that if the backups don't work, you'll know it VERY quickly at the backup phase. This is extremely preferable when contrasted with finding out in the restore phase. See, if there's an issue at the network or configuration level, the backup software won't be able to point to it in the first place, so when you perform your backup, it'll generally error out immediately, or not begin the backup process in the first place.
Personally, I've already done the bleeding obvious steps in this article - I've got a 3.5TByte FreeNAS where Acronis is humming along and backing up my household computers just wonderfully. It cost more than $200, but it greatly exceeds the capabilities of Time Machine in that it is also a great centralized management unit and is fault tolerant...plus all the ZFS wonderfulness of snapshotting, block level deduplication, etc.
I'd dare say that the ultimate issue with the article is that it wasn't designed for the slashdot crowd. It was designed for the general populous who isn't as acutely aware that there are alternatives to Time Machine. On the other side, the steps were very generic and broad, so it isn't really written for them, either :/
I think there was more to it than that. First and foremost, the media was extremely expensive. Second, there was no real bundling anywhere - few if any car stereos had them built in, nor did stereo minisystems, and no desktops or laptops could use them outside of the player (if you don't believe this is important, do you know anyone who's burnt an audio CD within the past decade? any of those people burn 'em on a standalone CD deck?). Third, the expensive media and players never paid off as being anything except a digital audio player - no data, no digital cameras, no video games. Costly and cost effective are two different things. Minidisc had the former down to a science.
Yes, while that largely reiterates what you stated above, I don't think it was that the public understood that this was the case as much as the fact that going Minidisc required a conscious effort. Customers had to decide to buy a portable minidisc player, as well as a home stereo minidisc player, and then transfer all their CDs to that format. By contrast, by time one or two friends had a minidisc player in my circle, CD-RW drives were standard fare in desktops (and in all but the most bottom level laptops), cars and home stereos had CD players, portable CD players had a median price of $50-$60 (higher for the Sony and Panasonic ones, but Chinese no-names were easily $25). All we had to do was either buy CDs and play them, or buy blank media and...play them. At a quarter a pop, blank CDs didn't need the rewriteability that Minidisc had. It wasn't that consumers said "they're proprietary", they said "CD is everywhere, so switching is pointless".
Still missing some context...
Those cameras I don't think went beyond 2 Megapixels, so fitting a dozen images on a floppy was possible. It was generally cheaper to buy a 100 pack of floppies than 144MBytes of flash memory, and at that it came with the added bonus of having a box of floppies handy for data storage. Finally, if someone wanted a picture, all you had to do was put in a fresh floppy, take the photo, and give it to them. Floppies were cheap and easy to give away. No one was going to part with a CompactFlash card or keep one around to hand out. If you were away, you could immediately view photos on any computer without a card reader or special cable. On the spot photo sharing is common place now with camera phones, but even now there's the caveat of having to provide someone with your cell number or e-mail address.
There wasn't much in the way of a guarantee that flash memory would be a race to the bottom, or which format would win. Seen any SmartMedia cards on a shelf recently?
While the Sony batteries were expensive, they still lasted longer than most digital camera batteries of their day. Most would eat through a pair of batteries after 40-50 pictures, so it wouldn't take too long for even wholesale packs of batteries to exceed the cost of the Sony battery, and having an 8-pack was essential. Yes, NOW we can get 200-300 photos out of a pair of AA batteries, but that wasn't the case during the era of the floppy camera.
None of this is true anymore, but floppy disk photos made hella lot of sense in 1999.
The one thing Dell did right was to make a deal with Stardock. The Dell Dock is really nice, to the point where I wish I had it despite having paid the $20 for ObjectDock Plus. Dell has had the notoriety of bloatware, but it's come down quite a bit recently. Unless you get a really cheap laptop, you'll get your machine basically shipped with Windows, drivers, Dell Dock, Roxio burning software, PowerDVD, and a McAfee demo...and little else (possibly one or two desktop shortcuts). About the only thing I'd consider to be Dell bloatware anymore is the McAfee trial, but whether it's a good idea to bundle the first two months of virus protection instead of baking a year subscription into the cost (or loading with Avast, AVG, etc.) is a whole different topic entirely. But even in their consumer line, Dell provides mostly-untouched, pre-activated Win7 discs and driver discs in the box.
The real king of bloatware these days is HP, who will ship laptops with 40GB of used space, for a machine whose msconfig list requires a scroll bar out of the box. It takes less time to find an untouched OEM copy of Win7 that takes HP keys on $TORRENT_TRACKER, download it, burn it, and install it, then install the drivers manually, than it does to decrapify the damn things. HP doesn't ship recovery media anymore, they have recovery partitions, that require the end user to burn discs themselves (a process that can take over three hours) that slipstream all the bloatware into the disc. God help you if you actually have to use them, since THAT process can take hours as well. Their printer driver discs require half a gig, and the 'custom' install basically lets you choose whether you get a desktop icon for the registration program or not, instead of actually giving you the choice of leaving half the crap on the disc. Curiously enough, Epson and Canon can fit their drivers into 10MBytes, and even HP themselves can make a 15MB driver stack - IF your printer speaks PCL or PostScript. If not, there's the obligatory msconfig scrub for the three services and five executables that add themselves to startup for a PRINTER. ugh. The sad part is...I generally like their laptops.
This.
Denon really has two mostly-distinct arms. Their home theater side is, well, a home theater gear company, for which I am unable to speak for one way or the other. Their professional audio side though, I *can* say is "real DJ gear". In my circle of DJ friends, gear ultimately has one test: what happens when you throw it down a flight of stairs. Crown and QSC amps fit the bill (as do some of the older carver amps). American Audio and Gemini don't. Technics 1200 turntables fit the bill, most Stanton and Numark don't (though my TTXs are damn close). Denon mixers, CD decks, and digital controllers are generally on par with Rane and Pioneer in the stairwell test, and lots of jocks I know who have Denon decks have had them for years without ever having an issue. The HD-2500 unit I've got in my rack is among the most innovative digital controllers I've ever used; it's the poster child for the phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to"; it was one of the few that had an internal hard disk. Their 3700 decks are pretty well regarded for several innovative features along with the fact that they, for the most part, pass the stairwell test.
I don't work for Denon, but decrying their DJ gear for the snake oil tactics of their home theater department is unwarranted.