My solution is simple: I refuse to touch Windows machines. The help choices I offer are:
1) I'll install Linux on it for you
2) I'll help you choose an appropriate Mac for your needs
No takers on either so far, and I don't often get bothered.
I went a little more in depth with my wife's cousin's wife, whose kids had installed Limewire and who knows what else on it and whose trial version of Norton had come with the computer and had expired over a year prior: I can't fix this, it's Windows and would be a bit out of my depth trying to fix it. If it were a Mac or a Linux machine I could, but if it were that, you probably wouldn't have this problem in the first place. You only have the manufacturer'l "Damn the data and re-image the disk" recovery CD, which makes it even harder.
At that point, I advised her to just write off that desktop (which she was using for her work as a real estate agent) and get a good laptop and never allow her children to touch it. I also offered to set up a second wireless network in their house that her computer and her kids' malware-infested computers never shared the same network. That was nearly a year ago, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't acted on any of that advice.
One of the morals of the story here is that if you are buying or selling a house, it couldn't hurt to ask prospective agents what they do to protect any data you give them. If they are utterly clueless about computers (as nearly all agents are), you'll find out soon enough.
Now, if Google were to lose a bunch of accounts and Nigeria were to simultaneously clean up its spam problem, I'd be less likely to call coincidence:p
Google alone among the major free email providers does not include x-orginating-ip info (unless you send through gmail over smtp, in which case they do, for some reason), which makes filtering more expensive for people who see no reason to accept any email from 41/8 or other netblocks allocated to Africa. Gmail: a 419ers best friend.
Isn't it ironic that "The Voice of Free Speech" would tell another group that if they don't shut up, they will have their free speech DDOSed off the face of the earth?
C'mon, Anonymous, I don't like the tactics of the Westboro people any better than you do, but you either believe in free speech or you don't. If you don't, and you want to go ahead and DDOS them, fine, but let's be consistent.
Of course, DDOSing them won't stop them from shoving up at funerals and inflicting pain on innocent, grieving families. It might make you feel like you're Doing Something, but you won't be, really.
Or at least you. As unqualified for the presidency as she may be, I'm at least smart enough to recognize that she almost certainly do worse than the current holder of that office, who is even less qualified and who appears to be on track to beat out Jimmy Carter as the least competent holder of that office during my lifetime (not that Jimmy Carter is not a highly competent individual in other areas; he just wasn't competent as POTUS).
Would it be impolite to point out that she has accomplished far more in life than you or I have, or probably ever will? If Sarah Palin is dumb, therefore, there's a significantly greater than zero chance that you and I are even dumber.
This maybe isn't a helpful reply, but among the various arguments on whether ghosts even exist or not and methods to try and prove or disprove it, I have to note that it might be really hard to prove with measurements or scientific method because AFAIK no one really knows how to build instruments that measure ghosts? Temperature drop? Could be subjective. It's not unusual to feel a chill even when no one around you does. Is it a ghost? Probably not. Magnetic disturbance? We know that many man-made and naturally occurring things produce EM disturbances. We don't know if ghosts do or not, so the presence of an EM disturbance is only proof of an EM disturbance.
Sometimes something that seems really "ghostly" happens and it's really hard to find any other answer. Once, a friend and I were returning at night from a pistol range to my house, which I'd bought not long before. I unlocked the front door and started to open it only to feel it pulled inward hard enough to almost wrench it from my hand. I pulled back hard, shut the door, and stepped back. My friend said "What happened?!" and we both took our pistols from our cases and loaded them as I explained. When ready, my friend slowly opened the door a little (no pull this time) as I reached in to flip the light switch, both of us with rounds in the pipe). I turned on the light and stepped back. My friend gave the door a push to open it fully. I went in first. Back door was closed. No windows I could see were open.
We turned on every light, searched the whole house, even the attic. No windows were unlocked, the back door was locked and hadn't been opened (it was impossible to cross that tile floor without leaving footprints when coming from outside). All locks were new, double-cylinder deadbolts and security screen doors front and rear. It was pretty spooky.
Three months later I found the explanation when I discovered that whoever installed the furnace had, instead of making a proper cold air return, simply cut a whole in the floor beneath the furnace and it was sucking in air from beneath the house. I then duplicated the effect and concluded the first time I opened the door the furnace had been on, but that it had stopped by the time my friend opened it the second time. No ghost. Just a hard to discover non-paranormal explanation.
OTOH, about 15 years ago, someone I knew pretty well told me she had been visited by the spirit of a family member of ours who had recently died. I didn't believe it, and thought that it was either caused by grief, or that she was possibly even making it up (I had reason to believe she might do that). Still, she knew something that I knew that she would have had no way of knowing, and she claimed the spirit of our family member gave it to her. I couldn't explain that, but did not at all believe her story, dismissing it as probable delusion and possible fabrication.
Five or six years later, I was visited by the same deceased family member, not once, but twice, and she actually reached out her hand and touched me on the shoulder. Not just the motion, I could feel the pressure of her hand. It wasn't the least bit scary, so I rather hesitate to call this a ghost encounter. It was warm and comfortable, easy and familiar. It never happened again after those two closely spaced events, nor has anyone else on either side of the family - including the other person who saw her - ever reported another encounter.
I had to go and eat some crow with my relative by telling her that I not only believed her and that it had happened to me, too. She was very gracious about the whole thing, although at first she wondered if I was telling the truth myself, until I described the encounters. Family members either believe these stories or don't, depending on what they already think about the possibility of such a thing happening. Some changed their minds based on the fact that I said it happened to me. They didn't believe the other person, and had good reason not to, as did I. Turns out she was telling the truth that time, though.
At least this sounds more fun than just trying for the cigarette butts and gum in the bottom of the urinal.
I realize that if you live in the US and are young, you may not even know about this, but in my youth it was hard to find a urinal that didn't have one or both of those things floating in it. When I lived in Japan, it was pretty common, too. Don't even get me started on the hideousness of the Japanese-style toilets in Shinjuku Station:p
It actually mentions both kinds - serious fraud, such as fraudulently taking disability leave, and one-off sick days to attend a wedding. As far as pursuing the one-offs, I bet that only happens in cases where they want to get rid of somebody and need an excuse. Having been in jobs where I had a lazy, worthless, co-worker or three dragging the entire department down with an ineffectual manager doing nothing until it got so blatant he had no choice but to fire them, it doesn't really bother me if they are using investigators to help get rid of people who they need to get rid of.
That said, I think a better way to handle one-offs is to do it the way my employer does it: you get 20 days of paid time off per year to start (more with seniority). What you use them for is your business. There is no differentiation between sick and vacation time. If you have a great year, you can spend a lot of time on vacation. Or if you have a really bad year, you have 20 days of sick time. Or you can carry it over, until you hit the accrual limit (240 hours IIRC).
Yes, we are. Comcast is being compensated by me to provide me with last-mile bandwidth. If I use more than whatever the cap is, then I have to compensate them some more. I never get near that amount, though.
What do I expect from Comcast in return? A big, fast, dumb, *neutral* pipe that carries any traffic I want. If they are going to prioritize some classes of traffic (VoIP, for instance), that may be OK so long as they prioritize everyone's VoIP equally. However, I'd rather have a last-mile pipe so big that QoS is superfluous.
If they need to do QoS, that should be across their core or distribution layers, and again, prioritized traffic should be neutral. Charging L3 extra for what I'm already paying Comcast to do is B.S.
Yeah, I love that spelling, too; fortunately, the actual pronunciation sounds something like "dowm" (rhymes with "down"). Bich (a name) doesn't sound like what you might expect, either:-)
To that I would like to add that I used to occasionally see trails from real rocket launches in the Vandenberg AFB area when I was a kid, and they were far more colorful than an aircraft contrail. I don't know why that was, but there was no mistaking them for something from an aircraft.
Uh, you realize that the US was not always a two-party system with its ensuing lack of choice; there was no intent for such a thing when the country was started, nor is there anything in the Constitution that "sets up" a two-party system. Indeed, Washington himself warned against the dangers of having political parties at all.
You're right, change takes time. If we start out now with a new party dedicate to the principles of liberty and fiscal conservatism, 50 years from now that party may control enough seats to at least reign in the GOP and the Democrats.
Yeah, I worked for an ML competitor a few years ago, and had the same sort of problem with SORBS from time to time (same business/network model as ML, making these incidents somewhat inevitable; outbound spam filtering is WAY harder than inbound filtering). I, too, am sure that's what happened.
I still work in email security, but not for the ML competitor mentioned above.
That's too absolute. There are certainly reliable RBLs operated by individuals. It is also certainly the case that any mail admin can, at any time, cease using an RBL that has become unreliable.
There are also reputation-based blocklists (don't know if any are free or not) that both remove the possibility of human capriciousness from the equation and allow more finely-grained judgments. A traditional RBL is a binary decision: accept or block. With a reputation-based RBL, you can say "OK, I will not accept any mail from a host with a reputation less than X, I will quarantine mail from a host with a reputation between X and Y, and I will deliver mail from a host with a reputation greater than Y" (for example; this is obviously simplistic and not meant as a real-world config except for the part about rejecting at X).
Indeed, without the use of RBLs, it would be intolerably costly to do content filtering on all messages, even for the fastest filtering systems. Blocking based on IP is an indispensable tool.
Full disclosure: I work for an email security vendor (but not MessageLabs).
Absolutely. I'm a Tea Partier, more or less, but one who believes we are wasting our time with the GOP. It can't be salvaged. We're better off making a fresh start with a new party and forming alliances with other fiscally conservative individuals or groups. I don't mind if they are socially liberal or whatever; sound economic policy and maximum liberty are what matter.
Depends on what you consider to be evidence, I guess. Accounts written by people who knew him, or written down by people who were told them by people who knew him are pretty much the only evidence we have of various other famous historical figures. Alexander the Great, for instance. We have no forensic evidence that he was real, just written records.
Keep in mind that much of the New Testament was written during the lifetime of the Apostles, and much of it was written *by* the Apostles. That is, people who knew Jesus during his earthly ministry and who walked with him (Paul only became an Apostle after the Resurrection, but it is clear from his writings that he did not doubt the existence of Christ as a single person).
Funny that you say that objectively speaking, He did not exist. If you want to claim objective truth, you need evidence of your own, of which you have none. You can believe that the evidence for the opposing point of view is not up to your standards of evidence and that's fine, but you can't stand there and say you know the objective truth when all you have is your opinion, without a shred of evidence to support it.
There's a pretty good argument for "Jesus wants us all to love each other." He made it Himself, them commenting on the two greatest commandments: "Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul, and love your neighbor as yourself."
Now, He isn't talking about some kind of wussie 1970s self-help book "I'm OK, you're OK" meaning of love. He holds people to high moral standards and expects us to do likewise (starting with ourselves, of course; mote/log), but expects us to act with compassion and genuine love and concern toward others. Those are tough marching orders, especially when some of those others want you dead or at least prevented from the free and open practice and expression of your faith. But He never said following in His footsteps would be easy. The opposite, in fact.
There's a reason why only fairly small operations do whitebox builds: it scales very poorly. Consider:
-How long would it take you to build 1000 PCs? Too long? OK, how long would it take your entire IT staff, if they did nothing else for 40 hours a week? Still pretty long, I bet. -Maintenance: when a Dell has a hardware failure under warranty, it's on Dell to repair or replace it. When your whitebox fails, it's on you. The individual part is warranted by a vendor, sure, but replacing the part from inventory and following up with the vendor for cash or a replacement part for your inventory is up to you.
-Speaking of inventory, you'll want to buy a stock of spare parts for those whitebox machines up front. Getting those parts a year or 18 months later can be tough and may cost more. Sometimes, getting the same part even 6 months later isn't easy. When you buy from a big vendor, the vendor is the one who has to worry about maintaining the parts inventory to repair/replace those machines under warranty. I work for a big company with a mix of PC and Mac hardware. PC hardware has limited IT department maintenance support and vendor repair support. *All* Mac hardware support is outsourced to Apple. It just takes too much staff to do that all in-house.
-Inventory database - you'll need to maintain a DB of each of those machines and what is inside them so you know what parts to put in when they fail. With a large vendor, your vendor does that by serial number.
-Refresh. Where I work, we have a three-year refresh cycle. When my machine is three years old, I pick a new one from the available choices and procurement does the rest. If you go whitebox, you have to build each refresh machine as they come due (if government shops have regular refresh?).
All this stuff costs money that is not apparent upfront. Running a support organization. Order fulfillment. Parts inventory. Tracking. This is most of what makes those large-vendor machines cost more for the performance you get; much more so than the vendor's margin, which is fairly thin on a business desktop machine. Chances are you currently have neither the staff nor the budget for that now. If you do, you're overstaffed:p
I build my own machines for personal use, but that doesn't scale much further. Even in a small business, I'm not sure I'd do it.
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My solution is simple: I refuse to touch Windows machines. The help choices I offer are:
1) I'll install Linux on it for you
2) I'll help you choose an appropriate Mac for your needs
No takers on either so far, and I don't often get bothered.
I went a little more in depth with my wife's cousin's wife, whose kids had installed Limewire and who knows what else on it and whose trial version of Norton had come with the computer and had expired over a year prior: I can't fix this, it's Windows and would be a bit out of my depth trying to fix it. If it were a Mac or a Linux machine I could, but if it were that, you probably wouldn't have this problem in the first place. You only have the manufacturer'l "Damn the data and re-image the disk" recovery CD, which makes it even harder.
At that point, I advised her to just write off that desktop (which she was using for her work as a real estate agent) and get a good laptop and never allow her children to touch it. I also offered to set up a second wireless network in their house that her computer and her kids' malware-infested computers never shared the same network. That was nearly a year ago, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't acted on any of that advice.
One of the morals of the story here is that if you are buying or selling a house, it couldn't hurt to ask prospective agents what they do to protect any data you give them. If they are utterly clueless about computers (as nearly all agents are), you'll find out soon enough.
Now, if Google were to lose a bunch of accounts and Nigeria were to simultaneously clean up its spam problem, I'd be less likely to call coincidence :p
Google alone among the major free email providers does not include x-orginating-ip info (unless you send through gmail over smtp, in which case they do, for some reason), which makes filtering more expensive for people who see no reason to accept any email from 41/8 or other netblocks allocated to Africa. Gmail: a 419ers best friend.
Thanks a lot, Google.
No, I think he needs to get *off* whatever meds he's on :p
Isn't it ironic that "The Voice of Free Speech" would tell another group that if they don't shut up, they will have their free speech DDOSed off the face of the earth?
C'mon, Anonymous, I don't like the tactics of the Westboro people any better than you do, but you either believe in free speech or you don't. If you don't, and you want to go ahead and DDOS them, fine, but let's be consistent.
Of course, DDOSing them won't stop them from shoving up at funerals and inflicting pain on innocent, grieving families. It might make you feel like you're Doing Something, but you won't be, really.
Or at least you. As unqualified for the presidency as she may be, I'm at least smart enough to recognize that she almost certainly do worse than the current holder of that office, who is even less qualified and who appears to be on track to beat out Jimmy Carter as the least competent holder of that office during my lifetime (not that Jimmy Carter is not a highly competent individual in other areas; he just wasn't competent as POTUS).
Would it be impolite to point out that she has accomplished far more in life than you or I have, or probably ever will? If Sarah Palin is dumb, therefore, there's a significantly greater than zero chance that you and I are even dumber.
This maybe isn't a helpful reply, but among the various arguments on whether ghosts even exist or not and methods to try and prove or disprove it, I have to note that it might be really hard to prove with measurements or scientific method because AFAIK no one really knows how to build instruments that measure ghosts? Temperature drop? Could be subjective. It's not unusual to feel a chill even when no one around you does. Is it a ghost? Probably not. Magnetic disturbance? We know that many man-made and naturally occurring things produce EM disturbances. We don't know if ghosts do or not, so the presence of an EM disturbance is only proof of an EM disturbance.
Sometimes something that seems really "ghostly" happens and it's really hard to find any other answer. Once, a friend and I were returning at night from a pistol range to my house, which I'd bought not long before. I unlocked the front door and started to open it only to feel it pulled inward hard enough to almost wrench it from my hand. I pulled back hard, shut the door, and stepped back. My friend said "What happened?!" and we both took our pistols from our cases and loaded them as I explained. When ready, my friend slowly opened the door a little (no pull this time) as I reached in to flip the light switch, both of us with rounds in the pipe). I turned on the light and stepped back. My friend gave the door a push to open it fully. I went in first. Back door was closed. No windows I could see were open.
We turned on every light, searched the whole house, even the attic. No windows were unlocked, the back door was locked and hadn't been opened (it was impossible to cross that tile floor without leaving footprints when coming from outside). All locks were new, double-cylinder deadbolts and security screen doors front and rear. It was pretty spooky.
Three months later I found the explanation when I discovered that whoever installed the furnace had, instead of making a proper cold air return, simply cut a whole in the floor beneath the furnace and it was sucking in air from beneath the house. I then duplicated the effect and concluded the first time I opened the door the furnace had been on, but that it had stopped by the time my friend opened it the second time. No ghost. Just a hard to discover non-paranormal explanation.
OTOH, about 15 years ago, someone I knew pretty well told me she had been visited by the spirit of a family member of ours who had recently died. I didn't believe it, and thought that it was either caused by grief, or that she was possibly even making it up (I had reason to believe she might do that). Still, she knew something that I knew that she would have had no way of knowing, and she claimed the spirit of our family member gave it to her. I couldn't explain that, but did not at all believe her story, dismissing it as probable delusion and possible fabrication.
Five or six years later, I was visited by the same deceased family member, not once, but twice, and she actually reached out her hand and touched me on the shoulder. Not just the motion, I could feel the pressure of her hand. It wasn't the least bit scary, so I rather hesitate to call this a ghost encounter. It was warm and comfortable, easy and familiar. It never happened again after those two closely spaced events, nor has anyone else on either side of the family - including the other person who saw her - ever reported another encounter.
I had to go and eat some crow with my relative by telling her that I not only believed her and that it had happened to me, too. She was very gracious about the whole thing, although at first she wondered if I was telling the truth myself, until I described the encounters. Family members either believe these stories or don't, depending on what they already think about the possibility of such a thing happening. Some changed their minds based on the fact that I said it happened to me. They didn't believe the other person, and had good reason not to, as did I. Turns out she was telling the truth that time, though.
At least this sounds more fun than just trying for the cigarette butts and gum in the bottom of the urinal.
I realize that if you live in the US and are young, you may not even know about this, but in my youth it was hard to find a urinal that didn't have one or both of those things floating in it. When I lived in Japan, it was pretty common, too. Don't even get me started on the hideousness of the Japanese-style toilets in Shinjuku Station :p
It actually mentions both kinds - serious fraud, such as fraudulently taking disability leave, and one-off sick days to attend a wedding. As far as pursuing the one-offs, I bet that only happens in cases where they want to get rid of somebody and need an excuse. Having been in jobs where I had a lazy, worthless, co-worker or three dragging the entire department down with an ineffectual manager doing nothing until it got so blatant he had no choice but to fire them, it doesn't really bother me if they are using investigators to help get rid of people who they need to get rid of.
That said, I think a better way to handle one-offs is to do it the way my employer does it: you get 20 days of paid time off per year to start (more with seniority). What you use them for is your business. There is no differentiation between sick and vacation time. If you have a great year, you can spend a lot of time on vacation. Or if you have a really bad year, you have 20 days of sick time. Or you can carry it over, until you hit the accrual limit (240 hours IIRC).
Yes, we are. Comcast is being compensated by me to provide me with last-mile bandwidth. If I use more than whatever the cap is, then I have to compensate them some more. I never get near that amount, though.
What do I expect from Comcast in return? A big, fast, dumb, *neutral* pipe that carries any traffic I want. If they are going to prioritize some classes of traffic (VoIP, for instance), that may be OK so long as they prioritize everyone's VoIP equally. However, I'd rather have a last-mile pipe so big that QoS is superfluous.
If they need to do QoS, that should be across their core or distribution layers, and again, prioritized traffic should be neutral. Charging L3 extra for what I'm already paying Comcast to do is B.S.
OK, if you know Can Tho I'm more inclined to believe you :-)
Don't know the water in the delta, but if you drank water out of the Saigon River these days, *that* would be probably kill you :-)
I haven't been to VN in 5 years, but I'm sure the Saigon River is as nasty as ever :-(
Yeah, I love that spelling, too; fortunately, the actual pronunciation sounds something like "dowm" (rhymes with "down"). Bich (a name) doesn't sound like what you might expect, either :-)
Heck, if government could do *that* I might even be willing to believe it could do health insurance right.
I used to work on the coast near LAX and saw contrails like that often. Never made a video because it's just a contrail. Why would I?
You've obviously never seen a real rocket launch. Anyone who has could never mistake that contrail for a missile.
To that I would like to add that I used to occasionally see trails from real rocket launches in the Vandenberg AFB area when I was a kid, and they were far more colorful than an aircraft contrail. I don't know why that was, but there was no mistaking them for something from an aircraft.
Uh, you realize that the US was not always a two-party system with its ensuing lack of choice; there was no intent for such a thing when the country was started, nor is there anything in the Constitution that "sets up" a two-party system. Indeed, Washington himself warned against the dangers of having political parties at all.
You're right, change takes time. If we start out now with a new party dedicate to the principles of liberty and fiscal conservatism, 50 years from now that party may control enough seats to at least reign in the GOP and the Democrats.
Yeah, I worked for an ML competitor a few years ago, and had the same sort of problem with SORBS from time to time (same business/network model as ML, making these incidents somewhat inevitable; outbound spam filtering is WAY harder than inbound filtering). I, too, am sure that's what happened.
I still work in email security, but not for the ML competitor mentioned above.
That's too absolute. There are certainly reliable RBLs operated by individuals. It is also certainly the case that any mail admin can, at any time, cease using an RBL that has become unreliable.
There are also reputation-based blocklists (don't know if any are free or not) that both remove the possibility of human capriciousness from the equation and allow more finely-grained judgments. A traditional RBL is a binary decision: accept or block. With a reputation-based RBL, you can say "OK, I will not accept any mail from a host with a reputation less than X, I will quarantine mail from a host with a reputation between X and Y, and I will deliver mail from a host with a reputation greater than Y" (for example; this is obviously simplistic and not meant as a real-world config except for the part about rejecting at X).
Indeed, without the use of RBLs, it would be intolerably costly to do content filtering on all messages, even for the fastest filtering systems. Blocking based on IP is an indispensable tool.
Full disclosure: I work for an email security vendor (but not MessageLabs).
Absolutely. I'm a Tea Partier, more or less, but one who believes we are wasting our time with the GOP. It can't be salvaged. We're better off making a fresh start with a new party and forming alliances with other fiscally conservative individuals or groups. I don't mind if they are socially liberal or whatever; sound economic policy and maximum liberty are what matter.
My wife is a native VNese speaker and her native language artifacts in English are nothing like mekongdelta's, so yeah, I think it's rather suspect.
Depends on what you consider to be evidence, I guess. Accounts written by people who knew him, or written down by people who were told them by people who knew him are pretty much the only evidence we have of various other famous historical figures. Alexander the Great, for instance. We have no forensic evidence that he was real, just written records.
Keep in mind that much of the New Testament was written during the lifetime of the Apostles, and much of it was written *by* the Apostles. That is, people who knew Jesus during his earthly ministry and who walked with him (Paul only became an Apostle after the Resurrection, but it is clear from his writings that he did not doubt the existence of Christ as a single person).
Funny that you say that objectively speaking, He did not exist. If you want to claim objective truth, you need evidence of your own, of which you have none. You can believe that the evidence for the opposing point of view is not up to your standards of evidence and that's fine, but you can't stand there and say you know the objective truth when all you have is your opinion, without a shred of evidence to support it.
There's a pretty good argument for "Jesus wants us all to love each other." He made it Himself, them commenting on the two greatest commandments: "Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul, and love your neighbor as yourself."
Now, He isn't talking about some kind of wussie 1970s self-help book "I'm OK, you're OK" meaning of love. He holds people to high moral standards and expects us to do likewise (starting with ourselves, of course; mote/log), but expects us to act with compassion and genuine love and concern toward others. Those are tough marching orders, especially when some of those others want you dead or at least prevented from the free and open practice and expression of your faith. But He never said following in His footsteps would be easy. The opposite, in fact.
Could be worse. I parsed "Virginia network" as "Vagina network" the first time :p
There's a reason why only fairly small operations do whitebox builds: it scales very poorly. Consider:
-How long would it take you to build 1000 PCs? Too long? OK, how long would it take your entire IT staff, if they did nothing else for 40 hours a week? Still pretty long, I bet.
-Maintenance: when a Dell has a hardware failure under warranty, it's on Dell to repair or replace it. When your whitebox fails, it's on you. The individual part is warranted by a vendor, sure, but replacing the part from inventory and following up with the vendor for cash or a replacement part for your inventory is up to you.
-Speaking of inventory, you'll want to buy a stock of spare parts for those whitebox machines up front. Getting those parts a year or 18 months later can be tough and may cost more. Sometimes, getting the same part even 6 months later isn't easy. When you buy from a big vendor, the vendor is the one who has to worry about maintaining the parts inventory to repair/replace those machines under warranty. I work for a big company with a mix of PC and Mac hardware. PC hardware has limited IT department maintenance support and vendor repair support. *All* Mac hardware support is outsourced to Apple. It just takes too much staff to do that all in-house.
-Inventory database - you'll need to maintain a DB of each of those machines and what is inside them so you know what parts to put in when they fail. With a large vendor, your vendor does that by serial number.
-Refresh. Where I work, we have a three-year refresh cycle. When my machine is three years old, I pick a new one from the available choices and procurement does the rest. If you go whitebox, you have to build each refresh machine as they come due (if government shops have regular refresh?).
All this stuff costs money that is not apparent upfront. Running a support organization. Order fulfillment. Parts inventory. Tracking. This is most of what makes those large-vendor machines cost more for the performance you get; much more so than the vendor's margin, which is fairly thin on a business desktop machine. Chances are you currently have neither the staff nor the budget for that now. If you do, you're overstaffed :p
I build my own machines for personal use, but that doesn't scale much further. Even in a small business, I'm not sure I'd do it.