In so-called 'exempt' positions, there's not a time-card, you work as long as it takes to get the job done. It is generally frowned upon to come in after 9, leave before 5, and take too long for lunch. Most places I have been see people coming in around 8-8:30 and leaving generally around 5. In the higher-up positions, they also don't count vacation days, you're expected to take about 2 weeks a year, but if you've got your department running like a well-oiled clock, then taking three three week vacations a year is also possible.
I've seen 'exempt' get out of control, both ways - one VP started coming in at 11 and leaving at 3, that lead to time-sheets all around for a couple of years. It's more common to slide in the other direction, I've seen guys come in at 7am, leave at 6pm - eat, tuck their kids into bed, then come back to work for another couple of hours because they had "so much to do." In the bigger picture, I've found that after about 50 hours a week, I'm fried - I can be present and look like I'm working, but the quality of my work really drops off - if I'm programming, it actually becomes negative productivity at some point.
In theory, the exempt status workaholics are bucking for promotion, but in practice it almost never works out that way.
I was just going by my experience at a mid-sized (500 employee) med device company... for the engineering staff, lunch was eaten out about 80% of the time - this was a social networking thing, bad for the health, but good for exchanging political information. Lunch started when you walked out the door and ended when you walked back in, it usually ran just under an hour, but maybe one day a week would run closer to 90 minutes. If that staff were given a $3.5K pay raise, it really wouldn't change anything.
And, no, I've never had a final rent demand, but I did live on my own for a bit over 2 years in grad school, paying my own rent and expenses on $14K per year income. During those years, any kind of free food was actively sought and rabidly consumed by myself and my similarly cash strapped friends. The Mexican restaurants likely lost net money on us (purchase one $2 margarita, consume a pound of free chips, dips, and other finger foods), but we did spend a couple of hours there every Friday, I think we were more regularly present than the wait staff.
What I've found over the years is that focusing on doing a job well is what nets the greatest long-term benefits. Micromanaging expenses, benefits, comparing competitive offers, moonlighting, etc. are all distractions from doing a primary job as best you can.
If you are in a job that you can do well, and it's a job worth doing, and they're paying you enough to meet your (necessary) expenses, and the organization recognizes and rewards you for a job well done, then all is good with the world. That's a lot of ifs, and a couple of them are very hard to get in your control, and if those out of your control are in the wrong state - it's probably time to polish and circulate the resume.
Point of the ramble is simply that: if you're in a good spot, yes, having somebody take care of things like getting a decent lunch once in awhile and getting basic medical care on-site are worth more to the company (as a whole) than they cost. If you're in a bad spot, an extra $5K per year isn't going to change jack, it's still a bad spot, and bad spots aren't likely to give you the perks or the cash, anyway.
The last time I was booted from a service for over-use (which was getting news feeds via dialup), the service (Concentric Networks) sucked so badly that it was a blessing to be forced to find an alternative. Their quality of service (as observed by a colleague who had signed up for a year subscription and didn't get booted) only continued to decline after they kicked me off - to the point that even text only e-mail was un-useably slow.
Hopefully AT&T won't get this hosed up, but I see this notice as a sign that they're already having trouble.
They may have indexed 120 billion pages, but as of now, they haven't indexed the _right_ 120 billion pages.
I once read that Google only indexes a small percentage (like, maybe 5%) of the "visible" web, part of what makes them useful is they hit the interesting 5%. Indexing 15% of the web, but hitting a bunch of uninteresting garbage, isn't very useful.
To paraphrase the parent and add my own perspective: the perks aren't the problem if the people are productive.
Lunch ordered in costs maybe $7 to $15 a head, and unless your employees would be bringing brown bags and eating them at their desk, saves at least 30 minutes of travel and waiting time to and from getting lunch. So, call cost of lunch $11, in return for 30 minutes of productivity - how many of your employees earn less than $22 an hour? And, those that do earn less than $22 an hour probably really appreciate the free lunch, possibly enough that they won't be jumping ship to a company down the street that might pay them $2 an hour more.... Most Google'ers are notoriously underpaid on a cash basis.
Free gym membership - $30 per month - this one is a little more esoteric, and I can see how working out actually takes time away from working on other things, but if the gym is conveniently located to work, it discourages people from getting a gym membership near their home, makes their life more work-centric, and possibly improves their cardio-vascular health - which actually does have a direct positive effect on cerebral productivity.... Similarly for the doctor on-site one day a week, convenient, health benefiting, time saving, and the cost is near trivial when you compare it to the benefits...
Now, this is all moot if your employees simply show up to take advantage of the benefits and don't actually do anything productive otherwise... but, these are likely the same employees you find at perkless companies who spend their time surfing the web, making personal phone calls, and leaving their post to run errands 10 hours a week and more. (and posting lengthy responses on/. (oops!)).
I presently use my Foxconn motherboard with a Linux only PC.
If Foxconn does not support Linux in the future, I will not be buying any Foxconn products in the future.
Dear Joe:
Thank you for taking the time to make us aware of the situation and also suggestions. Foxconn has no intention to reject Linux. As we all know that Linux is an open source system and there are various flavors available in the market, and that is why we could not perform the specific function tests on every version of Linux. However, we do have tested some Linux systems previously.
As for the Linux issue, our FAE team is working on this issue and hopefully it can be resolved soon. So if you have bought any retail Foxconn motherboards and got this issue please email us your system configuration and problem descriptions. We will be happy to look into it.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.
------
We do have tested? Not much point in getting technical with the tech support line, but hopefully if they get a few thousand pings on this the message will sink in.
Multi-platform targets with common code base. I build on X-Code / VisualC / Gnu command line, and whatever else comes around. Making Qt based code compile warning free in all environments takes about 1% additional effort, and shows up enough bugs to pay that effort back threefold.
E-mail is a given, sacrificing an hour of time for weekly face to face is also priceless, the formal meeting is usually done in 15 minutes or less, but the after-meeting sessions can run from 5 minutes to all afternoon, and that's where most of the problems are solved. We buy everyone lunch as an appeasement for calling the meeting (and also to get them to do a little work during lunch one day a week... nobody seems to mind the trade.)
We use SVN too, dedicated box in the closet, I think the hardware was destined for the scrap heap until we made a SVN/Trac server out of it, only cost is in electricity to run it - if that's a concern, think about running your server on something like the Asus EEE desktop PC when it comes out - with 3 guys, you don't need a killer server (and, looking back, the EEE desktop kicks a $10K 20 year old server around the block.) I have also successfully run Trac/SVN service on a MacMini (though I'd recommend booting it into Linux if I were to do that again).
We're looking at continuous integration, haven't done it yet with the excuse that the team is too small to take time out to set such a thing up.
True... the existing pair-programming studies are sparse and flawed. I made a direct effort at doing pair programming and I found the "conflicts with basic personality type" effect in a big way (3 out of 4 programmers in my shop) - funny thing was, the more resistant to pair work a programmer was, generally, the more useless they were as a programmer overall, even when left to work "alone." And, by resistant, I don't mean what they said during their hiring interview, it was better revealed in their attitude 2 months after hire.
I find "burst pair work" to be the best, where you do your own things for 90% of the time, and work together for 3-4 hours every week or so. Longer intervals tend to lead to more divergence, and too much time together tends to slow things down.
Having everything documented in a wiki is very helpful- even if only one person does 90% of the wiki work. I keep wishing that others would pick up and help maintain the docs, but even when they don't, my work is easier having the docs in place, rather than having to correct other people's work that wasn't done to spec (because the specs were weak), or worse still, attempting to evolve the spec to use the mish-mash of stuff that gets produced when the team members are all working to their own idea of the design direction.
There are times when it makes sense to rent - if you're catering to a fashion driven market where you're "in" one day and "out" the next, you want to be able to reach as much of the world as possible when you're "in" and not have to carry the infrastructure costs while you're "out." In this case, it might make sense to pay 10x the ownership costs while you're "in", since you'll still be making huge profits then, as long as you can drop your costs to 0 when you've got nothing going on. With these kinds of margins, there's a market for "Cloud Services."
On the other hand, if you do the same damn thing day in and day out, at a predictable pace, for decades at a time, you might as well own everything you need and maintain it all yourself - 'cause every dollar that goes to a service company could have been accomplished in-house for $0.50 or less.
It all depends on your style of work. The "Cloud" is for the exciting people... Personally, I don't have enough of a trust fund to be that exciting most of the time.
If it is such an invasion of privacy, the system should lock them out from being able to do it at all.... If the salesperson has the ability to do it, I would hope they would have sufficient training to relay the anonymous information of merit and filter things like name and address.... Better still would be a system that reports mean, median, max, and min actual bills for a particular configuration with all identities stripped, but they're apparently not capable of getting the billing software to perform the minimum required functions yet, so this is asking a bit much (though, you know that upper level marketing has this info, probably in near real-time.)
That math - simple as it is - is too complex to explain to the average viewer in a 30 second news byte... what the media will do is take those 159 matches and blow them into a sensational story about the possibility (not probability) that DNA nabbed the wrong guy. If they can sufficiently suppress this story, they will have a lot less jurors quoting the news byte as absolute proof that DNA evidence can't be trusted.
Still, they should do the test - I'm not worried if there are 50, 159, or 300 "matches" - I'd like to know if there are 1500+
The mistake is in the luxury - the 37" screen really is over the top in this situation, and it's all about appearances - increasing from 21" to 37" might have raised the total cost by less than 0.1%, but it just looks posh.
Oh, and calling it a "Comfort Capsule" doesn't help - first thing I thought of was a Japanese airport hotel room with Geisha included.
They used the "that would be an invasion of privacy" cop-out on that one (finding out from an existing account's bill.)
IMO, anybody who uses "that would be an invasion of privacy" as an excuse to hide something they don't want to reveal deserves a full legal investigation into what else they might be hiding.
Good to know - on the practical side, I've had an XP box, unpatched from Jan 2006 until about two weeks ago, sitting wide open behind the Linksys with about 95% uptime. Nothing found it.
It might help that I've gone to a non-standard sub-net, and I occasionally moved the internal IP around - it wasn't always at 192.168.0.100 - but otherwise, there wasn't any protection.
I guess you got hit by someone serious, most of the 5kr1pt k1dd135 aren't that sophisticated.
Has anyone given serious thought to the sociological context in which the first Methuselae will live?
i.e. if there are 300 year old humans in 2250, they were likely prominent and wealthy today, and would have had the attention of countless medical staff, etc., so, they are unlikely to remain anonymous or hidden. How are these few potential immortals going to integrate with the billions of mere mortals on the planet who are dying off in their low to mid 100's?
Google has done several things Windows only to start (GMail notifier was the only one I cared about...) It is commercial reality (develop for the majority market share platform to start), though I would have thought they might try to do something like this cross-platform from the start, like Google Earth.
Also speaking to the market majority, who has time to screw around creating 3D objects? I made a few lame objects in SL before I decided that the whole thing was a lot less fun than digging a trench in a mosquito infested swamp. SL charges real money for uploading textures - and this is the only thing that really mattered to me, being able to get my own pictures into "the world." It would be interesting to see a virtual world that isn't infested by persons attempting to get rich by spending vast amounts of time assembling 3D models with the world's lamest CAD software.
All in all, I just hope Google puts in the social engineering effort to make their virtual world accessible and enjoyable with a minimal learning curve.
Dark text on light backgrounds keeps your pupils more constricted, which makes it easier to focus. Also avoid very similar colors (like Navy blue vs Royal blue) which can cause some mental fatigue in differentiation, even if you don't think you're trying to differentiate.
I've noticed some of the new (cheap) LCDs have poor color rendering at certain angles - we have one that has rich colors from the side, but is washed out when looking straight on - just something else to consider. I think any LCD I have seen is preferable to all but the best CRTs available, in terms of eye-strain.
And I thought only the USA's AMA was turning doctors into either: a) arrogant pricks who know they are in short supply, or b) compassionate and overworked, and therefore less competent than they could be, again due to short supply.
Sorry to hear that it's the same down under. There's not a shortage of competent people who want to be doctors, there's a set of gatekeepers artificially keeping the supply down so that their members can aspire to demi-god status.
Obviously, you haven't lived under the Lone Star jurisdiction for any significant length of time (expecting better of Texas, ha!)
It really is a different country in a lot of ways - you can see the "independent spirit" in some of the laws and weird implementations of taxing districts, etc. But, more often, you can see the hand of graft / corruption / and the rich and powerful getting their way.
As you and others have pointed out, this is going to stifle the personal PC repair industry in Texas: fewer shops, shops that exist become more expensive, replace becomes more attractive than repair. It will likely create a boost in corporate in-house IT support staff, though most Texan businesses are already plenty paranoid about letting outsiders have any access to their data.
The way data storage is going (flash), this sort of law will make easily removable primary drives all the more popular - and that's not a bad thing.
First, I did my shopping in the (rapidly devaluing) US dollar a bit over a year ago when the quad core chips first came out... I also looked for pre-assembled systems from a vendor with at least 5 years in business and a decent reputation. Your shopping cart is interesting, but appears to come from all different vendors and I'm not sure if it includes shipping? Also, your CPUs are at 2.5GHz instead of 2.8, etc. etc. Apples to apples please;-)
I like QNAP - have had good experience with their TS-109. On first blush, they look expensive, but when I factored in electric power costs, they started getting cost competitive (with a generic linux PC) within a year of continuous use.
I also like the (lack of) noise factor. They make a TS-409 that will do RAID5.
I change my own, I know how. I haven't had anything mysteriously break after one of my oil changes, I have had many things go wrong that shouldn't after "professional" servicing, including at dealerships. Many could be traced to nuts/bolts that weren't tightened to spec (or at all), and I've seen outright sabotage on occasion.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
Slashdot Mirror
In so-called 'exempt' positions, there's not a time-card, you work as long as it takes to get the job done. It is generally frowned upon to come in after 9, leave before 5, and take too long for lunch. Most places I have been see people coming in around 8-8:30 and leaving generally around 5. In the higher-up positions, they also don't count vacation days, you're expected to take about 2 weeks a year, but if you've got your department running like a well-oiled clock, then taking three three week vacations a year is also possible.
I've seen 'exempt' get out of control, both ways - one VP started coming in at 11 and leaving at 3, that lead to time-sheets all around for a couple of years. It's more common to slide in the other direction, I've seen guys come in at 7am, leave at 6pm - eat, tuck their kids into bed, then come back to work for another couple of hours because they had "so much to do." In the bigger picture, I've found that after about 50 hours a week, I'm fried - I can be present and look like I'm working, but the quality of my work really drops off - if I'm programming, it actually becomes negative productivity at some point.
In theory, the exempt status workaholics are bucking for promotion, but in practice it almost never works out that way.
I was just going by my experience at a mid-sized (500 employee) med device company... for the engineering staff, lunch was eaten out about 80% of the time - this was a social networking thing, bad for the health, but good for exchanging political information. Lunch started when you walked out the door and ended when you walked back in, it usually ran just under an hour, but maybe one day a week would run closer to 90 minutes. If that staff were given a $3.5K pay raise, it really wouldn't change anything.
And, no, I've never had a final rent demand, but I did live on my own for a bit over 2 years in grad school, paying my own rent and expenses on $14K per year income. During those years, any kind of free food was actively sought and rabidly consumed by myself and my similarly cash strapped friends. The Mexican restaurants likely lost net money on us (purchase one $2 margarita, consume a pound of free chips, dips, and other finger foods), but we did spend a couple of hours there every Friday, I think we were more regularly present than the wait staff.
What I've found over the years is that focusing on doing a job well is what nets the greatest long-term benefits. Micromanaging expenses, benefits, comparing competitive offers, moonlighting, etc. are all distractions from doing a primary job as best you can.
If you are in a job that you can do well, and it's a job worth doing, and they're paying you enough to meet your (necessary) expenses, and the organization recognizes and rewards you for a job well done, then all is good with the world. That's a lot of ifs, and a couple of them are very hard to get in your control, and if those out of your control are in the wrong state - it's probably time to polish and circulate the resume.
Point of the ramble is simply that: if you're in a good spot, yes, having somebody take care of things like getting a decent lunch once in awhile and getting basic medical care on-site are worth more to the company (as a whole) than they cost. If you're in a bad spot, an extra $5K per year isn't going to change jack, it's still a bad spot, and bad spots aren't likely to give you the perks or the cash, anyway.
Not if you want an iPhone...
The last time I was booted from a service for over-use (which was getting news feeds via dialup), the service (Concentric Networks) sucked so badly that it was a blessing to be forced to find an alternative. Their quality of service (as observed by a colleague who had signed up for a year subscription and didn't get booted) only continued to decline after they kicked me off - to the point that even text only e-mail was un-useably slow.
Hopefully AT&T won't get this hosed up, but I see this notice as a sign that they're already having trouble.
They may have indexed 120 billion pages, but as of now, they haven't indexed the _right_ 120 billion pages.
I once read that Google only indexes a small percentage (like, maybe 5%) of the "visible" web, part of what makes them useful is they hit the interesting 5%. Indexing 15% of the web, but hitting a bunch of uninteresting garbage, isn't very useful.
To paraphrase the parent and add my own perspective: the perks aren't the problem if the people are productive.
Lunch ordered in costs maybe $7 to $15 a head, and unless your employees would be bringing brown bags and eating them at their desk, saves at least 30 minutes of travel and waiting time to and from getting lunch. So, call cost of lunch $11, in return for 30 minutes of productivity - how many of your employees earn less than $22 an hour? And, those that do earn less than $22 an hour probably really appreciate the free lunch, possibly enough that they won't be jumping ship to a company down the street that might pay them $2 an hour more.... Most Google'ers are notoriously underpaid on a cash basis.
Free gym membership - $30 per month - this one is a little more esoteric, and I can see how working out actually takes time away from working on other things, but if the gym is conveniently located to work, it discourages people from getting a gym membership near their home, makes their life more work-centric, and possibly improves their cardio-vascular health - which actually does have a direct positive effect on cerebral productivity.... Similarly for the doctor on-site one day a week, convenient, health benefiting, time saving, and the cost is near trivial when you compare it to the benefits...
Now, this is all moot if your employees simply show up to take advantage of the benefits and don't actually do anything productive otherwise... but, these are likely the same employees you find at perkless companies who spend their time surfing the web, making personal phone calls, and leaving their post to run errands 10 hours a week and more. (and posting lengthy responses on /. (oops!)).
I presently use my Foxconn motherboard with a Linux only PC. If Foxconn does not support Linux in the future, I will not be buying any Foxconn products in the future.
Dear Joe: Thank you for taking the time to make us aware of the situation and also suggestions. Foxconn has no intention to reject Linux. As we all know that Linux is an open source system and there are various flavors available in the market, and that is why we could not perform the specific function tests on every version of Linux. However, we do have tested some Linux systems previously. As for the Linux issue, our FAE team is working on this issue and hopefully it can be resolved soon. So if you have bought any retail Foxconn motherboards and got this issue please email us your system configuration and problem descriptions. We will be happy to look into it. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.
------
We do have tested? Not much point in getting technical with the tech support line, but hopefully if they get a few thousand pings on this the message will sink in.
Echo the parent with the following variations:
True... the existing pair-programming studies are sparse and flawed. I made a direct effort at doing pair programming and I found the "conflicts with basic personality type" effect in a big way (3 out of 4 programmers in my shop) - funny thing was, the more resistant to pair work a programmer was, generally, the more useless they were as a programmer overall, even when left to work "alone." And, by resistant, I don't mean what they said during their hiring interview, it was better revealed in their attitude 2 months after hire.
I find "burst pair work" to be the best, where you do your own things for 90% of the time, and work together for 3-4 hours every week or so. Longer intervals tend to lead to more divergence, and too much time together tends to slow things down.
Having everything documented in a wiki is very helpful- even if only one person does 90% of the wiki work. I keep wishing that others would pick up and help maintain the docs, but even when they don't, my work is easier having the docs in place, rather than having to correct other people's work that wasn't done to spec (because the specs were weak), or worse still, attempting to evolve the spec to use the mish-mash of stuff that gets produced when the team members are all working to their own idea of the design direction.
There are times when it makes sense to rent - if you're catering to a fashion driven market where you're "in" one day and "out" the next, you want to be able to reach as much of the world as possible when you're "in" and not have to carry the infrastructure costs while you're "out." In this case, it might make sense to pay 10x the ownership costs while you're "in", since you'll still be making huge profits then, as long as you can drop your costs to 0 when you've got nothing going on. With these kinds of margins, there's a market for "Cloud Services."
On the other hand, if you do the same damn thing day in and day out, at a predictable pace, for decades at a time, you might as well own everything you need and maintain it all yourself - 'cause every dollar that goes to a service company could have been accomplished in-house for $0.50 or less.
It all depends on your style of work. The "Cloud" is for the exciting people... Personally, I don't have enough of a trust fund to be that exciting most of the time.
If it is such an invasion of privacy, the system should lock them out from being able to do it at all.... If the salesperson has the ability to do it, I would hope they would have sufficient training to relay the anonymous information of merit and filter things like name and address.... Better still would be a system that reports mean, median, max, and min actual bills for a particular configuration with all identities stripped, but they're apparently not capable of getting the billing software to perform the minimum required functions yet, so this is asking a bit much (though, you know that upper level marketing has this info, probably in near real-time.)
That math - simple as it is - is too complex to explain to the average viewer in a 30 second news byte... what the media will do is take those 159 matches and blow them into a sensational story about the possibility (not probability) that DNA nabbed the wrong guy. If they can sufficiently suppress this story, they will have a lot less jurors quoting the news byte as absolute proof that DNA evidence can't be trusted.
Still, they should do the test - I'm not worried if there are 50, 159, or 300 "matches" - I'd like to know if there are 1500+
The mistake is in the luxury - the 37" screen really is over the top in this situation, and it's all about appearances - increasing from 21" to 37" might have raised the total cost by less than 0.1%, but it just looks posh.
Oh, and calling it a "Comfort Capsule" doesn't help - first thing I thought of was a Japanese airport hotel room with Geisha included.
IMO, anybody who uses "that would be an invasion of privacy" as an excuse to hide something they don't want to reveal deserves a full legal investigation into what else they might be hiding.
Good to know - on the practical side, I've had an XP box, unpatched from Jan 2006 until about two weeks ago, sitting wide open behind the Linksys with about 95% uptime. Nothing found it.
It might help that I've gone to a non-standard sub-net, and I occasionally moved the internal IP around - it wasn't always at 192.168.0.100 - but otherwise, there wasn't any protection.
I guess you got hit by someone serious, most of the 5kr1pt k1dd135 aren't that sophisticated.
While the idea is half-baked, the astronauts won't be, especially in the coming solar activity maximum.
A hardware firewall (think: $40 Linksys router) is 100% effective at blocking the inbound threats during download of SP2.
Has anyone given serious thought to the sociological context in which the first Methuselae will live?
i.e. if there are 300 year old humans in 2250, they were likely prominent and wealthy today, and would have had the attention of countless medical staff, etc., so, they are unlikely to remain anonymous or hidden. How are these few potential immortals going to integrate with the billions of mere mortals on the planet who are dying off in their low to mid 100's?
Google has done several things Windows only to start (GMail notifier was the only one I cared about...) It is commercial reality (develop for the majority market share platform to start), though I would have thought they might try to do something like this cross-platform from the start, like Google Earth.
Also speaking to the market majority, who has time to screw around creating 3D objects? I made a few lame objects in SL before I decided that the whole thing was a lot less fun than digging a trench in a mosquito infested swamp. SL charges real money for uploading textures - and this is the only thing that really mattered to me, being able to get my own pictures into "the world." It would be interesting to see a virtual world that isn't infested by persons attempting to get rich by spending vast amounts of time assembling 3D models with the world's lamest CAD software.
All in all, I just hope Google puts in the social engineering effort to make their virtual world accessible and enjoyable with a minimal learning curve.
Dark text on light backgrounds keeps your pupils more constricted, which makes it easier to focus. Also avoid very similar colors (like Navy blue vs Royal blue) which can cause some mental fatigue in differentiation, even if you don't think you're trying to differentiate.
I've noticed some of the new (cheap) LCDs have poor color rendering at certain angles - we have one that has rich colors from the side, but is washed out when looking straight on - just something else to consider. I think any LCD I have seen is preferable to all but the best CRTs available, in terms of eye-strain.
And I thought only the USA's AMA was turning doctors into either: a) arrogant pricks who know they are in short supply, or b) compassionate and overworked, and therefore less competent than they could be, again due to short supply.
Sorry to hear that it's the same down under. There's not a shortage of competent people who want to be doctors, there's a set of gatekeepers artificially keeping the supply down so that their members can aspire to demi-god status.
Obviously, you haven't lived under the Lone Star jurisdiction for any significant length of time (expecting better of Texas, ha!)
It really is a different country in a lot of ways - you can see the "independent spirit" in some of the laws and weird implementations of taxing districts, etc. But, more often, you can see the hand of graft / corruption / and the rich and powerful getting their way.
As you and others have pointed out, this is going to stifle the personal PC repair industry in Texas: fewer shops, shops that exist become more expensive, replace becomes more attractive than repair. It will likely create a boost in corporate in-house IT support staff, though most Texan businesses are already plenty paranoid about letting outsiders have any access to their data.
The way data storage is going (flash), this sort of law will make easily removable primary drives all the more popular - and that's not a bad thing.
First, I did my shopping in the (rapidly devaluing) US dollar a bit over a year ago when the quad core chips first came out... I also looked for pre-assembled systems from a vendor with at least 5 years in business and a decent reputation. Your shopping cart is interesting, but appears to come from all different vendors and I'm not sure if it includes shipping? Also, your CPUs are at 2.5GHz instead of 2.8, etc. etc. Apples to apples please ;-)
I like QNAP - have had good experience with their TS-109. On first blush, they look expensive, but when I factored in electric power costs, they started getting cost competitive (with a generic linux PC) within a year of continuous use.
I also like the (lack of) noise factor. They make a TS-409 that will do RAID5.
I change my own, I know how. I haven't had anything mysteriously break after one of my oil changes, I have had many things go wrong that shouldn't after "professional" servicing, including at dealerships. Many could be traced to nuts/bolts that weren't tightened to spec (or at all), and I've seen outright sabotage on occasion.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.