And employees just shouldn't let them get away with it. I have NEVER signed an enforceable non-compete agreement without asking for something in return. I usually amend or demand my non-compete agreement (if I even get them) to have a clause that states that if enforced against me the company will pay out wages until the non-compete either expires or the enforcement is resolved.
Most companies (especially big ones) have that type of stuff outsourced to their lowest-level HR drone who says nothing about it (or doesn't understand your rights to amend contracts before signing) or even has it pre-signed from their part. I usually ask for a duplicate signed off by that department. If I am a contractor in service of another company, I usually make the excuse of already having signed contracts with that company (and usually they'll just have a clause about not taking any information with you when you leave)
Yes, I can do that and if somebody asks about it I will let them know to talk to my and their own lawyers. I had one really big oil company I worked for and I simply refused to sign the darn thing until I decided to quit. They also had clauses about copyrighting ALL my OWN programming work (I was contracting for them) I did while I was employed with them. HR came about every other week (or sent e-mails) that I should sign off on my 'package', never did.
you know, back when farmers where around, then it made sense to change it. Now it just messes up everything. First of all, all of a sudden it gets light an hour early, I wake up with the sun so at what used to be 8, it's now 7 so I have to do something for that extra hour (use electricity to post on/. for example) then I come home at night and where I used to make dinner in the sunlight before plopping down in the couch or doing something, now I need electricity to light up my kitchen for the rest of winter until the sun (and my body) has caught up with the time. Next to that because my body clock is all screwed up for the rest of the month, I have one hour less sleep and one hour more activity whether it be computer, tv or something else, I live at night and I have to use electricity to light my house.
And then when summer comes around, the same thing goes the backward way. All of a sudden it's dark in the morning and I need lights in my home and office for the whole morning (because once it gets light enough, I don't notice them being on).
And there is no excuse for farmers anymore, one of my family members is an 'agricultural engineer'. These days farms are industrialized and literally work 24/7 to work their huge lands with as little (very expensive) machinery as possible (having 3-shifts of work on 1 machine). And the "biological" farmers (the smaller ones that sell their food at premium price to health stores) work at night now too since it's suppositively healthier for their crops and the environment to be cultivated (plowed etc.) at night. Even the 'classic' farmers have huge spotlights on their machines, I don't know any farmer that still has his horses pull a plow.
Some of us (most of us) have more music than you have. 500MB (0.5 Gig) as you so eloquently put it is only a few minutes of music. I have about 500G (~21 days) of MP3-compressed music, I have 500MB just in WAV/FLAC samples, 700MB in Tracker (as in FastTracker) format and 15G in AAC format. Putting that all in FLAC/WAV would take a few TB which quite honestly, I just don't have (especially since I need a backup of all that as well) and lugging an XRAID to a party would definitely look good but it's just too expensive.
After all, all x86 are the same. MMX extensions get emulated on AMD, Linux distro's run on both processors without recompiling, the kernel handles calls and most likely an Apache server is not going to call the special media extensions. It would be interesting to see this happen in an environment that has been optimized and is using certain incompatible extensions (like 3DNow!) eg. a computing cluster.
If you abstract enough and emulate a processor you should even be able to move between architectures but the overhead of emulation wouldn't make it very cost effective.
I don't know very much IT careers that pay more than $200,000 (at least not in my neck of the woods). You would have to be a C*O in a very big company to have that kind of salary here in upstate NY.
I am working with Apple's integration of LDAP, OpenDirectory and since it's pure LDAP and Kerberos it integrates nicely. It allows for you to define groups that have access or not to certain programs, to set up desktop environments uniformly etc. It's also much cheaper (even if you include the hardware).
Both Novell and Red Hat have similar solutions and there are plenty of guidelines out there to have LDAP do whatever you want. I find myself that enforcing stuff through Group Policies are too difficult to maintain and have an overview about (especially when you start getting exceptions) resulting in every year having to review all of them and re-apply them to much dismay of the users.
For software updates and the like there are other channels than Group Policy, GP makes a big mess out of the whole thing by stuffing everything in LDAP. I find it much more convenient to have specialized software integrated with LDAP handle specialized stuff (like apt-get or yum)
Wrong analogy. In restaurants you pay after you receive service. If you abuse the wait staff, they'll kick you out and don't expect you to pay (or come back).
Here you already paid for service and now they're kicking you out based on their interpretation of acceptable free speech. It's like buying a car, paying it off then loudly complaining how bad that car is (whether or not something goes wrong) at the dealership when you bring it in for service and then the dealership says: sorry, we're keeping your keys (you physically own the car, you just can't drive it)
You need to have a seat (license or CAL as Microsoft calls them) for Exchange for every client that would connect through OWA.
In most situations, clients need three different licenses:
A license for the desktop operating system (i.e., Windows XP). A client access license (CAL) for the Windows server. This license allows the client to legally connect to the server over the network. If you are using per server licensing, then you need a separate CAL for every Windows server on your network. If you are using per seat licensing, then you only need one CAL. An Exchange CAL. This is the license that permits the clients to access the Exchange server. At one time, Exchange clients also required a license to use Microsoft Outlook, but today an Outlook license is included with each Exchange CAL.
The rule is that an Exchange CAL is required for any person or device that is accessing Exchange. This includes access through Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, Exchange ActiveSync, or any other messaging interface.
But who says that the kiddie porn got there from a specific person. Maybe it's from a previous owner, maybe a botnet, maybe the same person that calls the police put it on there in order to frame the first person. Either way you take this, the chain of evidence was broken by police not doing their job right.
Why exactly? I haven't seen a single computer with Blu-Ray movie support and even when assembling a new computer, the upgrade costs 250 or more to add on. There aren't very consumers that want it and even less that use it.
It would of course be nice for Linux to support all types of media but I am pretty sure you can read the data of the discs already with the current implementation. HD media on most (if not all) blu-ray discs is encumbered with DRM anyway which is illegal to play. The only signal to give to companies distributing such media is to NOT BUY IT in order for better/free open source programs to support it.
There is several HD media supported for Linux, use it instead.
they should be illegal to use on US citizens Where have we heard that before... oh yeah, Manhattan project, border control, Guantanamo Bay,...
And why are "US Citizens" so much better than Non-US Citizens? I am not a US Citizen, yet I live and work in the US. So I should be shot down by them? What if you are collateral or mistaken for me?
Since you're in a physics lab, maybe you have a physicist or some students (or even another department on campus) which you can work together with. Maybe the University already has a support contract or discounts with certain vendors in another department or the end users would like to work with some specific brand for whatever reason.
Listen to your end users (what do they need, especially if you're working with higher frequency or digital stuff), stay well within your budget (all of a sudden you'll notice that some functionality on the new scopes is missing or you need to buy some converters or specific probes) and make sure you plan for the future.
Make sure you have some type of support contract if you buy more than one and you have more than a standard 1y warranty.
Make sure the scope interface (as most modern ones do interface to a computer) is available on your computers and future-proof (don't go for RS-232 or parallel port ones or worse, those with their own interfaces). Make sure it is compatible or comes with some open source software as well (preferably interface using SCPI). I had to use a digital storage "scope" once in a school (they're dirt cheap) and the only software available was for Windows 95 and it didn't work with anything else. It's a pain finding a computer and the installation disks for something like that.
Technically, your operating system should protect you against that in the first place. I don't even know why there are still antivirus programs in this world. We had virusses back in the day of DOS when memory was accessible by anyone and everyone had the same permissions (even back then, OS/2 and other OS'es had better functionality without virusses) but nowadays, the only reason your box should be rooted is because of an exploit in a misconfigured box and nothing can protect you against that.
I was going to say: Anti-Virus programs, how quaint but then again, there is still an OS out there that is criminally retarded.
Just any type of metal junkyard, not car-specific. The car-specific ones like to sell you car parts and price it up but there are junkyards (usually metal scrapyards that take in all types of metal in order to melt it after it has been taken apart) out there that sell everything from old fridges to huge compressors and in between you'll have all type of machinery that has gearboxes and other fun stuff. There are also the airplane junkyards that have all kinds of cool stuff in it. Next to that, I would start building prototypes with Lego Technics (if they still sell those) that have all types of axles, joints and gears. There was once a carset from Lego you could build that had a gearbox and 4-wheel drive.
I have an even smaller budget since I work for an educational institute in an only-research department that only gets money when research grants are being spent in that department (local pilot grants that max out at $10,000, NIH for the rest).
There is plenty of stuff out there for the 'cheap' sysadmin. I run a few Apple XRAIDs over FibreChannel. They are (were) the cheapest in the industry with very good specs and if you can afford a few Apple XServe's you get XSAN on there and a FibreChannel switch (on my wishlist for winter-een-mas) and you have a very easy to maintain expandable SAN.
I was looking into $12000 solution for a backup (40 TB total storage to go over with about 500 GB changed per week). Backups would take about a week to complete and require me to switch tapes once and a while. But then I found the Norco DS cases which have 12 slots (10 if you want to maximize usage on a single controller card) and for less than USD 1500 you can get a 10TB eSATA array. The performance is pretty crappy (1 eSATA link per 5 drives). I use it for backups and using rdiff-backup over rsh I have a fully functional (weekly) mirror with weekly diffs in a weekend (starts Friday evening at 5:00pm and ends early Monday morning) but I should be able to get better performance if we get a new fileserver (currently dual PowerPC).
And that is a problem why exactly? If (Mother Nature/God/the universe) intends to kill us off because we are too many there is nothing we can do about it. Watch "The Happening" to see what I mean.
Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box-- to be used in that order.
Soap (you've been here and to the feds) doesn't work Ballot Box doesn't work either because you don't have enough cash to buy yourself a politician although they are 50% off for the next 2 weeks. There are laws against this kind of practice but finding the responsible corporation might be another problem. Jury Box might work in conjunction with the Ballot Box if you can gather enough evidence and find the people responsible
Have you ever called Microsoft for any support? Get your credit card ready because just OPENING a support request will cost you ~$150 unless you have an Enterprise Agreement and even then, getting the information together they need before opening a support request made one of my previous employers break out his Visa card and bill it as a company expense. And I didn't know Intel made full machines that they support. Unless you buy an expensive machine from a vendor like HP or IBM, you won't get any level of support either (SuperMicro comes to mind) or yeah, you'll get some support (Dell) but they only know what any junior level sysadmin would know.
Buying Red Hat with a yearly support contract is cheaper in most instances since their yearly support cost as much as one support instance with Microsoft. Hardware isn't THAT difficult to maintain and support by any sysadmin worth it's money (any sysadmin even at junior levels that doesn't know how to diagnose a bad stick of ram or a failed hard drive should be fired). And if you want a nice combination of hardware and software support, cheap/free software and ease of use, get a Mac. Their servers are decently priced for what you get and their support is the best I have found so far in the industry (IBM actually has really good support too) and I should know I have a degree in electronics and have worked internationally for and with some of the biggest corporations in the world as well as large and small hosting providers and currently work in a large education environment, I know when someone is talking crap or is using a script on the other end of the line, I am usually transferred to second/third line support within the first few minutes of support calls.
Is that why I pay so much for healthcare? I pay more per month for health care than I probably use in a year... just in case. This is supposed to be a pooled resource so that people that are less fortunate health-wise can afford to get healthcare. There are hundreds of people like me, only a few like them. Of course insurance companies would like to weed out 'them' from their policies so they don't have to pay out but that's not because of scarce resources (nowhere in the world is there scarcity of any resource, only artificial scarcity by either societies, corporations or governments) it's because of pure greed and profit. Insurance companies should be not-for-profit organizations, only making enough money to cover their expenses and a pool of money that's invested in something with steady returns for pay outs. The fact that insurance companies are listed in stock markets is bad enough.
On the other hand, burning their house down might get better reimbursement from their insurance company and then they'll have money to replace everything. As long as it looks like an electrical fire not caused by you, neither the insurance company nor the fire marshal will know any better.
This sounds like the start of a lame joke but: A Dell, a Lenovo (aka IBM Thinkpad) and a Mac fall off a table...
Either way. I have had Dells and Mac's (and IBM Thinkpads). The only ones still floating around at my house is the Mac and the IBM. The Dell machines just break as soon as they're put up to a little bit of abuse and I won't put up any longer with their support department. Like this time that I got a bundle from work which included a laptop, a docking station, a screen and keyboard/mouse. Something was DOA so I contacted support which is apparently in India, they told me to send it back... oh, I have to pay for packaging and shipping by FedEx or UPS. They then ship it back a week later saying that parts are missing and they can't do anything with it. Call them again and after about an hour or so on the phone, apparently I need to ship EVERYTHING back and STILL pay for shipping because it was bought as a bundle. That's over $100 just to get something replaced? Then it takes them over 3 weeks to get me my stuff back.
Ever called Apple support? You can call without any support contract and get help for just about anything Mac related (or walk in any Apple store) in about 5-15 minutes. If it's really a big problem and you're friendly, they might even connect you to an engineer that worked on the product. If something breaks like a hard drive they will OVERNIGHT you a package with the new hard drive and schedule to pick up the dead one without any cost to you, you just take off the first mailing stickers and magically a well-formed return sticker appears. The same goes for laptops, they will overnight or same-day you a special package that fits the laptop and if you can convince the FedEx guy to wait a second while you pack it back up, a repaired or new laptop will arrive within 3-5 business days.
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And employees just shouldn't let them get away with it. I have NEVER signed an enforceable non-compete agreement without asking for something in return. I usually amend or demand my non-compete agreement (if I even get them) to have a clause that states that if enforced against me the company will pay out wages until the non-compete either expires or the enforcement is resolved.
Most companies (especially big ones) have that type of stuff outsourced to their lowest-level HR drone who says nothing about it (or doesn't understand your rights to amend contracts before signing) or even has it pre-signed from their part. I usually ask for a duplicate signed off by that department. If I am a contractor in service of another company, I usually make the excuse of already having signed contracts with that company (and usually they'll just have a clause about not taking any information with you when you leave)
Yes, I can do that and if somebody asks about it I will let them know to talk to my and their own lawyers. I had one really big oil company I worked for and I simply refused to sign the darn thing until I decided to quit. They also had clauses about copyrighting ALL my OWN programming work (I was contracting for them) I did while I was employed with them. HR came about every other week (or sent e-mails) that I should sign off on my 'package', never did.
you know, back when farmers where around, then it made sense to change it. Now it just messes up everything. First of all, all of a sudden it gets light an hour early, I wake up with the sun so at what used to be 8, it's now 7 so I have to do something for that extra hour (use electricity to post on /. for example) then I come home at night and where I used to make dinner in the sunlight before plopping down in the couch or doing something, now I need electricity to light up my kitchen for the rest of winter until the sun (and my body) has caught up with the time. Next to that because my body clock is all screwed up for the rest of the month, I have one hour less sleep and one hour more activity whether it be computer, tv or something else, I live at night and I have to use electricity to light my house.
And then when summer comes around, the same thing goes the backward way. All of a sudden it's dark in the morning and I need lights in my home and office for the whole morning (because once it gets light enough, I don't notice them being on).
And there is no excuse for farmers anymore, one of my family members is an 'agricultural engineer'. These days farms are industrialized and literally work 24/7 to work their huge lands with as little (very expensive) machinery as possible (having 3-shifts of work on 1 machine). And the "biological" farmers (the smaller ones that sell their food at premium price to health stores) work at night now too since it's suppositively healthier for their crops and the environment to be cultivated (plowed etc.) at night. Even the 'classic' farmers have huge spotlights on their machines, I don't know any farmer that still has his horses pull a plow.
Some of us (most of us) have more music than you have. 500MB (0.5 Gig) as you so eloquently put it is only a few minutes of music. I have about 500G (~21 days) of MP3-compressed music, I have 500MB just in WAV/FLAC samples, 700MB in Tracker (as in FastTracker) format and 15G in AAC format. Putting that all in FLAC/WAV would take a few TB which quite honestly, I just don't have (especially since I need a backup of all that as well) and lugging an XRAID to a party would definitely look good but it's just too expensive.
After all, all x86 are the same. MMX extensions get emulated on AMD, Linux distro's run on both processors without recompiling, the kernel handles calls and most likely an Apache server is not going to call the special media extensions. It would be interesting to see this happen in an environment that has been optimized and is using certain incompatible extensions (like 3DNow!) eg. a computing cluster.
If you abstract enough and emulate a processor you should even be able to move between architectures but the overhead of emulation wouldn't make it very cost effective.
I don't know very much IT careers that pay more than $200,000 (at least not in my neck of the woods). You would have to be a C*O in a very big company to have that kind of salary here in upstate NY.
... it wants it's packaging back. Seriously, it has been the reason for picking Apple over other products: just in case you need to ship the product.
I am working with Apple's integration of LDAP, OpenDirectory and since it's pure LDAP and Kerberos it integrates nicely. It allows for you to define groups that have access or not to certain programs, to set up desktop environments uniformly etc. It's also much cheaper (even if you include the hardware).
Both Novell and Red Hat have similar solutions and there are plenty of guidelines out there to have LDAP do whatever you want. I find myself that enforcing stuff through Group Policies are too difficult to maintain and have an overview about (especially when you start getting exceptions) resulting in every year having to review all of them and re-apply them to much dismay of the users.
For software updates and the like there are other channels than Group Policy, GP makes a big mess out of the whole thing by stuffing everything in LDAP. I find it much more convenient to have specialized software integrated with LDAP handle specialized stuff (like apt-get or yum)
Wrong analogy. In restaurants you pay after you receive service. If you abuse the wait staff, they'll kick you out and don't expect you to pay (or come back).
Here you already paid for service and now they're kicking you out based on their interpretation of acceptable free speech. It's like buying a car, paying it off then loudly complaining how bad that car is (whether or not something goes wrong) at the dealership when you bring it in for service and then the dealership says: sorry, we're keeping your keys (you physically own the car, you just can't drive it)
The problem with that is, domains without a tld (like apple) might/should be locally resolved.
You need to have a seat (license or CAL as Microsoft calls them) for Exchange for every client that would connect through OWA.
In most situations, clients need three different licenses:
A license for the desktop operating system (i.e., Windows XP).
A client access license (CAL) for the Windows server. This license allows the client to legally connect to the server over the network. If you are using per server licensing, then you need a separate CAL for every Windows server on your network. If you are using per seat licensing, then you only need one CAL.
An Exchange CAL. This is the license that permits the clients to access the Exchange server. At one time, Exchange clients also required a license to use Microsoft Outlook, but today an Outlook license is included with each Exchange CAL.
The rule is that an Exchange CAL is required for any person or device that is accessing Exchange. This includes access through Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, Exchange ActiveSync, or any other messaging interface.
But who says that the kiddie porn got there from a specific person. Maybe it's from a previous owner, maybe a botnet, maybe the same person that calls the police put it on there in order to frame the first person. Either way you take this, the chain of evidence was broken by police not doing their job right.
Why exactly? I haven't seen a single computer with Blu-Ray movie support and even when assembling a new computer, the upgrade costs 250 or more to add on. There aren't very consumers that want it and even less that use it.
It would of course be nice for Linux to support all types of media but I am pretty sure you can read the data of the discs already with the current implementation. HD media on most (if not all) blu-ray discs is encumbered with DRM anyway which is illegal to play. The only signal to give to companies distributing such media is to NOT BUY IT in order for better/free open source programs to support it.
There is several HD media supported for Linux, use it instead.
they should be illegal to use on US citizens
Where have we heard that before... oh yeah, Manhattan project, border control, Guantanamo Bay,...
And why are "US Citizens" so much better than Non-US Citizens? I am not a US Citizen, yet I live and work in the US. So I should be shot down by them? What if you are collateral or mistaken for me?
If you play long enough, eventually your creature will start forming Duke Nukem Forever
Since you're in a physics lab, maybe you have a physicist or some students (or even another department on campus) which you can work together with. Maybe the University already has a support contract or discounts with certain vendors in another department or the end users would like to work with some specific brand for whatever reason.
Listen to your end users (what do they need, especially if you're working with higher frequency or digital stuff), stay well within your budget (all of a sudden you'll notice that some functionality on the new scopes is missing or you need to buy some converters or specific probes) and make sure you plan for the future.
Make sure you have some type of support contract if you buy more than one and you have more than a standard 1y warranty.
Make sure the scope interface (as most modern ones do interface to a computer) is available on your computers and future-proof (don't go for RS-232 or parallel port ones or worse, those with their own interfaces). Make sure it is compatible or comes with some open source software as well (preferably interface using SCPI). I had to use a digital storage "scope" once in a school (they're dirt cheap) and the only software available was for Windows 95 and it didn't work with anything else. It's a pain finding a computer and the installation disks for something like that.
Technically, your operating system should protect you against that in the first place. I don't even know why there are still antivirus programs in this world. We had virusses back in the day of DOS when memory was accessible by anyone and everyone had the same permissions (even back then, OS/2 and other OS'es had better functionality without virusses) but nowadays, the only reason your box should be rooted is because of an exploit in a misconfigured box and nothing can protect you against that.
I was going to say: Anti-Virus programs, how quaint but then again, there is still an OS out there that is criminally retarded.
Just any type of metal junkyard, not car-specific. The car-specific ones like to sell you car parts and price it up but there are junkyards (usually metal scrapyards that take in all types of metal in order to melt it after it has been taken apart) out there that sell everything from old fridges to huge compressors and in between you'll have all type of machinery that has gearboxes and other fun stuff. There are also the airplane junkyards that have all kinds of cool stuff in it. Next to that, I would start building prototypes with Lego Technics (if they still sell those) that have all types of axles, joints and gears. There was once a carset from Lego you could build that had a gearbox and 4-wheel drive.
I don't understand. Can you repeat this with Alice, Bob, Carol and Ted?
I have an even smaller budget since I work for an educational institute in an only-research department that only gets money when research grants are being spent in that department (local pilot grants that max out at $10,000, NIH for the rest).
There is plenty of stuff out there for the 'cheap' sysadmin. I run a few Apple XRAIDs over FibreChannel. They are (were) the cheapest in the industry with very good specs and if you can afford a few Apple XServe's you get XSAN on there and a FibreChannel switch (on my wishlist for winter-een-mas) and you have a very easy to maintain expandable SAN.
I was looking into $12000 solution for a backup (40 TB total storage to go over with about 500 GB changed per week). Backups would take about a week to complete and require me to switch tapes once and a while. But then I found the Norco DS cases which have 12 slots (10 if you want to maximize usage on a single controller card) and for less than USD 1500 you can get a 10TB eSATA array. The performance is pretty crappy (1 eSATA link per 5 drives). I use it for backups and using rdiff-backup over rsh I have a fully functional (weekly) mirror with weekly diffs in a weekend (starts Friday evening at 5:00pm and ends early Monday morning) but I should be able to get better performance if we get a new fileserver (currently dual PowerPC).
most of humanity will die.
And that is a problem why exactly? If (Mother Nature/God/the universe) intends to kill us off because we are too many there is nothing we can do about it. Watch "The Happening" to see what I mean.
Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box-- to be used in that order.
Soap (you've been here and to the feds) doesn't work
Ballot Box doesn't work either because you don't have enough cash to buy yourself a politician although they are 50% off for the next 2 weeks. There are laws against this kind of practice but finding the responsible corporation might be another problem.
Jury Box might work in conjunction with the Ballot Box if you can gather enough evidence and find the people responsible
Ammo Box? Find the *ckers and shoot them.
Have you ever called Microsoft for any support? Get your credit card ready because just OPENING a support request will cost you ~$150 unless you have an Enterprise Agreement and even then, getting the information together they need before opening a support request made one of my previous employers break out his Visa card and bill it as a company expense. And I didn't know Intel made full machines that they support. Unless you buy an expensive machine from a vendor like HP or IBM, you won't get any level of support either (SuperMicro comes to mind) or yeah, you'll get some support (Dell) but they only know what any junior level sysadmin would know.
Buying Red Hat with a yearly support contract is cheaper in most instances since their yearly support cost as much as one support instance with Microsoft. Hardware isn't THAT difficult to maintain and support by any sysadmin worth it's money (any sysadmin even at junior levels that doesn't know how to diagnose a bad stick of ram or a failed hard drive should be fired). And if you want a nice combination of hardware and software support, cheap/free software and ease of use, get a Mac. Their servers are decently priced for what you get and their support is the best I have found so far in the industry (IBM actually has really good support too) and I should know I have a degree in electronics and have worked internationally for and with some of the biggest corporations in the world as well as large and small hosting providers and currently work in a large education environment, I know when someone is talking crap or is using a script on the other end of the line, I am usually transferred to second/third line support within the first few minutes of support calls.
Is that why I pay so much for healthcare? I pay more per month for health care than I probably use in a year... just in case. This is supposed to be a pooled resource so that people that are less fortunate health-wise can afford to get healthcare. There are hundreds of people like me, only a few like them. Of course insurance companies would like to weed out 'them' from their policies so they don't have to pay out but that's not because of scarce resources (nowhere in the world is there scarcity of any resource, only artificial scarcity by either societies, corporations or governments) it's because of pure greed and profit. Insurance companies should be not-for-profit organizations, only making enough money to cover their expenses and a pool of money that's invested in something with steady returns for pay outs. The fact that insurance companies are listed in stock markets is bad enough.
On the other hand, burning their house down might get better reimbursement from their insurance company and then they'll have money to replace everything. As long as it looks like an electrical fire not caused by you, neither the insurance company nor the fire marshal will know any better.
This sounds like the start of a lame joke but: A Dell, a Lenovo (aka IBM Thinkpad) and a Mac fall off a table...
Either way. I have had Dells and Mac's (and IBM Thinkpads). The only ones still floating around at my house is the Mac and the IBM. The Dell machines just break as soon as they're put up to a little bit of abuse and I won't put up any longer with their support department. Like this time that I got a bundle from work which included a laptop, a docking station, a screen and keyboard/mouse. Something was DOA so I contacted support which is apparently in India, they told me to send it back... oh, I have to pay for packaging and shipping by FedEx or UPS. They then ship it back a week later saying that parts are missing and they can't do anything with it. Call them again and after about an hour or so on the phone, apparently I need to ship EVERYTHING back and STILL pay for shipping because it was bought as a bundle. That's over $100 just to get something replaced? Then it takes them over 3 weeks to get me my stuff back.
Ever called Apple support? You can call without any support contract and get help for just about anything Mac related (or walk in any Apple store) in about 5-15 minutes. If it's really a big problem and you're friendly, they might even connect you to an engineer that worked on the product. If something breaks like a hard drive they will OVERNIGHT you a package with the new hard drive and schedule to pick up the dead one without any cost to you, you just take off the first mailing stickers and magically a well-formed return sticker appears. The same goes for laptops, they will overnight or same-day you a special package that fits the laptop and if you can convince the FedEx guy to wait a second while you pack it back up, a repaired or new laptop will arrive within 3-5 business days.