$99 is a drop in the bucket. How do you recoup the $100/hr that you as an independent contractor should be charging for your labor?

Unless of course your time isn't worth anything.

Pay for performance is only a world wide metric if you consider the song and dance performances corporate officers give to justify their obscene salaries.

Seriously their only real job skill is selling their own self worth to their bosses, or board of directors.

First keep your work and your personal shit separate.

Second, since they insist on having the ability to https, in reality they probably aren't the kind of people you want to be working for in the first place. So I would recommend leaving, because it reflects the nature of their character, as opposed to that being a specific behavior.

There may be specific instances where this may be acceptable; so this is only a general rule to go by.

Just because they have the degree doesn't mean they will be able to utilize the knowledge.

There are plenty of pinheads out there with degrees who have never been able to get decent jobs.

How about the abolition of private prisons?

Oh, wait they're convicted felons and don't deserve human rights either; never mind go on about your business.

Have him put together a resume and get it online, he should at least be able to get a contract job.

Then there's the big consulting firms like Accenture, they love guys with degrees other than CS.

And as others have said, network.

But do not take a job doing techsupport, it's a career limiting move and it won't actually be developing marketable job skills.

I haven't read Susskind yet, but I have read General Relativity by Dirac.

According to Dirac's, the singularity will never actually occur because of time and space dilation. The stellar matter will accelerate towards the singularity but never actually reach it. And never is an appropriate term since according to Hawking the black holes have a finite lifetime and will eventually evaporate according to Quantum Mechanics.

Will get to Susskind as soon as I finish a couple of Penrose books.

Okay, they've changed their product lineup.

Maybe you go through enough systems that you have to judge by series/model, but I don't. I get whatever the company wants me to have. But for my personal systems, and I do keep work separate from personal, I've been burned once by Dell, not again because there are plenty of other manufactures out there to choose from.

Seriously, like I said, they burned me once, not again, when someone sells you shitty product, you don't go back to them, again. Sure there are things that are broken, and what not. But the last laptop was completely underperformant relative to the IBM with the same hardware. So I have no reason to trust Dell now, no matter what they claim about hardware.

Also just checked out the XPS, I still don't see a 15" with 1920 x 1080, which is what I have now, so Dell still can't meet even my minimum requirements.

And actually they used to make such a beast, but that was more than 5 years ago.

In addition, I have looked at Alienware systems in the store, nice chassis, but nothing whatsoever impressive about the rest of the hardware or the performance; and the whizbang alienware customization software was show as shit.

Dell had their chance with my money, and they blew it.

So with all the numerous alternatives out there, I have no reason to give them a second one.

Completely irrelevant since the IBM and the Dell speced out the same with the same OS.

So as far as I'm concerned Dells are shit.

Don't buy a Dell, Dude; just don't.

I was never happy with the performance of any Dell laptop I had, either personally, or work provided.

I had a thinkpad with essentially identical hardware as my personal dell: same memory, GFX, CPU, screen rez, I think the HD on the Dell even speced faster. But the actual usage difference between the two was like night and day; so just don't buy a Dell.