I went in expecting a terrible movie and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a mediocre movie. I still think it deserves the poor RT rating though

I should add that I have heard that the new Asus Zenbook 505 laptops are very Linux friendly, but I have personally never used one and they ship only with Windows.

I can second this. My Dell XPS 13 "Developer Edition" that came preinstalled with Ubuntu is the best Linux laptop I have ever owned. I hate the crap Broadcom WiFi card in it, but it does work fine out of the box with Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I did have to replace the preinstalled Dell version of Ubuntu as it was horribly corrupted somehow (if you ran anything other than trivial programs, they would crash). I also own a System76 Linux laptop, but I think the Dell "Developer Edition" XPS 13 model and the M3800 model are better built machines. Check http://www.dell.com/ubuntu or http://www.system76.com/ as both options do ship with Ubuntu preinstalled.

Honestly both should be involved. Anyone proposing a solution should be prepared to back that solution up when presenting it to others. I have seen Management make some really absolutely stupid decisions relating to software and platforms, but I have seen the Techie side do the same.

When I worked at a relatively small ISP, we had a backdoor (locked down by IP) into the DSL modems we handed out, but we only ever used it to make config changes on behalf of our customers. Honestly it cut down on support time quite a bit. We were more than happy for a customer to use their own DSL modem, but those people were in the minority compared to customers who wanted us to help them change the SSID and password on their wifi. Ours had all settings exposed for the customer if they wanted to change them, although almost none ever did on their own.

Obviously your company's experiences differ quite a bit from ours. Our experiences with Cisco's support for IOS bugs has left a rather bad taste in our mouths for any Cisco branded hardware. So bad that we switched all of our core routers over to another vendor and haven't looked back.

So you live in Boston?