As a former BestBuy/GeekSquad employee I can tell you that the company procedure was:
1.) Drill holes in hard drive.
2.) Send Computer to Best Buy Service Center to be discarded.
When a customer would bring a computer in to be recycled I would open the cover with them standing there. I'd remove the hard drive and take a drill and put multiple 1/4 inch holes through the hard drive. I'd have the customer watch me do this and drill until they were happy.
After that I would put the hard drive back into the computer and send it to a service center.
90% of your GeekSquad/BestBuy Employees have no idea what they are doing. They are also only getting paid $10 / hr. Don't expect much. There are one or two in each store that generally know more then you'd expect. But they are also only getting paid $10 / hr. If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.
The last thing I want to worry about while landing an aircraft is being blinded. While I am juggling frequencies through the communicatiosn system, reporting my position, looking for other aircraft...Watching the airspeed, altitude, attitude, throttle, gear, mixture, fuel selectors...glide slope...alighnment....etc
Now....Look at a large jet, with lots of people.. Do you want blinded piltos who get blinded, or experiance vertigo.. and end up wtih a large jet crashing into a school? a neighborhood..exploding..Killing hundreds in the plane..hundreds on the ground..
I'm sorry.. Use your fucking head. This is not something to screw around with.
I work at Best Buy and often sell copies of Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office to home users. Infact, I sell about one a day myself alone... Consider the other employees also.
When we do sell it though, it's not the box on the shelf (those are empty) the real ones are locked up in a glass case.
Not that I support Microsoft in any way shape or form, but people do actually buy it.
debian > xp
The way I look at it, this could be a very good thing.. From what I've witnessed currently the gaim development team is busy with many things, and cannot focus on one or two certain features.
Now that It has forked off the developers that are interested in this will have the time to do the one thing they WANT to do, not a bunch of others.
The way I look at it, it is kind of like the introduction of the assembly line, a group will be very skilled at one task and not be working on and assembleing all the other features.
Quite frankly, This is one feature gaim is really lacking. With the introduction of broadband services in the home, video and voice is extremely popular.
It's hard to get someone to try linux when their main tasks cannot be performed.
Purchase your laptop at Best Buy with an extended performance service plane (3 years). If your battery fails, Best Buy will mail you a new one.. (i'm a instore tech @ best buy)
That's just because of the way they advertise.
The space isn't hidden. They are just using fake numbers 1000 instead of the real 1024.
You aren't very smart are you?
If windows xp pro was $45 to the home builder. I'd be less hesitant to purchase a copy for my gaming use. All other use is with Linux...
*hides from SCO*
Your posting on slashdot, and you restored to a VCR? What the hell?
Jack your stereo into your computer, compress it into mp3. Throw the Mp3 on whatever you'd like.. etc. Would work a hell of a lot better, and wouldn't be ghetto. Plus you already have the tools to do it..
I am an in-store repair tech for Best Buy (store 14 rochester, mn) . We used a software package called PC Certify. I've had a lot of experiance with it and as far as locating hardware problems it is quite sucessful.
In all the time that I've ran it, Only once did it not detect a hardware problem when the ram was faulty. Every other time It's been great at locating ram, motherboard, processor, and hard drive issues.
I would highly reccomend it to anyone who is dealing with diagonsing computers. It's great for the hardware side of things.
Who gives a shit if a Linux user wrote it? If a Windows user wrote a virus to attack Linux the news articles wouldn't be saying "Microsoft Users are Evil. Attacking innocent Linux Users".. They would be.. "Linux is Inseccure and worthless"..
If you don't want viruses to spread, don't have users running as adminstrators as default. Don't write worthless code.
The music services that charge per song are never going to take off. Users simply do not want to pay $1 for every song they download. This is for several reasons.
First off, You are downloading a digital file, It's not the same as going to the store and purchasing a CD in a case and getting something physical out of it.
Any person would much rather go to the store, probably get a better price, and get a hard copy of it. Not some proprietary music format that you'll loose the next week because your sibling installed some virus from MSN Messenger.
These services are just a way for teh RIAA to distract people. They know it won't take off, and so does everyone.
They can have feeling, they can encourage the public. We put a robot on Mars!! Who cares, A robot just needs sunlight, That's not an accomplishment.
We put a MAN on Mars, That's an accomplishment, and a man sees, feels, and can confinscate for problems instantly. A man wouldn't see so much shit his memory would fill up and have to have NASA restore him.
Sending a man to mars would be the step in putting humans in space. Humans in space are the ultimate goal, Is Star Trek full of robot human represenatives?
I work at Best Buy and sometimes will be in the wireless department. I don't hear people coming in saying that they want a simple phone and hate all the extra features.
People come in excited about the camera phone concept, perhaps you haven't seen it, it's cooler then you'd think.
So 99% of the people out there want the features, Afterall the features are very affordable.
Seriously, If the screw holds the drive in place, It works. Hell, I've done it with tape before.
Would you rather of had the tech spend the time in educating himself in screws, then educating himself in hardware/software? The screw holds the damn drive, I'd buy it.
Just because they may be straight out of high school, doesn't mean much. The employeer isn't going to hire someone that isn't qualified at all.
Infact, Straight out of high school you have extremely fast thinking and dedicated to spending hours a day working on assignments.
Hell, We need kids straight out of high school to work for Nasa, maybe they could write software for rovers that don't die for reasons that shouldn't ever occur.
It seems like to me that it wouldn't be all that reliable. You've got four 250 gig hard drives packed into the smallest space they could. Scary.
They also mention hooking several of them together, that means if you hook even as many as 2 of them together, you are 8 times more likely to fail then a standard drive. I'm sure they are also using the cheapest drives and technology they can possible use to make a profit at that price.
You don't think that this disparity is because of the ability of these companies to differentiate the cost legitimately? There is large fixed cost to be amortized in providing wireless infrastucture over such a large country, with such low population density.
Here in Vermont we have the same problem with electricity - it costs a lot when you have few customers per mile of wire (or even wireless miles). For the national utilities (like Verizon Wireless and the wired long distance carriers) they lose money on rural areas in order to provide the same bundle to all customers within the country. In rural Alaska all your long-distance calls come over satellite to ground stations that might serve 1000 people who are paying 6.2 cents a minute for long-distance!!!
Always look for a rational reason before you complain too much about conspiracies.
Why does everyone make such a big deal out of Sony's backwards compatibility with PS1. PS1 didn't even HAVE good games. Crappy frame rates, low replay abilities. Seriously. If that's Sony's only arguement is "i want to play my old games" then what the hell?
Chances are if they have the old games, they have the old console too. Am I missing something?
I dont know but IMO a smaller/thinner notebook is a very specialized product for a small market. I personally have a Dell Inspiron 4150 and I think it weighs in around 5-7lbs, but I think it is a perfect weight/size. When you go smaller you start to lose drives (ie, cdrom, etc..), I/O connections, and also the laptop is so light that if you *accidentally* snag your power cord then its to the floor w/ the laptop. I hate the devices that are too small... PDA/phones that try to be laptops (or laptops that try to be palm/small sized) are less user friendly.
Yes, yes, it's just an opinion, but it's very interesting and thought provoking. It helped me understand (somewhat) the motivation behind the truly wacko environmentalists.
NASA needs something to help it change, and providing it a vision besides LEO would be a vast improvement. I don't know how many times I read that NASA starts a project to design a replacement for the Shuttle and then it gets cancelled. The Shuttle was designed in the early 1970s. And they want to keep flying it for another 10+ years?
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
TFA states that what they've created is a matrix of silicon islands connected by molybdenum MOS transistors to automate batch testing of carbon nanotubes (about 2000 at a time). Yes, they look for I/V curves, but the CNTs are being tested as two-terminal devices (e.g. diodes) not three-terminal devices (e.g. transistors).
At least, they're not laying claim to it (though you can bet they would like to). Their more modest (!) goal is to characterize the fabrication process in hopes of achieving higher yields of semiconducting (vs. metallic) CNTs.
There will definitely be a few problems with productization; molybdenum's not something you want to get anywhere near a commercial fab, and that big blob of CNT growth catalyst is a bit of a disaster. But this looks like a very nice bit of engineering.
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Why cant we just get rid of the icons and by doing so cut down the size of the selector and simplly have a listbox of pre-defined locations to save files?
Also it would be good if that list could be changed by editing a configuration file, maybe an XML file?
It's big news because like someone else said, they're the first samples we've ever gotten that didn't come from the moon, and aren't inter-planetary dust particles. Plus, they're actually -returned- to earth, and not just measured/observed like all the other previous satelites have done. Wild 2 is presumed to be composed of the same substances that were present at the begining of the universe, and will contribute to a better understanding of how everything was back then. Since it's mostly just a dirty snowball floating in space, it's presumed to have been relatively unchanged for billions of years. The scientists will go wild over actual samples of particles that are this old.
What's also cool, is that the same stunt helicopter guys that they used in the matrix will be the ones that snag the returning samples's capsule/heatshield out of the air over utah.
My dad is the V.P. of Civil Space at lockheed martin (this project was under his management), so the family and I got to go and watch the final approach and the turning of the satelite (not that we could see anything other than people at workstations at JPL and Waterton) and see the first images. It was kinda neat to see all the scientists at JPL get excited that they were receiving data. And cooler to see the engineers here in Denver breathe a sigh of relief that it worked, and that it didn't get nailed by a rock going 36,000 miles an hour.
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As a former BestBuy/GeekSquad employee I can tell you that the company procedure was: 1.) Drill holes in hard drive. 2.) Send Computer to Best Buy Service Center to be discarded. When a customer would bring a computer in to be recycled I would open the cover with them standing there. I'd remove the hard drive and take a drill and put multiple 1/4 inch holes through the hard drive. I'd have the customer watch me do this and drill until they were happy. After that I would put the hard drive back into the computer and send it to a service center. 90% of your GeekSquad/BestBuy Employees have no idea what they are doing. They are also only getting paid $10 / hr. Don't expect much. There are one or two in each store that generally know more then you'd expect. But they are also only getting paid $10 / hr. If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.
Are you stupid?
The last thing I want to worry about while landing an aircraft is being blinded.
While I am juggling frequencies through the communicatiosn system, reporting my position, looking for other aircraft...Watching the airspeed, altitude, attitude, throttle, gear, mixture, fuel selectors...glide slope...alighnment....etc
Now....Look at a large jet, with lots of people.. Do you want blinded piltos who get blinded, or experiance vertigo.. and end up wtih a large jet crashing into a school? a neighborhood..exploding..Killing hundreds in the plane..hundreds on the ground..
I'm sorry.. Use your fucking head. This is not something to screw around with.
We loose old school tapes.. We gain half-life 2.. i'm happy.
I work at Best Buy and often sell copies of Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office to home users. Infact, I sell about one a day myself alone... Consider the other employees also. When we do sell it though, it's not the box on the shelf (those are empty) the real ones are locked up in a glass case. Not that I support Microsoft in any way shape or form, but people do actually buy it. debian > xp
The way I look at it, this could be a very good thing.. From what I've witnessed currently the gaim development team is busy with many things, and cannot focus on one or two certain features.
Now that It has forked off the developers that are interested in this will have the time to do the one thing they WANT to do, not a bunch of others.
The way I look at it, it is kind of like the introduction of the assembly line, a group will be very skilled at one task and not be working on and assembleing all the other features.
Quite frankly, This is one feature gaim is really lacking. With the introduction of broadband services in the home, video and voice is extremely popular.
It's hard to get someone to try linux when their main tasks cannot be performed.
This is a very good thing.
Purchase your laptop at Best Buy with an extended performance service plane (3 years). If your battery fails, Best Buy will mail you a new one.. (i'm a instore tech @ best buy)
That's just because of the way they advertise. The space isn't hidden. They are just using fake numbers 1000 instead of the real 1024. You aren't very smart are you?
If windows xp pro was $45 to the home builder. I'd be less hesitant to purchase a copy for my gaming use. All other use is with Linux... *hides from SCO*
Your posting on slashdot, and you restored to a VCR? What the hell?
.. etc. Would work a hell of a lot better, and wouldn't be ghetto. Plus you already have the tools to do it..
Jack your stereo into your computer, compress it into mp3. Throw the Mp3 on whatever you'd like
I am an in-store repair tech for Best Buy (store 14 rochester, mn) . We used a software package called PC Certify. I've had a lot of experiance with it and as far as locating hardware problems it is quite sucessful.
In all the time that I've ran it, Only once did it not detect a hardware problem when the ram was faulty. Every other time It's been great at locating ram, motherboard, processor, and hard drive issues.
I would highly reccomend it to anyone who is dealing with diagonsing computers. It's great for the hardware side of things.
As far as the price of it, I wouldn't know.
Who gives a shit if a Linux user wrote it? If a Windows user wrote a virus to attack Linux the news articles wouldn't be saying "Microsoft Users are Evil. Attacking innocent Linux Users".. They would be.. "Linux is Inseccure and worthless" ..
If you don't want viruses to spread, don't have users running as adminstrators as default. Don't write worthless code.
Microsoft is just asking for it, as is SCO.
The music services that charge per song are never going to take off. Users simply do not want to pay $1 for every song they download. This is for several reasons.
First off, You are downloading a digital file, It's not the same as going to the store and purchasing a CD in a case and getting something physical out of it.
Any person would much rather go to the store, probably get a better price, and get a hard copy of it. Not some proprietary music format that you'll loose the next week because your sibling installed some virus from MSN Messenger.
These services are just a way for teh RIAA to distract people. They know it won't take off, and so does everyone.
They can have feeling, they can encourage the public. We put a robot on Mars!! Who cares, A robot just needs sunlight, That's not an accomplishment.
We put a MAN on Mars, That's an accomplishment, and a man sees, feels, and can confinscate for problems instantly. A man wouldn't see so much shit his memory would fill up and have to have NASA restore him.
Sending a man to mars would be the step in putting humans in space. Humans in space are the ultimate goal, Is Star Trek full of robot human represenatives?
I work at Best Buy and sometimes will be in the wireless department. I don't hear people coming in saying that they want a simple phone and hate all the extra features.
People come in excited about the camera phone concept, perhaps you haven't seen it, it's cooler then you'd think.
So 99% of the people out there want the features, Afterall the features are very affordable.
Who gives a shit?
Seriously, If the screw holds the drive in place, It works. Hell, I've done it with tape before.
Would you rather of had the tech spend the time in educating himself in screws, then educating himself in hardware/software? The screw holds the damn drive, I'd buy it.
Just because they may be straight out of high school, doesn't mean much. The employeer isn't going to hire someone that isn't qualified at all.
Infact, Straight out of high school you have extremely fast thinking and dedicated to spending hours a day working on assignments.
Hell, We need kids straight out of high school to work for Nasa, maybe they could write software for rovers that don't die for reasons that shouldn't ever occur.
It seems like to me that it wouldn't be all that reliable. You've got four 250 gig hard drives packed into the smallest space they could. Scary.
They also mention hooking several of them together, that means if you hook even as many as 2 of them together, you are 8 times more likely to fail then a standard drive. I'm sure they are also using the cheapest drives and technology they can possible use to make a profit at that price.
Don't think this is the wave of the future.
You don't think that this disparity is because of the ability of these companies to differentiate the cost legitimately? There is large fixed cost to be amortized in providing wireless infrastucture over such a large country, with such low population density.
Here in Vermont we have the same problem with electricity - it costs a lot when you have few customers per mile of wire (or even wireless miles). For the national utilities (like Verizon Wireless and the wired long distance carriers) they lose money on rural areas in order to provide the same bundle to all customers within the country. In rural Alaska all your long-distance calls come over satellite to ground stations that might serve 1000 people who are paying 6.2 cents a minute for long-distance!!!
Always look for a rational reason before you complain too much about conspiracies.
Why does everyone make such a big deal out of Sony's backwards compatibility with PS1. PS1 didn't even HAVE good games. Crappy frame rates, low replay abilities. Seriously. If that's Sony's only arguement is "i want to play my old games" then what the hell? Chances are if they have the old games, they have the old console too. Am I missing something?
I dont know but IMO a smaller/thinner notebook is a very specialized product for a small market. I personally have a Dell Inspiron 4150 and I think it weighs in around 5-7lbs, but I think it is a perfect weight/size. When you go smaller you start to lose drives (ie, cdrom, etc..), I/O connections, and also the laptop is so light that if you *accidentally* snag your power cord then its to the floor w/ the laptop. I hate the devices that are too small... PDA/phones that try to be laptops (or laptops that try to be palm/small sized) are less user friendly.
... before putting too much stock in tree-hugger predictions. :)
s _quote05.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeche
Yes, yes, it's just an opinion, but it's very interesting and thought provoking. It helped me understand (somewhat) the motivation behind the truly wacko environmentalists.
NASA needs something to help it change, and providing it a vision besides LEO would be a vast improvement. I don't know how many times I read that NASA starts a project to design a replacement for the Shuttle and then it gets cancelled. The Shuttle was designed in the early 1970s. And they want to keep flying it for another 10+ years?
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
TFA states that what they've created is a matrix of silicon islands connected by molybdenum MOS transistors to automate batch testing of carbon nanotubes (about 2000 at a time). Yes, they look for I/V curves, but the CNTs are being tested as two-terminal devices (e.g. diodes) not three-terminal devices (e.g. transistors). At least, they're not laying claim to it (though you can bet they would like to). Their more modest (!) goal is to characterize the fabrication process in hopes of achieving higher yields of semiconducting (vs. metallic) CNTs.
There will definitely be a few problems with productization; molybdenum's not something you want to get anywhere near a commercial fab, and that big blob of CNT growth catalyst is a bit of a disaster. But this looks like a very nice bit of engineering.
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Why cant we just get rid of the icons and by doing so cut down the size of the selector and simplly have a listbox of pre-defined locations to save files?
Also it would be good if that list could be changed by editing a configuration file, maybe an XML file?
It's big news because like someone else said, they're the first samples we've ever gotten that didn't come from the moon, and aren't inter-planetary dust particles. Plus, they're actually -returned- to earth, and not just measured/observed like all the other previous satelites have done. Wild 2 is presumed to be composed of the same substances that were present at the begining of the universe, and will contribute to a better understanding of how everything was back then. Since it's mostly just a dirty snowball floating in space, it's presumed to have been relatively unchanged for billions of years. The scientists will go wild over actual samples of particles that are this old. What's also cool, is that the same stunt helicopter guys that they used in the matrix will be the ones that snag the returning samples's capsule/heatshield out of the air over utah. My dad is the V.P. of Civil Space at lockheed martin (this project was under his management), so the family and I got to go and watch the final approach and the turning of the satelite (not that we could see anything other than people at workstations at JPL and Waterton) and see the first images. It was kinda neat to see all the scientists at JPL get excited that they were receiving data. And cooler to see the engineers here in Denver breathe a sigh of relief that it worked, and that it didn't get nailed by a rock going 36,000 miles an hour.