As a previous employee of Best Buy / Geek Squad, I never read a longer, more annoying thrown together post as yours. As a former employee, all I see there are the remains of corporate brainwashing that BBY tries to throw on you, and you are buying into it. Organic growth, serving the customer's needs, etc etc. BBY's definition of serving the customer's needs is lying to them or NOT helping them. Management encourages salespeople who know their stuff to NOT act like they do, to direct people to Geek Squad for services. In store techs? Paid miserably @ $11/hour. It makes me sad to see grown men getting these wages when they could be professionally employed, making much more.
Don't goto Best Buy unless you know what you want (they hate those types) and don't buy into their service garbage. It's a huge sham.
Granted, I only came into gaming around the time of the debut of Nintendo (blame my young age), but I've lived through enough next gen systems to see the pattern with these writers.
The same type of articles surfaced during the debuts of Genesis and SNES, as well as Saturn and Playstation.
Then there was Playstation 2 and Xbox. Oh no! PS2 has shiny helmet graphics and Xbox can go online! PC gaming is doomed!
As we can all see now, these early predictions mean nothing. These writers just say it every time so that, in the extremely unlikely event that their predictions are true, they can flaunt it.
The fact of the matter is a lot of the demos shown at E3 were on dev-kit hardware, lots of promises are made that aren't kept, and while the consoles' debut titles will like trump PC games, at least in the bells and whistles (read: shallow graphics) department, PC gaming isn't going anywhere. A game like World of Warcraft, Gamespot's Game of the Year, will not likely surface in anyone's living rooms any time soon.
That's not to say that I'm not interested in the hardware - some very special advancements have been made, especially with multi-core processing, that should drive costs down across the board, in gaming consoles and PCs, and should produce some really cool results.
I started dropping off my card to people telling them to call me if they wanted a better deal.
Dropped your card off to people while you were in Best Buy? If I saw that, I woulda gladly asked you to leave our store. Just because you don't think we are qualified to work on machines (most of us are), doesn't give you the right to solicit in our store. We get plenty of people like you who talk the talk and, yes, it sucks that big business is taking over a normally small business market in personal consultation, but live with it and don't bothor me while I'm working.
As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period.
Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned.
He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings.
Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.
with the very likely (lack) of security on this deployment, every wardriving script-kiddie who wants to cause some havoc will be there having a grand ol time.
As Dave Molta's article states http://informationweek.mobilepipeline.com/ 60300027
muni WiFi is a bad idea. Many here are mentioning the waste of money, etc. But what about the choice of technology? The article says they want to deploy this with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi was NOT designed as a wide area network technology. You only have 11 channels to work with and, realistically, only 3 because they overlap in the spectrum.
What about interference with user's home networks? It's bad enough that every Joe Computer has a wireless gateway set up in his room, but now those default-configured devices are going to suffer from an a/b/or g network flyin around the whole city.
The limitations of WiFi will cause a terrible quality of service, probably equating to slow dial up speeds with many disconnects as multiple users are trying to share this limited bandwidth.
Not to mention that it is difficult to imagine that the government is actually going to support and maintain this deployment as they should. Seems as if they are discussing setup costs and not Total Cost of Ownership.
Muni-WiFi cannot work if they stick to current 802.11 technologies. WiFi was built for very small LAN deployments. As there are only 11 channels for 802.11, interference is going to pose a big problem with home users' own WiFi networks, as well as technologies that run in the 2.4 GHz band of the spectrum.
If they choose to use a technology more suited for a WAN deployment, like the unproven WiMax, this is more of a political move than anything else. The government is trying to look like it is hip with technology and attract the tech-savvy crowd. However, such a deployment is not good for competition, as governments receive special tax-exempt status and would either take many companies out of the market completely, or lend a huge advantage who whomever the government contracts. And what happens when the technology / project goes belly up? In the normal market, companies go bankrupt. The government, however, will just throw (and waste) more money at it.
I know Macs are (well, were) more expensive, even though they're really not, when you finally jam that ugly cheapass Dell with enough video cards and sound cards and disk burners to make it comparable to a Mac that comes with all of it, standard.
This just shows how uninformed the author is. I know he is trying to be funny, but he shoots himself in the foot by referring to multiple video and sound cards - even if it is sarcasm, it's not funny or informative.
Truth is, I can buy an ugly cheap ass Dell - it will have a super fast CPU and a big hard drive - and spend under $500 for it and, in some cases, may come with an LCD monitor. Sure, if I want to play some games, I'd have to plop a better video card in that budget level machine, pushing it up to maybe $1000 if I bought a really nice card and doubled the ram.
So, if I may ask, when did a Mac EVER come standard with gaming-level video for $1000?
Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics.
--Mark Twain
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/12/10481/1427
Interestingly enough, a search for "miserable failure" leads www.michaelmoore.com at the top, instead of Google's standard George W. Bush biography
They certainly are competing with Google on response time.
I probably could walk cross-country to Microsoft and submit my search on paper quicker than this. Or maybe use the cans connected by string.
Those have to be some of the best special effects I've ever seen in an independent film.
Don't goto Best Buy unless you know what you want (they hate those types) and don't buy into their service garbage. It's a huge sham.
The same type of articles surfaced during the debuts of Genesis and SNES, as well as Saturn and Playstation.
Then there was Playstation 2 and Xbox. Oh no! PS2 has shiny helmet graphics and Xbox can go online! PC gaming is doomed!
As we can all see now, these early predictions mean nothing. These writers just say it every time so that, in the extremely unlikely event that their predictions are true, they can flaunt it.
The fact of the matter is a lot of the demos shown at E3 were on dev-kit hardware, lots of promises are made that aren't kept, and while the consoles' debut titles will like trump PC games, at least in the bells and whistles (read: shallow graphics) department, PC gaming isn't going anywhere. A game like World of Warcraft, Gamespot's Game of the Year, will not likely surface in anyone's living rooms any time soon. That's not to say that I'm not interested in the hardware - some very special advancements have been made, especially with multi-core processing, that should drive costs down across the board, in gaming consoles and PCs, and should produce some really cool results.
Actually, Geek Squad was its own company and BBY bought it up
Dropped your card off to people while you were in Best Buy? If I saw that, I woulda gladly asked you to leave our store. Just because you don't think we are qualified to work on machines (most of us are), doesn't give you the right to solicit in our store. We get plenty of people like you who talk the talk and, yes, it sucks that big business is taking over a normally small business market in personal consultation, but live with it and don't bothor me while I'm working.
As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period. Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned. He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings. Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.
with the very likely (lack) of security on this deployment, every wardriving script-kiddie who wants to cause some havoc will be there having a grand ol time.
See you all in Chicago!
As Dave Molta's article states/ 60300027
http://informationweek.mobilepipeline.com
muni WiFi is a bad idea. Many here are mentioning the waste of money, etc. But what about the choice of technology? The article says they want to deploy this with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi was NOT designed as a wide area network technology. You only have 11 channels to work with and, realistically, only 3 because they overlap in the spectrum.
What about interference with user's home networks? It's bad enough that every Joe Computer has a wireless gateway set up in his room, but now those default-configured devices are going to suffer from an a/b/or g network flyin around the whole city.
The limitations of WiFi will cause a terrible quality of service, probably equating to slow dial up speeds with many disconnects as multiple users are trying to share this limited bandwidth.
Not to mention that it is difficult to imagine that the government is actually going to support and maintain this deployment as they should. Seems as if they are discussing setup costs and not Total Cost of Ownership.
Sure, changing the channel is easy, but in reality there are only 3 channels (1 6 and 11) that can work simultaneously without overlapping.
Yeah I forgot to mention the overlap. Very true, once you start overlapping, you get much reduced QoS
If they choose to use a technology more suited for a WAN deployment, like the unproven WiMax, this is more of a political move than anything else. The government is trying to look like it is hip with technology and attract the tech-savvy crowd. However, such a deployment is not good for competition, as governments receive special tax-exempt status and would either take many companies out of the market completely, or lend a huge advantage who whomever the government contracts. And what happens when the technology / project goes belly up? In the normal market, companies go bankrupt. The government, however, will just throw (and waste) more money at it.
This just shows how uninformed the author is. I know he is trying to be funny, but he shoots himself in the foot by referring to multiple video and sound cards - even if it is sarcasm, it's not funny or informative.
Truth is, I can buy an ugly cheap ass Dell - it will have a super fast CPU and a big hard drive - and spend under $500 for it and, in some cases, may come with an LCD monitor. Sure, if I want to play some games, I'd have to plop a better video card in that budget level machine, pushing it up to maybe $1000 if I bought a really nice card and doubled the ram.
So, if I may ask, when did a Mac EVER come standard with gaming-level video for $1000?