Cheap and Quanitiy ALWAYS beat quality!

[1sty]

THis crap is getting on my nerves!

Rant

I see this crap all day long in the pro AV market where these assclown IT guys buy complete POS $600 projectors off of the net and then spend the next year justifying it as that was all they needed. The truth being that they have absolutely no clue what they are doing and they are used to a terrible 27" walmart TV yet have a $700 computer monitor but a projector somone how can magicly display both signal types well enough as far as they are concerned. Mean while:
- The marketing department can't understand why everytime they meet about a new logo or advertisment, the colors seem to be completely off. Resulting an almost all promotion going out late or incorrectly as now the colors match the projectors horrible DLP display engine.
- The training department wonders why no one is learning anything even though they have to turn off all the lights and close all the windows any time they show a tape which causes 1/2 the class to fall asleep. But Dell or Infocus says its 2000 lumens so it must be bright enough. Of coarse the 2000 lumen is a all but completely ficticous value that only could even possibly exist on the computer input and the video input has NO chance of ever going near that intensity.
- The CEO's pissed that the projector likes to over heat when he is in the middle of a 4 hour presentation which looks like complete ass since his laptops XGA output which can't exceed 15 feet is running almost 100 through a radio shack VGA cable that is picking up a crap load of noise and then getting scalled down to the s*** tastick projector's SVGA resolution so not only is the picture hard to read if using less then a 30 point font but its jittery to the point that people get motion sickness watching the damn thing.
- Administration wonders why the install looks terrbile as there is a cable running all the way from the table, tapped down to a floor and then goes into a hole in the wall.
- And accounting can't figure out why they are spending $350 every 6 months for new bulbs for a $600 projector..

Now I also want to know when the HELL did hi-end became an inclusive term of everything except the dirt cheapest POS s*** that exists. If one more person in the audio sections tells me that they are looking for "just something basic" and not "competition level" I am going to F-ing snap. Like I honestly though their cheap ass shopping at best buy was interested in spending the $20K to create a compedative system. Not to mention the fact that they are going to be listening to an IPOD which throws the entire possibility of sound quality into the crapper.

I hate people.
Sorry for the rant

 

[vindication]

slice their throats

 

[chuyler1]

Quality products exist on the market...but not in quantity, and they certainly are not easy to find among the fog of s*** products. However, everyone is interested in some sort of cheap product and that is why they are there.

Take computers for instance. If you buy a $2000 computer now it will be obsolete in 3-5 years. If you buy a $500 computer now it will break in 2 years, at which point you buy another $500 computer. You still make out even though the product was a piece of junk. It wasn't as fast as the $2000 computer but if you can manage it works out to be a good deal.

Now you may have a thing against using a piece of junk and that is fine. It is up to you to research the market and find a computer that is not a piece of junk and it is up to you to pay top dollar for it.

The same applies to car audio. There is plenty of cheap stuff out there and frankly, it all pretty much sounds the same. Should I buy speaker A for $80 or speaker B for $90? Just buy the cheap one because they both suck yet are better than stock.

Now if you are like me, you will research car audio components to death and you'll pay the extra money for the right component. But when it comes to my computer...I'll buy something cheap that satisfies my needs without breaking the bank (which I intend to break when I buy my next car audio component).

This market strategy only becomes a problem when the buyer is mislead into thinking he or she is buying a quality product when they are in fact buying a s*** product. In your case Craig, the IT people simply don't know how to do the research to buy what their company needs. Those cheap projectors work fine in my office where we simply display spread sheets and design specs. Our IT guys don't get complaints when the color sucks. But obviously they are not good enough for advertisement designers.

With regards to 'high-end'. It's only a term that people use to emphasize that they don't want to buy more than they need. A $3000 projector is not high-end if you need it. I would consider a 3GHz computer high-end but a pc gamer would consider that necessary. Its all a state of mind.

 

[neoturner]

I build data models for a very large bank. We have just been tasked with building a 170 GIG cube model with drill through capability to a relational data store in 6 months. My department has 4 people. We have two developers, me and one other guy.

Our largest working model is 10gigs and it brings the network to it's knees. My boss made this comittment 3 weeks before he quit the company (that was last week). He is a programmer. He knew there was no effing way. He was a bad manager.

They are basically requesting every piece of information we have on our customers for the last 3 years. They want it to consolidate all the way up.

That is a CRM system. If you hired a company to build it they would send in 10 consultants and MAYBE have an estimate in 6 months. There isn't a relational reporting data store that can process the information the way it has been requested. We don't have enough hardware to even store it let alone test ANY retrieval on that scale.

I haven't had a raise in 4 years which doesn't bother me cause they pay for any software training I want but I am not signing my name to that much information and being held responsible for what I get paid.

F that.

Why are CEO's making system decisions. Why doesn't anybody ask the developers what is possible.

much better.

 

[Greg S]

Don't feel too bad Craig. I deal with the general public morons for A/V on the consumer end. At least twice a week I get some fool coming in who wants to see a front projection system for the house. I ask him a few questions, like if it for a theater room or the family room, of course it's for the family room, so that means two walls of windows and no back wall as that is the kitchen. I tell them about the light output and explain that they would be better off witha big TV, or if they really want it a plasma for TV viewing and a drop down screen for night time movie viewing. A few still insist that it'll be fine and I'm being snobby so I put on the $3000 Sharp DLP projector, which is actually pretty good, and let them see it, then I turn the lights on, all 300 watts of them and then let them see what it looks like with mild light levels in the room and tell them to imagine it with sunlight. If they still insist then I let them see the $10,000 Sony SXRD projector which could actually be used in natural light and still be viewable. They love it and want it then have a heart attack when they find out the price and htat still doesn't include a sceen and install. most of them go out and buy a projector and screen combo from Costco try to slap it up in the family room and call me a week later wanting to have me send our crew out to make it look better. Then I get to explain, again, to them that it can't look any better due to the same reasons I told them when they were in the store.
I'm so much happier when I get people who actually will listen to what I tell them and either buy a TV or build a theater room. I even help them design them if they'll commit to buying the product from me and not just try to milk me for information. I mean come on, I'm paid when I sell things not to teach you how to do my job so that you can go buy it off the internet, do your own damn research and train yourself or pay me for my knowledge.

Damn it, now you got me ranting.(poke)