Things I Overheard While At Fry's

Today, I took a trip to our local Fry's. I was looking for a few things. Among them was male-male BNC adapters. I couldn't find them since Fry's crap is unorganized and in about 15 different locations. I pulled a worker from 'the heard' and asked him where the connectors were. He pointed me to the aisle and said, "they're in this aisle." I asked if they have packs of the connectors to which he responded no. Long story short, I bought a couple 10-packs. Worthless.

I can never get over some of the stuff I hear while there. I'd like to share a couple things I overheard today.

Conversation 1. Sales Rep: No, you need to buy the higher quality HDMI cables. It will give you a better quality picture and you won't see video latency with these cables.
Rebuttal 1. HDMI is a digital transmission. Unlike analog, for the most part, you won't have a "better" picture with a more expensive cable. The video is basically the same technology used in DVI and it uses TMDS, Transition Minimized Differential Signaling, which enables robust clock recovery at the receiver to achieve high skew tolerance for driving longer cable lengths as well as shorter low cost cables. In other words, buy the cheaper cables.

Conversation 2. Customer: I don't know why my friend still uses DSL, it's crap. Sales Rep: I agree, cable is a better product.
Rebuttal 2. I've personally had cable and DSL. Back when I had cable, it was crap 1Mbp/s service that went out ever time the wend blew. It was a shared pipe that often experienced slowdowns at peak usage times due to poor management. I saw it progress up to 6Mbp/s with better infrastructure and uptime. I made the switch to DSL when it came available. It was cheaper and just as fast as the cable at the time. It made several advancements and I would put it next to cable any day. In all, the customer was obviously biased without facts to defend his statement. I seriously hope that the sales rep that agreed made his sale.