Apparently CompUSA is closing 100 of its 229 stores.
This isn’t a big surprise to me. It seems that these days almost everyone knows that “CompUSA” is synonymous with “crappy customer service.”
I actually went to my local CompUSA store today to buy a couple of graphics cards that I found on sale on their online blowout list. A 7800GT for $80 and a 6600GT for $50? (as well as several other cards) Count me in! When I went to the store, of course they had none of the graphics cards on sale that I was looking for. (Their site still says they have 2 of each in stock) I went to an employee who looked up the cards. He told me that they had sent the cards back to the manufacturer on February 7 and hadn’t even removed them from the website. Now that’s plain ridiculous!
Screw you CompUSA!
posted by scoot at 7:46 pm
This is a Mac user vs. PC user comparison from the September 1996 issue of MacAddict. (this issue was actually the premiere/first issue of MacAddict) I recently found it when going through some of my old MacAddict magazines. It doesn’t look a lot different from the “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” Apple ads of today, at least in my opinion!
Some people seem to think this was an Apple ad. This was not actually an Apple ad - it was part of a MacAddict article. During this time Apple was really struggling and this particular issue of MacAddict seemed to have a lot of Mac fanboy-ism in it.
posted by scoot at 7:41 pm
For many of us, strict DRM makes it undesirable for us to download music/movies/TV off of paid download services. Steve Jobs recently acknowledged this issue in his open letter to the music industry.
However there’s another major issue that the music/film industry is overlooking: the desirability of the products themselves! As this guy pointed out, you can download a XviD HDTV encode of your favorite TV show off of a BitTorrent tracker for free, and it is of far higher quality than the one that you can buy on iTunes. It’s not much harder, either, unless you need to convert it to play on an iPod or other video device.
Whenever I miss a TV show, I will usually either download a copy off a torrent tracker or watch a copy recorded on my SageTV PVR. TV shows from these sources don’t have DRM, meaning that I can watch it on whatever device I want, and of course they are higher quality as well. I watch my TV with SageTV or my Zen Vision:M, two things that I could not do if I downloaded TV shows off iTunes. Even though downloading TV shows off BitTorrent is still a gray area, if I want to stay legal, I can still record TV shows off my PVR and stay completely legal.
And, of course, it’s the exact same thing for music. First of all there’s the issue with DRM, which everyone knows about. First of all there’s some music that you can’t download on paid download services. An example is how everyone got so excited when there were rumors that Apple would sell Beatles songs on iTunes. It’s ridiculous! And also you can download higher-quality rips off torrent sites than you can download off of iTunes. Most albums can be found in 320 Kbps or VBR MP3, and some can even be found in FLAC lossless format.
RIAA/MPAA, you’ve got a long way to go.
Original link:
http://the-ish.com/blog/?p=18
posted by scoot at 4:04 pm
