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Well, it looks like earlier predictions of Circuit City’s demise were only slightly premature.  They’re now struggling to hold on and will start easing their pain with the cut of up to 150 stores. This, of course, would slash thousands of jobs with it.  Circuit City presently has 715 stores in the United States and another 772 in Canada.  My take - too little, too late.

Oh, and just so we don’t forget, their stock is down almost 8% today and resting at a whopping 35 cents.  For those that are counting that’s down over 90% this year.

Geek

Another sign of the times… or another admission that corporate (and main street) America isn’t ready for Microsoft Windows Vista?  A spokespoerson for the company is reportedly confirming in an email to InformationWeek that is is pushing the downgrade extension all the way to July 31, 2009.  Pretty big admission from a company that continues to tout the success and power of Windows Vista.

~geek

In what may simply be a sign of the times, it looks like Circuit City is on the brink of going under.  Their stock (CC) has fallen below $.50/share, which is never a good sign.  The pull-out of Blockbuster - which didn’t seem like a good marriage to me - probably means that there are few suitors for one of the few remaining legacy natin-wide electronics chains.

I will be sorry to see them go, although personally I feel that their service in recent years has declined faster than their stock price.

~geek

There has been so much hype over the past few days about the as yet only partially announced Blackberry Storm that my haead is spinning.  Here’s what the guess is so far:

1. RIM is apparently soon to release a new touch-screen competitor to Apple’s wildly successful iPhone.
2. The media believes this will be called the Storm and whether it’s ready for prime time is still open to debate.  More people than not think it’s probably not ready for release and that the software is quite buggy.
3. The “exclusive” US carrier of the Blackberry Storm will be Verizon.
4. Verizon “announced” (soft announced) the Blackberry Storm on their website at http://www.verizonwireless.com/storm on September 16, 2008.  That same day they removed the coming soon page that outlined details and collected user information from people interested in the product.
5. The community at large assumes this is bad.

That, of course, is only a small bit of what the community is saying and even the defacto kind of Blackberry news, BoyGeniusReport.com is suggesting that someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.  Personally, I’ll opt for the other consensus - there is a new phone coming out - it’s not ready - Verizon announced it too soon - and they’re worried about the competition.  A lot of people are leaving Verizon and Blackberry for the iPhone.  It’s that simple - they need to keep their customers - especially in these difficult financial times - and their customers want new, better, and more powerful handsets.

So what do you think??

~geek

I should have known it would never last, but I was very optimistic when I purchased an HD-DVD player from Wal-Mart last year for the outstanding price of $99.99.  I justified it by saying “Microsoft is behind this,” and thinking that worst case I could play regular DVDs on it, too.  Unfortunately, I believe that the final nail has been placed against the pine top of HD-DVD’s coffin.

Wal-Mart has officially announced that they will no longer stock or sell HD-DVD media by June.  Their HD offering will continue to support the increasingly popular Blu-Ray, and they’re not alone.  Netflix and Best Buy are also pulling HD-DVD from their offering, effectively ending any chance the format had of success.  So, if the consumer hasn’t spoken, the retailers have.  They’ve picked their format and like it or not the consumer is going to have to suffer the consequences.

As always, I would love to know your thoughts.

~geek

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done.  After a variety of different frustrations - even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security - I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better.  Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant - it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me.  OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

CTRL-C and CTRL-V have been around for a long time now - years in fact - and I believe that people have become accustomed to being able to take a piece of information that they’ve already entered and put it somewhere else without having to re-enter text.  From an input tool like that of the iPhone, this is a no-brainer, and I can’t believe that it’s not there already.  Hopefully the rumors will come true and Apple iPhone users will be copying and pasting happily sometime in the near future.

~geek

Chalk another one up for the Apple legal team.  A press release was issued from Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher today.  It read as follows:

December 20, 2007 - PRESS RELEASE: Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, said “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

My thoughts are pretty simple - someone gave him some information that they shouldn’t have and pissed off Apple.  He lost.  Too bad, so sad.

 Geek

Aston Martin and Bang & Olufsen have announced a “creative and strategic partnership” that is set on revolutionizing luxury automobiles. The press release states that designers, engineers and specialists from both companies will be working closely together in the future.

This could mean a variety of things, but I suspect what it means is that B&O will be putting their sound technology and aesthetics into the Aston Martin product line.  Not sure how I feel about this, but it will be be very interesting as both companies are already well known for their high-priced eye-candy.  And, of course, if they would like me to demo and review any of their products, I would be more than happy to do so.

~geek

I will admit to being a fan of Palm.  Despite everything, I want them to succeed, because I think that they were ten years ahead of everyone else in their thinking.  Unfortunately, I also believe that they’re now years behind the competition and that sticking to their form-factor has limited their success in some senses because they haven’t gone away from the style that made them successful in the beginning.  Changing the color just wasn’t enough for most die-hard techies.

On the plus for them, though, Verizon is now carrying and marketing their 755P smartphone that will allow Verizon users to get their fix of this now aged phone.  Thanks, but no thanks.  Too little, too late in my mind.

~geek