World

April 2, 2010

hoqo CNET News Daily Podcast- Microsoft on Zune, W

Filed under: clothing — admin @ 8:46 am

Wrapping up Road Trip 2009: A traveler’s post-mortem

Also on Friday’s podcast: Microsoft announces family pack pricing forWindows 7, a grad student is found liable for swapping music files online, Google lobbies for laws on book copyrights, and we check in with reporter Daniel Terdiman’s now-finished yearly Road Trip feature.

Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She’s also one of the hosts of CNET News’ Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she’s a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica.


BU student found liable in music file-swapping case



Microsoft prices Windows 7 family pack

CNET News Daily Podcast: Microsoft on Zune, Windows 7 upgrade pricing

CNET News reporter Ina Fried got a chance to speak with Microsoft Entertainment division president Robbie Bach, and finds out more about the company’s vision for theZune brand, including bringing it to theXbox 360. Bach also talked about the latest project, Natal, and bringing the already-behind schedule Windows Mobile 7 to market next year.

Today’s stories:

Google pushes for new law on orphan books

Listen now:Download today’s podcast

Microsoft’s Bach on Zune, Natal, and Windows Mobile

7jis CNET News Daily Podcast- Looking ahead to iPh

Filed under: Ugg Boot — admin @ 8:45 am

Sonic lasers–a shot heard ’round the world



Microsoft veteran launches Twitter search engine

(Almost) waterless washing machine on its way

CNET News Daily Podcast: Looking ahead to iPhone 3G S Day

What kind of crowds will show up foriPhone 3G S Day Friday? CNET News reporter Erica Ogg talks about some of the factors likely to affect the turnout.

Apple: iPhone OS 3.0 plugs 46 security bugs

Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET’s Crave, covers gadgets, games, and most other digital distractions. As a co-host of the CNET News Daily Podcast, she sometimes tries to channel Terry Gross. E-mail Leslie.


Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Microsoft pitches $40 mouse for Netbooks


Listen now:

Microsoft wins deal to sell NBC ads

That and other headlines of the day on Thursday’s CNET News Daily Podcast.

iPhone 3G S hits stores Friday: Will the crowds follow?

Teen cheating morphs with new tech, poll shows

April 1, 2010

wffm Clearing the Hurdles_860

Filed under: shoes — admin @ 1:51 pm

Responsibility for achieving wage gains in global sportswear supply chains is more widely distributed than it might be in a national industry producing for domestic consumption, because global sportswear production takes place in a context of:

Freedom of association and collective bargaining

If the sportswear industry is serious about changing the way business is currently done, there is an urgent need to take immediate steps to address these three central issues.

Home-based workers stitching soccer balls in Jalandhar, India told Play Fair researchers that piece rates have remained stagnant for the last five years, despite local inflation rates last year estimated at between 6.7% and 10%. Depending on the type of ball, a home-based hand stitcher makes between US$0.35 and US$0.88 per ball, completing two to four balls a day. Home-based workers also face a total lack of income security. During months when orders are low, households are often plunged into debt to money lenders.

Concrete Actions and Measurable Targets

Three Hurdles to Overcome

Play Fair researchers also found that wages for sportswear workers are still well below a local living wage. Even where governments raised the legal minimum wage or sportswear brand buyers attempt to impose limits on overtime, Play Fair researchers found evidence of employers finding new ways to evade their responsibilities.

A small sample of the actions and targets that can be taken include:

Sportswear brands should require suppliers to adopt a policy on freedom of association and communicate this to the workers in the form of a written “Right to Organize Guarantee.” This should be done at a minimum of 30% of a brand’s suppliers by Vancouver 2010, and 100% by London 2012. By Vancouver 2010, sportswear brands and retailers should provide measurable incentives to factories which have a Collective Bargaining Agreement with an independent trade union. Such incentives could include: Preferential order placement; Long-term, stable supply contracts; and A measurable CBA premium in unit pricesSportswear suppliers must ensure that, by Vancouver 2010, at least 95% of workers engaged in the company’s core business are employed under open-ended or undetermined duration contracts, and that: Any use of fixed duration contracts is in response to a clearly defined plan justifying their use; Any workers on fixed duration contracts are provided the same salary and benefits accorded to permanent workers performing the same work; Once a short-term employee has been hired on a fixed duration contract twice by the same employer, or for two years, the employee is automatically hired on an undetermined duration contract with the third contract. By Vancouver 2010, buyers should report publicly on the company’s policies for supplier/vendor selection, management, and/or termination, including new source approval process, linking of supplier CSR performance with sourcing decisions, and strategy for managing impact of exiting factories. Multi-stakeholder initiatives should require this of their members. Buyers should commit to the attainment of a living wage in at least 25% of supply factories by London 2012, by: Collaborating with other buyers (possibly through a multi-stakeholder initiative) to identify suppliers where participating buyers collectively control more than 75% of production on a regular basis; Facilitating the establishment of negotiating structures to enable factory management and trade union(s) to consolidate the living wage element into the existing pay structure at those factories; Individually negotiating with factory management on measures needed to meet a living wage target proportional to each buyer’s share in production. The Challenge

For these reasons, a coordinated effort to increasing wages in the sportswear industry must be developed. It should focus initially on major suppliers and relatively stable factories where a critical mass of buyers have a long-term relationship with the supplier factory and all are willing to take steps to ensure that workers receive wages that fall within the range of living wage estimates for the region.

Across the global sportswear industry, workers manufacturing sports apparel, footwear, and soccer balls all report the same kinds of problems. These findings are not new. A particular business model, lack of incentives, competing interests, institutional inertia, and other factors have often negated even the best efforts to fix the endemic problems that continue to plague this industry.

The Maquila Solidarity Network is a labor and women’s rights organization that supports the efforts of workers in global supply chains to win improved wages and working conditions and a better quality of life. They authored this report on the behalf of Play Fair 2008. Recommended Citation:

Suppliers and/or buying agents using multiple factories in one or more countries make choices about which factories receive which orders, affecting the viability of one or another facility. Buyers also, either by decision or simply by neglect, fail to support facilities that have been more compliant with labor standards -especially those with collective bargaining agreements -leading to closures. Because we are dealing with global supply chains, a narrow assessment of one isolated facility’s economic viability is not sufficient to rationalize a closure. A true assessment of a facility’s economic viability must also take into account the order patterns from buyers, whether prices paid by buyers are sufficient to support labor rights compliance at a facility, and the finances of the parent company.

The rash of factory closures that has accompanied industry restructuring over the past few years contributes to a climate of fear amongst workers and suppliers, feeding the myth that any efforts to improve conditions will only lead to more job losses. When workers face employment insecurity, they are less likely to take steps to challenge abusive practices.

Although comprehensive global data across the industry is not available, in recent years, unions and labor rights organizations have reported an increasing use by supplier factories of successive short-term employment contracts and third-party employment contract agencies.

Despite more than 15 years of codes of conduct adopted by major sportswear brands, such as adidas, Nike, New Balance, Puma and Reebok, workers making their products still face extreme pressure to meet production quotas, excessive, undocumented and unpaid overtime, verbal abuse, threats to health and safety related to the high quotas and exposure to toxic chemicals, and a failure to provide legally required health and other insurance programs.

Soccer ball stitchers in Pakistan, for example, report that they receive between US$0.57 and US$0.65 for each ball they produce, a rate that hasn’t changed in six years even though the consumer price index rose by 40% over that period. Garment workers in Cambodia earn an average of US$70 to US$80 a month, including overtime and bonuses -not enough to provide a worker and family with a decent standard of living. In Bangladesh, where massive worker protests in 2006 led to a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage to US$24.30 a month, the real value (after inflation) of their monthly wage is now worth even less than the 1995 minimum wage. In Turkey, the prevailing industry wage in the garment sector is estimated to be less than half the living wage.

While a few brand-sensitive sportswear companies are willing to discuss how to minimize the negative impacts of restructuring and consolidation, the vast majority refuse to even consider whether they have an obligation to justify their decisions to workers or communities that will be negatively affected.

For example, when the Chinese government raised the minimum wage in Dongguan province in order to account for a skyrocketing inflation rate on basic goods like food, employers at many of the athletic footwear factories studied by Play Fair found ways to nullify the increase. Some employers raised production targets, thereby reducing or eliminating production bonuses, a significant portion of worker incomes. Others introduced new charges for food, lodging or other services. Some of the workers interviewed now receive less income than before the minimum wage increase.

But there is another side to the story. Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, the Play Fair at the Olympics Campaign -the biggest international worker rights mobilization of its kind ever undertaken -brought the world’s attention to the underside of the sportswear industry: the abysmal working conditions endured by the young women and men, and children, who make the shoes, jerseys, footballs and other items in contract factories and subcontract facilities around the world.

The problem is that the sportswear industry is addicted to flexibility. In the prevalent sportswear business model, retailers, brands, and transnational suppliers seek to maximize their ability to change not only the styles and products being produced, but the factories or countries in which the goods are being made, all in pursuit of the quickest, most reliable, best quality and, of course, cheapest production.

    Unstable buying relationships; Difficulties with national wage setting mechanisms due to footloose sourcing and investment; Lack of respect for freedom of association and collective bargaining; and, Low price expectations by consumers, brands and retailers.

    By linking their brands with the Olympic Games, as well as other sporting events like the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) 2008 Euro Cup, sportswear companies hope to reach for the gold in sales, market share and brand recognition. And if the past is any guide, these major sporting events should prove extremely profitable for some of the major players in this global industry.

    Workers face considerable obstacles when they try to exercise their right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, including:

    The lack of respect for workers’ right to freedom of association and to bargain collectively impedes worker efforts to resolve workplace problems as they arise and to negotiate long-term improvements in wages and working conditions.

    Just as workers at the bottom of the supply chain have been forced to bear the lion’s share of risks associated with the industry’s demand for flexibility, workers have also been forced to shoulder the costs associated with consumer demand for low prices. 

    Clearing the Hurdles

The 2008 Beijing Olympics represents a golden opportunity for the brand-conscious sportswear industry to associate its products with the cherished Olympic brand. For a costly, but manageable sponsorship or licensing fee, a sportswear company can infuse its athletic shoes and clothes with the lofty Olympic ideals of fair play, perseverance and, most importantly, winning.

The dominant attitude and practice in this industry is so biased against the development of trade unions that we believe a more proactive approach is needed to create a positive (rather than just neutral) climate for unions. We believe that companies should adopt a positive approach towards the activities of trade unions and an open attitude towards the organizational activities of workers.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that sportswear factories would seek to “flexibilize” their workforces. As long as the global system of sportswear production remains unstable, there will be a drive to download the bulk of the risk involved in competing for business and orders. Those that can no longer download the risk -the workers at the bottom of the supply chain -end up bearing the brunt of the instability in the system.

Play Fair’s research also indicates that despite increasing work pressure and excessive working hours, worker incomes remain, on the whole, well below a living wage. While industry leaders have been willing to take action in some cases to ensure that workers receive the legal minimum wage or prevailing industry wage, there has been very little action to date to ensure that workers’ wages are sufficient to meet basic needs.

Based on interviews with over 320 sportswear workers in China, India, Thailand, and Indonesia, as well as reviews of company and industry profiles, published and unpublished reports, newspaper articles, web sites, and factory advertisements, researchers from the Play Fair network found that while some brands have developed labor rights monitoring and compliance programs and taken action on a number of issues and cases, substantial violations of worker rights are still the norm for workers in the sportswear industry.

“We have no savings so we have nothing left during emergencies,” said a 50-year-old soccer ball stitcher. There are few if any safety nets available for homeworkers: sickness or an accident can amount to a catastrophe. “I have lost my wife’s gold, which I gave as security to a moneylender and could not repay,” he said. “Once I even rented my cooking gas cylinder to arrange some money for a health emergency suffered by my wife. The situation is similar for all of us. One of my friends even sold his blood to get some extra money to meet an emergency.”

Photo by Maquila Solidarity Network.

Rather than merely rehashing a litany of abuses, this report seeks to identify solutions to these persistent workplace problems, focusing on three central hurdles that, if not overcome, will inhibit the industry’s ability to make real progress on other issues in the future.

Growth in precarious employment



Flash forward four years, with the Beijing Olympics upon the horizon, and it’s time to ask, “What, if anything, has improved?”

Maquila Solidarity Network, “Clearing the Hurdles” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, August 20, 2008)

Four years ago Play Fair asked the industry to take up the challenge of making real, substantial improvements in labor standards compliance by the Beijing Olympics. As the opening flame was lit in Beijing progress toward these goals was limited at best. If the sportswear industry -buyers, suppliers and the multi-stakeholder initiatives that include them as members -is truly serious about addressing the issues outlined in this report, it must demonstrate its willingness to undertake concrete action to meet measurable targets to ensure that when the next Olympic Games come around in two and four years’ time, workers can expect real improvements in their conditions rather than two or four years’ more talk about vague commitments.

Closures should only occur when a factory is no longer able to sustain itself economically, and all other options to rescue the business have been exhausted. But it’s not always easy to disentangle the responsibility for economic decisions that affect the viability of a particular factory.

In some cases, Play Fair researchers discovered, workers are not even receiving the legal minimum wage, despite working 12-13 hours a day. As well, in a number of the factories studied, there was evidence of employers falsifying factory records to mask the fact that employees were being forced to work excessively long and illegal hours and were not receiving the legal overtime premium pay.

    Dismissal of union leaders and supporters; Refusal by factory management to recognize and negotiate with unions; Closures of or reduction in orders to unionized facilities; Movement of production to jurisdictions where freedom of association is legally restricted; and, Management promotion and selection of unrepresentative “worker committees.”Factory closures

    What Researchers Found

    The Fourth Hurdle: a living wage


The growing use of short-term contracting and other forms of precarious employment is denying workers their social security and other legal entitlements, discouraging worker organizing, and undermining the enforcement of labor regulations, which too often do not apply to non-permanent workers.

To seriously address the lack of freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively, precarious employment, and the impacts of factory closures, and to raise incomes to a level that meets workers’ basic needs, sportswear companies will need to take a series of concrete, measurable actions in close collaboration with multi-stakeholder initiatives, trade unions, non-governmental organizations, and governments.

hlcd Clampi Trojan stealing online bank data from

Filed under: shoes — admin @ 1:50 pm

Stewart has identified 1,400 Web sites in 70 different countries out of 4,500 sites being targeted by the Trojan attack. The sites include banks, credit card companies, online casinos, retail sites, utilities, ad networks, stock brokerages, mortgage lenders, and government and military portals.

Clampi has spread quickly through Microsoft-based networks in a worm-like fashion in recent months, Stewart said. It uses domain administrator credentials that were either stolen by the Trojan or based on an administrator logging into an infected system. It then uses a Windows executable SysInternals tool, “psexec,” to copy itself to all the computers on the domain, he said.

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.


When the infected computer is used to access a targeted banking or other site, the log-in and other information is stolen.

“This type of Trojan, banking Trojans in general, are the biggest threat to home computer users and businesses doing banking online,” he said. “You can’t rely on antivirus. At some point you are going to visit the wrong site and they’ll get a Trojan on your computer.”

Clampi, also known as Ligats, Ilomo, or Rscan, infects computers in drive-by downloads when people visit Web sites hosting malicious code that exploits vulnerabilities in browser plug-ins Flash and ActiveX, said Joe Stewart, director of malware research for the Counter Threat Unit of SecureWorks.

Because it can take days or weeks to get a sample of the latest version of the Trojan, antivirus protection is often delayed, arriving after a PC is already infected, according to Stewart.

Stewart recommends that consumer and business Web surfers use a dedicated computer for their banking and other sensitive financial online activities that is separate from the computer where e-mail is accessed and Web surfing is done. People should also be careful using removable drives on those isolated computers as Trojans can spread that way. 

Clampi Trojan stealing online bank data from consumers and businesses

SecureWorks’ intrusion prevention software doesn’t stop computers from getting infected but it prevents the stealing of the data by blocking the encrypted traffic that it deemed suspicious, he said.

Even so, the losses from Clampi are starting to be publicized. The Trojan was behind the theft of nearly $75,000 from Slack Auto Parts in Gainesville, Ga., according to the Security Fix blog at The Washington Post.

Joe Stewart, SecureWorks' director of malware research for the Counter Threat Unit, has been researching the Clampi Trojan for two years.



Clampi also serves as a proxy server for criminals to anonymize their activity when logging into stolen accounts.

Based on the techniques they are using, Stewart said criminals in Eastern Europe are believed to be behind Clampi.

By now, the criminals “probably have way more accounts than they can actually clean out,” Stewart said.

(Credit:Elinor Mills/CNET)

The Trojan uses three types of encryption and sophisticated virtual machine-based packing technology to disguise itself in order to get through antivirus filters, according to Stewart.

LAS VEGAS–Hundreds of thousands of Windows computers are believed to be infected with a Trojan called “Clampi” that has been stealing banking and other log-in credentials from compromised PCs since 2007, a security researcher said on the eve of the Black Hat security conference.

0tpi Citrix to reduce staff by 10 percent_5063

Filed under: clothing — admin @ 12:44 am

The application-delivery infrastructure specialist also reported financial results for the full 2008 year. Annual revenue went from $1.39 billion in 2007 to $1.58 billion, a rise of 14 percent. Net income was $178 million, compared with $214m for 2007.



At the same time, Citrix announced that it was starting a “restructuring program and steps to reduce (the company’s) headcount by approximately 10 percent.” That is equivalent to approximately 490 staff.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Stephenson said that the other two Xen divisions–Xen Server and Xen Desktop–grew by 40 percent over the same quarter last year.


Citrix saw a slight decline in part of its Xen virtualization business. Of the three Xen divisions–Xen App, Xen Server, and Xen desktop–one, XenApp, saw a fall in sales of three percent in the fourth quarter, compared with the same time last year.

Overall revenue for the fourth quarter increased from $400 million (300 million pounds) to $416 million, the company said on Wednesday, even though revenue from product licenses fell by 9 percent. Revenue from license updates was up by 13 percent, and online service revenue grew by 18 percent compared with the same quarter the previous year. Net income for the fourth quarter was $60 million, calculated on a GAAP basis, a drop from $63 million.

Citrix to reduce staff by 10 percent

Citrix Systems, the business software company behind the Xen hypervisor, said it plans to cut 10 percent of jobs despite being “pleased” with its fourth-quarter results.

“Overall, the Xen business looks very healthy,” James Stephenson, Citrix’s area vice president for the UK, Ireland, and South Africa told ZDNet.co.uk. “What we saw was the same as everybody else, which is the business doing well until the third quarter this year.”

“I’m pleased with our fourth-quarter results and performance for 2008, especially in the face of an extraordinary worldwide environment,” said Mark Templeton, chief executive of Citrix, in a statement.

March 31, 2010

Ercg Behind Microsoft’s open-source jitters_4282

Filed under: shoes — admin @ 2:19 pm

Because Microsoft, more than any other company, has built a massive distribution channel through its partners, one that is seriously threatened by the vastly more efficient open-source model: the free (as in price and is in license) download.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, once told me that Microsoft knows how to compete with 1 cent but fears 0 cents, and so it seeks to impose a patent tax on open-source software in order to raise its price to a level at which its highly efficient licensing model can compete. Open source, however, refuses to cooperate, continuing to spread itself through free downloads with no proprietary strings attached.

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.


George Orwell might pay “Homage to Catalonia,” but why should Microsoft care about a tiny deal in a tiny market?

I’ve asked before why Microsoft, of all the enterprise software companies, stands alone in accusing open source, and specifically (though not exclusively) Linux, of stealing intellectual property. Why don’t we see Oracle, IBM, and other big software companies deriding open source?

Microsoft is a distribution model. It’s certainly not an innovator. Open source challenges Microsoft because it offers an alternative distribution model, one that is more efficient.



It’s not just license costs that are lower, either. It’s the cost of entry: Microsoft software generally requires other Microsoft software to run. If you want to run SharePoint or BizTalk, for example, you’re going to need Windows, SQL Server, etc. Open-source solutions, however, work with other free and open-source databases, application servers, and operating systems.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

The answer came from my friend and Alfresco CTO John Newton while we were talking yesterday:

Microsoft, in other words, is being Microsofted, and the Redmond giant doesn’t like it. Even as Microsoft has dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of computing, so, too, is open source reducing Microsoft’s price even further, beating Microsoft at its own game.

Behind Microsoft's open-source jitters

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently struck a deal with the president of the Generalitat de Catalunya in Spain, which had earlier made a commitment to move off Microsoft and other proprietary software to open source, to get free Microsoft touch-screen PCs and other technology.

Why does Microsoft struggle with open source? Because open source is a dramatically thinner, fitter version of Microsoft’s own partner-dependent distribution model. If open source were a vendor, Microsoft could compete. It struggles, however, to compete with a phenomenon.

We talk often of open source as a development methodology, and so it is. But I agree with John: the open-source distribution model is arguably much more subversive to Microsoft’s market hegemony than its development model.

druu Bees Swarm and Nowak Speaks- The Art of Extra

Filed under: boots — admin @ 2:18 pm

This event is cosponsored by Foreign Policy In Focus, Split this Rock, and SALSA. A suggested donation of $5 would be appreciated for the travel and lodging expenses of the Beehive Collective but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can register for the event here.

The Beehive Collective is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for its stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for its dedication to the revitalization of the old Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in their small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing since 2000, at full speed! Their most recent campaign is exposing the cost industry’s strip mining injustices in the Appalachia.

Bees Swarm and Nowak Speaks: The Art of Extraction

The progressively spectacular art of the renowned Beehive Collective is coming to DC to join forces with the powerful social justice poetry of Mark Nowak. The theme of this blend of sight and sound display will address the true cost of coal and how regular people are challenging its impact.

Mark Nowak, Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, will read from his recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary.A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, WV miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.


acbk Bedlam breaks out at Circuit City_5504

Filed under: shoes — admin @ 2:18 pm

On Friday, Circuit City said it was liquidating all of its stores. Then, on Saturday, there was a big liquidation sale at my local Circuit City–up to 30 percent off. The checkout line was almost as long as the lines you encounter on a typical Saturday at Fry’s–the mostly California- and Texas-based sprawling electronics warehouse. (The line actually snaked to the back of the store.)

Understand that I’m not giving Fry’s any backhanded praise. Fry’s is so big, so unwieldy, and, in some respects, its sales policies so lax that, as a rule, I avoid it (unless I need a nuts-and-bolts item like a Torx screw). 

Bedlam breaks out at Circuit City

After Best Buy mega-stored Circuit City to oblivion, the hapless retailer has quickly gone to pieces.

Inside, it was close to pandemonium. (The manager would not let me take pictures inside the store.) Consumers swarming everywhere: every one of them with at least a few breathless questions and scant employees to provide answers. And consumers seemingly snapping up anything that wasn’t nailed down. (I’ve never seen so many HP wide-screen monitors in one checkout line.)



Ask your casual consumer, who is familiar with both stores, why Circuit City failed and the answer is often summed up in two words: Best Buy. Others will say Amazon–but that’s another story.

One male employee in the section I was browsing, spent most of the time I was there (about 15 minutes) pleading ignorance and searching for a manager who never (apparently) materialized.

My local Circuit City (in southern California) on Saturday had lines inside as long as Fry’s–though that isn’t necessarily a compliment

Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones’ Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times’ Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec.


A female employee I talked to outside (she was on break) said no one knew it would happen–until it happened.

But Fry’s is still a going concern. Circuit City isn’t. The store that I visited on Saturday had been taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the liquidator. I interviewed (very briefly because she was on checkout duty) the “store manager” who said that, as of Saturday, her new immediate boss was the person from the liquidation company. That person, in effect, was now running the show, she said.

My take as a consumer? The sheer scale, selection, organization, and relative attention to display detail that one senses at Best Buy proved to be a huge disincentive for going back to Circuit City–and CompUSA for that matter. Statistics don’t lie. I have been to Best Buy dozens of times in the past two years. I’ve been to Circuit City–even though it’s closer–maybe six times, and always as a last resort.

(Credit:Brooke Crothers)

What was ironic (and sad) was that I had been to this same Circuit City a few weeks before and an employee had boasted that this store would not close (in the wake of the limited nationwide store closings Circuit City had announced in November) and would be around for a long time.

fvhk Brandon Wood last ;week – Halos Heaven_1365

Filed under: Shoe — admin @ 1:50 pm 
Brandon Wood last ;week - Halos Heaven

B Wood went 5 for 14, hitting .357, over the last week. That’s 3rd on the team behind Spidii and Tush. Yes, it is a very small sample size, but encouraging none the less. I’m also psyched that all his hits were singles, including the suicide squeeze. That means either he’s shortened up his swing, or just getting lucky. Note also that he struck out only 3 times, the same number as Teixiera and Figgins among others.


Do you think Wood will continue to hit this week, or was he just a beneficiary of TX pitching? Discuss.



When Kendrick and Aybar went down, my reaction was that if either Wood or SRod could figure things out quickly, we’d be ok (or if one of our catcher’s bats caught on fire). So far, Wood is the man of destiny.

Nvql Brandon Wood Time ;Already! – Halos Heaven_80

Filed under: UGG — admin @ 1:48 pm 




Brandon Wood Time ;Already! - Halos Heaven

Is anyone else thinking it is time to see Brandon Wood in the lineup? Right now the Angels have 6 homeruns for the whole team. Brandon has 3 homeruns in 4 games languishing in Salt Lake. I for one would like to see him called up. He had a great spring and he’s taking off already in AAA. Why waste him there? There has already been a few games I would have like to see his bat. Just a thought for today.

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