RadioShack Gone

A long agonizing death. Too bad they did not capitalize on this maker thing.

Cheers

Den fredag den 6. februar 2015 kl. 01.22.24 UTC+1 skrev Martin Riddle:

I doubt they could compete with choice and price of the numerous online stores and as a result the only thing people would buy is couple of resistors or something like that because they need them _now_ I don't see how it could become a business

-Lasse

They had excellent kits and learning materials there for a while. Then they blew the PC market away:

Most don't even have resistors. They made money on cell phones but everyone, from Walmart to the kiosk in the center of the aisle in the mall is in on that deal. They've been dead for decades but finally realized it.

They so lost their way. The free battery program was bonkers. When I was going past a store and in no rush I'd go collect a free PP3... they got not a thing for them. Not a very sensible business plan.

NT

In a dynamic economy, new companies kill old companies. Expensive things get cheap.

Then why am I paying 80 bucks a month for "broadband" Internet speeds that would make residents in Pakistan laugh?

What proportion of your income goes to broadband? Theirs?

NT

It used to be cheaper to record your data on a magtape, buy an airline ticket, and carry it coast to coast, as compared to paying the long-distance costs to send the data by modem. Quicker, too.

On a sunny day (Thu, 5 Feb 2015 15:06:27 -0800 (PST)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

Radioshack disappeared here many decennia ago (eighties?). Big shops chain after big chain is in trouble here. People buy online. ebay is cheaper, shipping is free. The occasional bad product on ebay still leaves a positive balance.

The "Fix 1500" scheme was amazing - the beatings will continue until morale improves!

I could not imagine living in a society where it was legal to fire people by mass email with a 30 minute notice period.

As the old saying goes, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of tapes."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Because your ISP has a virtual monopoly?

I don't know about that scale but back in the 1980's intercontinental VLBI was done by shipping van loads of VHS tapes to the main central correlator facility from each of the contributing big dishes.

What is scary is that today we have tiny micro sD cards with capacity that make the storage chips in the original Star Trek positively clunky.

Nah- it's these friggin top heavy dinosaurs managed by types who have NONE of the skillset it took to create the enterprise in the first place.

Such as the federal government, for instance. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

With some "unlimited" wireless data plans, if you go over their bandwidth cap it's still cheaper to buy a hard drive and FedEx it overnight than pay the overage fees.

And that's going to be the new de-facto standard; Verizon is giving up on rolling out FiOS in favor of cheaper to implement, "unlimited" but capped, slow as a dog peer bandwidth-sharing garbage wireless Internet for a ridiculosly high price - all while they incessantly lobby Congress to do away with net neutrality, because broadband is too dangerous for children and the disabled, and they need website access to be bundled into a tiered price structure to protect them.

Which would all be fine, as a publically traded corporation they're nominally free to do whatever they think will maximize value for their shareholders. Except it's not at all what they promised when they took the hundreds of billions of tax breaks and incentives from the government years ago in exchange for a mandate to construct a broadband network that would not make Bulgarians giggle.

Occasional??? Ebay if full of junk, pure and simple. It's the occasional decent product that is the less common feature.

Try buying an Ethernet cable that doesn't have 28 gauge wire in it. Try buying an micro SD card adapter that doesn't jam up the second time you use it. I'm sure they have good products too, but how can you tell? Price alone is no guarantee of quality.

We're using a tiny 128 GByte Class10/U3 microSD card in our Wayback Machine waveform playback box. They used to be expensive.

We're averaging about 12 MBytes/sec, pouring big FAT32 files directly into a FIFO in the FPGA.

When you think about the old sci-fi books and movies, hardly anyone anticipated handheld computing or huge wireless bandwidths. Or Twitter and video games. RatShack made some bad guesses, too.