CompUSA is closing all of its stores (Finally!)

Read the whole story HERE.

PC Retailer CompUSA plans to close all its stores after the holidays, part of a sale of its assets to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm.
CompUSA, owned by the Mexican based firm Grupo Carso SA, has 103 stores in 68 markets.
Reports said that Gordon Brothers would look to sell individual stores in certain markets and close those that it could not sell.

In recent years, CompUSA has struggled against other big-box retailers such as Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Internet-based companies such as CDW (NSDQ:CDWC ). Earlier this year, CompUSA had tried to ignite some interest with small businesses by reaching a deal with Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) to offer the services of Microsoft’s Small Business Specialist Community (SBSC) to CompUSA’s small-business customers.

Under the plan, CompUSA would refer customers that needed services to the 3,750 Microsoft SBSC partners in the United States, providing the partners had registered as a CompUSA TechPro Business provider.

A typical opportunity with CompUSA might have involved resolving a server or an application issue for a current customer or helping a new customer set up an office, said Gregory Geodakyan, managing partner at SoftNet Technology, an Iselin, N.J.-based solution provider, in an interview with CMP Channel earlier this year.

“This is a good market. Until this point, it’s been up to us to shake the business out of [CompUSA's] business services guys for the leads. Now with the formalization of the program and with Microsoft throwing some might behind it, it will raise the profile of the program,” Geodakyan said.

Many solution providers also used CompUSA as an alternative sourcing option, but it was clearly not enough to support the company, which had already closed more than 100 stores earlier this spring as part of a restructuring.

CompUSA was founded in 1984 and rose to national prominence under the guidance of Nathan Morton. As chairman and CEO, Morton led CompUSA from two stores and $60 million in sales as SoftWarehouse to its standing as a multibillion-dollar national retailer in less than five years. He was posthumously honored as a member of CRN’s Industry Hall of Fame in 2006. He succumbed to cancer at the age of 57 in 2005.

Read the whole story HERE.

Summary: Just in case you encounter the famous “An Unknown Error Has Occurred” dialog in Adobe Illustrator CS2, the solution is to install / reinstall Adopbe Photoshop CS2.

Description: Adobe Illustrator CS2 suddenly will not successfully save files containing type. When attempting to save, an error box pops up after typing the file name and clicking the save (or save as) button.  This box reads, “An Unknown Error Has Occurred.” If you convert the type to outline, then you can save.  This is obviously some sort of font issue.

What doesn’t fix this error:  Go ahead and try the suggestions posted on the internet, but the problem will not be reesolved.  Adobe even has a knowledge base article on the error, but none of their 4 solutions actually solve the problem.

• Saving to a different file format doesn’t work.
• Saving without PDF compatibility doesn’t work.
• Recreating the transparency flattener doesn’t work.
• Repairing and / or re-installing Illustrator CS2 doesn’t work.
• Deleting the preferences file doesn’t work.
• Copying the CMAP directory from Acrobat Reader v8 doesn’t work.
• Deleting adobe font”.lst” files doesn’t work.

Known solutions: The only known solution for fixing this problem is installing or re-installing Adobe PhotoShop CS2.

Analysis:  The “Unknown Error” error is probably one of the most frequent and debilitating error that occurs in Illustrator.   Don’t waste your time trying the other options you find on the net.  THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO INSTALL PHOTOSHOP!  I really don’t know why and I don’t have the time to spend analyzing why this fixes the problem.  I’m just glad it does!

PROBLEM: Tonight when I visited the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) Access was prevented by my security software. The offending action that would not allow me to load The Drudge Report was: tags.expo9.exponential.com. The drudgereport.com would not load without this site being loaded.

SOLUTION: I modified my .HOSTS file to redirect tags.expo9.exponential.com to my internal loopback address 127.0.0.1. When I reloaded my hosts file I was able to load drudgereport.com because I fooled the system into thinking that it was allowed to load, when in actuality, it wasn’t. Now I can view Drudge without having my privacy and security compromised by whatever tags.expo9.exponential.com does.  You can bet it has nothing to do with news.

SUMMARY:  exponential.com has several brands that are involved in online advertising and statistics. These brands aree:

Tribal Fusion® Premium CPM Advertising

FullTango™ Performance Marketers

LeadGenuity™ Lead Generation Specialists

EchoTopic™ Contextual Advertising

RECOMENDATIONS: the spyware running on Drudge seems to be using an image tracer that logs every time that image is loaded by a visitor. This records referrer information, IP address, ISP host and even geographical location. Because many of these services run on so many web sites, the folks at exponential can readily profile you and recreate you as more of you information such as sites visited, and referrers enter their database, and you become a virtual person within their profile.

Make sure that you create entries in your .HOSTS file for tags.expo9.exponential.com, for *.exponential.com, and for www.exponential.com.  Redirect these offending domains to 127.00.1.

Taking a page out of the American Government’s play book the Chinese are implementing a big brother plan of their own. The only difference is that they don’t lie and say that it’s for Homeland Security.  It’s for the same purpose as the American Government: to control, track, and oppress the population so that government power remains unabated.

From the article:

August 12, 2007
China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People
By KEITH BRADSHER

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

Read the entire article HERE.

An interesting controversy exists concerning allowing comments on blogs. Recently, Michelle Malkin finally updated her blog and made the decision to allow comments. Some people like this person think that only losers post comments to blogs, but I think the ability to leave comments is a positive feature of the online media.  I enjoy leaving comments and I enjoy receiving comments.  The only downside is the enormous volume of comment spam and the high percentage of unacceptable content left in the comments.  Kudos to Malkin for enhancing her blog. I think it only makes her great blog even greater.

Is It OK that Google Owns Us?
Google’s continuously raked over the coals regarding the massive amounts of PII (personally identifiable information) it collects, what it does with it, how long it retains that data and what the company might do with it if its merger with DoubleClick goes ahead.

That’s all been ratcheted up to fever pitch over the past few weeks, with two new privacy headlines: complaints being voiced about Google’s new Street View service’s photographs getting too close for comfort and Privacy International’s having flunked Google on its privacy policies and procedures in a report published June 9.

The fury boils down to one question: whether or not it’s OK for Google to own us.

Make no mistake, Google owns you. The ways in which it owns you are laid out in a complaint filed by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and other privacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s proposed merger with targeted advertising company DoubleClick. Here’s the list of data that Google collects and retains and the technologies through which the company gets it, from the complaint:

* Google search: any search term a user enters into Google;
* Google Desktop: an index of the user’s computer files, e-mails, music, photos, and chat and Web browser history;
* Google Talk: instant-message chats between users;
* Google Maps: address information requested, often including the user’s home address for use in obtaining directions;
* Google Mail (Gmail): a user’s e-mail history, with default settings set to retain emails “forever”;
* Google Calendar: a user’s schedule as inputted by the user;
* Google Orkut: social networking tool storing personal information such as name, location, relationship status, etc.;
* Google Reader: which ATOM/RSS feeds a user reads;
* Google Video/YouTube: videos watched by user;
* Google Checkout: credit card/payment information for use on other sites.

Read the entire article by clicking HERE. 

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In fact, there’s twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is “image spam,” containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don’t even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now.

“Traditional methods have failed spammers, so they are resorting to more and more sophisticated tactics,” said Dave Mayer, a product manager at IronPort, which makes anti-spam products.

The tactics are working. There are 62 billion spam messages sent every day, IronPort says, up from 31 billion last year. Now, spam accounts for three of every four e-mails sent, according to another anti-spam firm, MessageLabs.

Image spam is a big part of the resurgence of unwanted e-mail. By using pictures instead of words in their messages, spammers are able to evade filters designed to detect traditional text-based ads. New computer viruses have contributed to the uptick, also, particularly a surprisingly prolific Trojan horse program called “SpamThru” that turns home computers into spam-churning “bots.”

Read the article HERE.

We’ve been hearing about the enhanced security features of every new Windows version since WFW 3.11!!  The problem is that, while some security flaws are corrected, an entirely new generation of flaws are created and promptly exploited by all those hackers out there that don’t seem to have anything else to do.

“Microsoft claims that by addressing the social aspect of IT attacks—in which even the smartest users can be duped into launching malware-laden attachments or clicking unknown URLs—Vista will improve PC security significantly.”

Yeah, sounds like our politicians who keep promising to fix the same problems that they create and then act like they’ve done something wonderful.  Microsoft (like the politicians) will continue to deliver low quality garbage as long as the people tolerate it.
Read the article HERE. 

Here’s the situation: drive letters change. I made the mistake of making a Windows XP Pro SP2 installation where a USB flash drive just happened to be in the unit. The system assigned the flash drive as “C,” the CDROM as “D” and the System Drive as “E.”  The system worked fine, but it was so confusing that it was almost unusable. To resolve this, I reinstalled Windows.  all seemed OK, but Office 2003 would not install because of the 1327 Invalid drive error.

I checked all the shell data settings and none of those seemed to affect the situation, but I suppose that it’s best to double check these values:

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
2. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
5. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

What really solves this problem, however, has eluded many.  Microsoft support notes on this are useless. The general “techhie” consensus is that the drive letters should all be restored to their original undesireable sequence (Sorry, that doesn’t fly with me).

Unlike the hordes of pseudo techs that try to act cool, but they can’t fix a problem if their pathetic geek-wanna-be life depended on it.

Navigate to this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Delivery\

Change the LocalCacheDrive for each entry in this key.  Office 2003 will now install.