Archive for September, 2007
Best Buy Acts Shocked That Consumers Don’t Understand HDTV
September 25th, 2007
According to CNNMoney.com, 90% of consumers surveyed in a study commissioned by Best Buy, are confused about high definition televisions. Why the country’s #1 electronics retailer should act shocked that consumers don’t understand what they’re not being properly educated about is beyond me. Education starts with the sales staff and for anyone who has ever stepped foot in a Best Buy, it’s quite clear the sales staff know next to nothing about the electronics industry or technology.
I recently went shopping with my dad for an HDTV. Best Buy was one of the places we stopped by and was by far the worst shopping experience of the stores we went to. Half the HDTV floor models weren’t even working, for the ones that were, the signal they were sending to the TVs appeared to be below standard definition, and the sales people were easily stumped when asked relatively simple questions that I’m sure most consumers ask. They were even stumped when asked questions that don’t relate to technology at all and instead involve delivery policies.
Instead of commissioning studies and then lamenting the results, maybe Best Buy should actually put some time and money into training their sales force in a visible and thorough manner.
Sphere: Related ContentAmazon Launches MP3 Downloads
September 25th, 2007
Amazon.com today unveiled their MP3 download service which is clearly an attempt to compete with iTunes’ dominance. The catalog right now is limited to only Universal Music Group and EMI (I’ve still yet to figure out how consumers are supposed to know what artist is on what label). Anyway, it looks pretty promising. The prices are cheaper than iTunes’ DRM versions of songs and the MP3 format means better compatibility with the majority of portable music players; not just the iPod. It will be interesting to see how much business Amazon.com MP3 gets and whether they’ll be tracking if users are sharing music downloaded from the site.
Sphere: Related ContentGetting Ready for the TV Season
September 11th, 2007
If you’re wondering when your favorite shows (and new highly anticipated shows) will be premiering, check out BrentEvans Geek Tonic’s list of upcoming TV premiere’s.
Mac Crash
September 9th, 2007
Last Monday night, I returned from a Labor Day vacation in Tahoe. Before I went to bed, I ran a full backup of my MacBook Pro using SuperDuper (I try to back up my Mac once a week in the event of a crash). When I woke up Tuesday morning, I tried to quit SuperDuper but it appeared frozen. I then tried to shut down the computer but the entire operating system appeared frozen (the mouse still moved but nothing would respond). So, I forced a power off by holding down the power button. When I powered the computer back on, all I got was a gray screen with a blinking folder icon with a question mark in the middle. My Mac was hosed!
After work on Tuesday, I took my MacBook Pro to the Genius Bar at the Apple store. The Genius took a look at it for about two minutes and then told me that the computer was no longer under warranty (it had been a year and two months since I bought it) and that the problem was most likely with the hard drive or the logic board. He said if it was a hard drive problem, it would be much cheaper to have it fixed by a local repair shop than send it Apple and referred me to a local Apple-certified repair shop. I took my lifeless Mac in the next morning and a few hours later, they had a new hard drive in it.
When I got home, I installed the operating system from the original install DVDs and then went to find my SuperDuper drive image on an external hard drive. At first, I was a little confused how to restore the image and it took me a little while to realize I had to boot into the OS installer and then open Disk Utility from there. However, when I opened Disk Utility from the install DVD, I wasn’t able to drag the drive image (the user interface requires you to drag the image, there’s no other way to select it). After searching around for a bit online (I luckily had my work laptop with me), I found out that there’s a bug in Disk Utility on some of the OS X Install DVDs. Luckily I know my way around the command line so I opened the terminal and used Apple’s asr to restore the drive image using the command asr restore -s
The restore took about an hour and a half and when it finished, I rebooted my Mac and the OS immediately loaded. I’ve been using the restored image for a week now and everything seems to have worked perfectly with the backup and restore except for some font caching issues which were easy to clean up using Yasu.
I’m just glad that the backup and restore process worked so flawlessly. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Back up your computer often!
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