A Public Statement Regarding Ubiquitous Encryption on the XMPP Network - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.txt

<comment><USER2> A simple comment to share Jitsi[1]. It uses XMPP but also many other protocols. It encrypt text/audio/video and even have a share and control screen feature.

I discovered it Friday. Our team will certainly use it as a secure replacement for Hangouts and Skype. My only complain is that it doesn't use my already existing gpg keys.

[1]: [https://jitsi.org](https://jitsi.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> The pidgin client/libpurple library is notably unrepresented.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the list seems impressive until you assemble a list of non-signatories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always use a .onion xmpp server. Moxie has a review of gibberbot somewhere on his blog and all its TLS failings

<comment><USER6> Looks like they disabled their faulty alternative trust manager, and are back to using the built in one:

[https://github.com/guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid/blob/50...](https://github.com/guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid/blob/5008029f33cbc330cbc0aa884e7ef8622a3dad42/src/info/guardianproject/otr/app/im/plugin/xmpp/XmppConnection.java#L166)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I respect the effort, this doesn't really do much about thwarting the NSA, assuming that's a big part of the reason for this. The suspicion is that they have the master keys anyway and can decrypt SSL/TLS at will.

<comment><USER6> Some clients use certificate pinning of known popular XMPP hosts. For example, ChatSecure (née GibberBot) on Android appears to use Moxie's certificate pinning for cert chains of a few well-known Jabber servers (like Google and Facebook's), so you will get a warning if they ever start presenting you with new certificates from a different CA.

The implementation leaves a little to be desired; the way it's implemented, any of the CAs for any of the pinned organizations could issue certs that could MITM you, but that's still a lot less than the usual default list of CAs in the system trust store.

<comment><USER8> > appears to use Moxie's certificate pinning for cert chains

Marlinspike and Perrin actually proposed TACK ( [http://tack.io/draft.html](http://tack.io/draft.html) ) which requires changes to TLS.

Certificate pinning is different ( simpler and less flexible ) and does not require protocol changes, the logic is held at the application level.</comment></comment></comment>


A Warm Welcome to Our New Team Member - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warm-welcome-our-new-teammember-malin-andersson <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.konvai.com](http://www.konvai.com) or [https://angel.co/konvai](https://angel.co/konvai)</comment>


NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html <comment><USER2> The "former analyst" in question is Russell Tice, who was terminated by the NSA in 2005 after "publicly urging Congress to pass stronger protections for federal intelligence agency whistleblowers facing retaliation" [1]. There's an interesting exchange from then-director of NSA special access programs Renee Seymour to Tice warning him against testifying on the NSA programs [2] about a half year later.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower) [2]: [http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf](http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That letter seems eminently reasonable to me.

<comment><USER2> I agree. It's interesting from a historical context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see somebody pointing out the obvious bullshit regarding the Utah facility's real purpose (content storage, not metadata).

What kind of iron do you need to run NLP on a day's worth of content (let's limit "content" to voice transcriptions from phone calls)? Suppose I want to pick out "bomb" in near real-time? How many $billions for total information awareness?

Even the best algo is going to produce false positives. At nation scale, that is going to be a massive QA/QC effort.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious about the storage media they might have... is it just plain old rotational harddrives? Who made them -- Seagate? Western Digital? It's curious that no word has come out from that front -- "wow, this customer is requesting a _LOT_ of storage devices... like, more storage space than what is available in the world".

And really, because of this I think the idea that they might have some in- house innovation is not so far-fetched. We started hearing a lot about inPhase Technologies and such about DVD-sized discs that could store upwards of 6 terabytes back almost 10 years ago, but it amounted mostly to vapourware. We do now have confirmed information from Seagate that they'll start shipping out laptop-sized 2.5" rotational drives that will be able to store around ~60 TB of data within the next 2-3 years. Perhaps NSA has been secretively working with them, if not just producing the devices for themselves?

<comment><USER6> Uncompressed, 1 hour of phone audio is only ~29MB (8KB/sec*3600s/h). Compressing it for storage can send that way down. Let's assume to 6MB. If every 300M Americans talked for an hour a day, that's only 2TB a day for call audio.

Edit: That's only one-way, so double. But compression can eliminate most of that, as there's usually only audio on one side of a call at a time. Anyways, even if I'm right within a factor of 10 or so, it doesn't really seem like a suspiciously high volume of disks.

(Disclaimer: I'm very drowsy just been woken up due to a datacenter coolant failure so maybe I miscalculated it.)

<comment><USER7> You're off by three orders of magnitude.

6 MB * 300 million = 1716 TB

<comment><USER8> You're right, but that's only the calls one way. It should really be times by 2.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+MB+*+300+million](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+MB+*+300+million)

<comment><USER6> See my comment about two-way. It wouldn't matter much as it's rare that both parties are speaking at the same time.

It's also possible that the compression techniques for long-term storage are vastly superior to realtime codecs. The lowest realtime voice codecs are 300-600 bits per second (they sound like shit), which is 213x compression (so an hour would be under a a meg).

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600bps*1h*300000000](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600bps*1h*300000000)

81TB a day. Again, this is assuming one hour of calls for 300 million people.

I did a quick search and found this snippet: "A telephia survey said that Americans average 13 talking hours a month – with the 18-24 age group averaging 22 hours."[1]

So that is under half an hour a day average. So, let's assume 300bps (lowest realtime voice codec I'm aware of), half hour a day, I'll stick to 300M people and we get:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300bps*30minutes*300000...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300bps*30minutes*300000000)

20TB.

So maybe I was only an order of magnitude off. Still pretty sloppy of me.

1: [http://www.accuconference.com/blog/Cell-Phone- Statistics.asp...](http://www.accuconference.com/blog/Cell-Phone- Statistics.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reposting this from a previous thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654))...

I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell.

After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...

"Almost immediately Erin Burnett, the host of CNN's Outfront, wanted to know how the government knew. Aren't phone calls supposed to be private? She interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent on May 1, asking:"

      Is there any way … they [the federal investigators] can
      try to get the phone companies to give that up … It's not
      a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way
      they can actually find out what [was said on the call],
      right, unless she tells them?

      Clemente:  There is a way. We certainly have ways in
      national security investigations to find out exactly what
      was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily
      something that the FBI is going to want to present in
      court, but it may help lead the investigation … we
      certainly can find that out.

      Burnett: So they can actually get that? … that is
      incredible.

      Clemente: Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being
      captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it, or
      not.

Source: [http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston...](http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston- bombing-investigation-reveals-government-surveillance-of-phone-calls)

CNN Interview Clip ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U))

CNN Follow-Up Interview ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc))

When I initially saw this on CNN, my first thought was, do they also have access to all photos and videos that are taken and transmitted online?

And if so, couldn't they stitch together a multi-angle montage from all the photos and videos taken at the scene of the Boston bombing (like [http://photosynth.net](http://photosynth.net)), rather than asking everyone to manually scour through their personal footage?

<comment><USER9> Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak?

Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching".

Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invisible hand. Those that united and cooperated survived and evolved, and those that refused to unite died off.

Jonathan Haidt has been talking ([http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt.html](http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt.html)) and writing ([http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan- Haidt/e/B001H6GAXW](http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Haidt/e/B001H6GAXW)) about how this was key to and accelerated civilization's evolution -- "it put everyone in the same boat."

This same phenomenon happens at the cellular level -- bacteria group to form mitochondria, and mitochondria to form cells, and so on, each time forming a superorganism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization)).

E pluribus unum ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum)) -- "out of many, one."

Ants, wasps, and bees are the canonical example of this, and the beehive is often used to symbolize this concept ([https://www.google.com/search?q=beehive+symbolism&newwindow=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=beehive+symbolism&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X)). The PRISM name even reflects the symbology -- a honeycomb is made up of prisms ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb), [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_prismatic_honeycomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_prismatic_honeycomb)).

For the last few hundred years, market forces have been the invible hand ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand)), and the corporation emerged as the superorganism. But overtime entropy increases and order erodes. Maybe PRISM is an attempt to reestablish order.

The NSA may see other benefits from PRISM leaking. For example, mining the world's communication data may or may not be practical today, but observing a system changes a system.

How will people's behavior change now that they know they're being watched? It would be easier to detect deltas than to mine the entire system. Turn on the lights. Roaches scatter. Targets reveal.

<comment><USER10> I've also wondered if perhaps Snowden is still on CIA payroll. Maybe the NSA didn't want this leaked but CIA did.

<comment><USER11> It's very interesting to think about if Snowden is actually a part of a larger group and is just the front man for leaking what they want out there, regardless of their motivation.

So far he's been presented as a lone wolf with assistance now from groups like Wikileaks but acquiring data on his own and initiating things up himself. But that may not be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So here's my startup idea:

Stenographically-encoded messages in high-def porn. It's secure communications with a built-in subscription model!

Porn accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and video doesn't compress too well. Get enough people exchanging messages in porn videos and all of a sudden, those listening in have a whole hell of a lot more bytes to sift through.

(I'm only half joking.)

<comment><USER13> Real terrorists have already been using that for a long time. (For instance, remember those media blurbs about lots of porn being found in the raid on bin Laden?) As such I'd bet they have infrastructure in place to detect such communications.

But in the same half-joking vein, some other problems:

1\. I recall reading that such stegonagraphically watermarked videos were pretty easy to detect using simple statistical analysis of the noise in the frames. With dedicated hardware for multimedia decoding cheaply and ubiquitously available, frames can be efficiently extracted and the additional number of bytes does little to slow them down. If the hidden data is encrypted, well, you could just do that without the porn.

2\. Unless you make it as easy as tapping a key to start communicating, it still does not remove a main barrier to widespread adoption of encryption, which is inconvenience.

3\. The problem with porn is, people will just end up paying more attention to the medium rather than the message.

<comment><USER14> I read some research about provably secure steganography , which claim that if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure steno, at least to the level one way functions.

So it is interesting if in reality there is a stego detection tool.

www.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/tc-stego.pdf

Btw one of the authors is Luis von ahn, the founder of duelingo, the language teaching/translation app.

<comment><USER15> > if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build > secure steno

That's a pretty big if though. I mean, if you miss one nuance the NSA didn't, then your scheme could be toast. At least in the high data limit.

<comment><USER14> You're right, that's a very big if.

Also, most of the research in the field has been done on black and white image, so it not directly usefull.

And come to think on it, if we're talking about image stego, what prevents the NSA from controlling the statistical distributions of output of cameras in such a way that stego will be noticed(even after some image transforms) ?

<comment><USER16> Maybe the answer is to have a program that adds low scale random noise to as many images as it can before upload to the internet.

It would be easy enough to make a one-click batch process, and would help provide cover noise for real communication channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So it's now in the realm of maybe-to-probable that the NSA has every domestic phone call on tape as well as some non-trivial sized chunk of all emails sent? Plus for sure has all metadata they can get their hands on? Plus cable taps on most (all?) internet backbones?

<comment><USER18> Maybe SETI should try a SETI@NSA

<comment><USER19> Are you suggesting that NSA should wire-trap the aliens too? :)

<comment><USER18> Obviously we need to know where the eggs are getting laid.

I mean before we cure cancer, figure out how the brain works and solve inequality all the alien eggs must be found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _> We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a way that none of our allies, even in Europe, have done. We have all three branches of government involved in overseeing the activities of the NSA..._

That a whistleblower had to reveal the programs, that Congress was largely unaware that any such programs existed, and that NSA personnel are content with lying to Congress about the programs pretty well contradicts that claim. Still, glass half full, I suppose it's somewhat encouraging that PBS is reporting on this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Am I he only one who read that bit about wire-tapping the Supreme Court judges? While unsurprising, that really seems to cross the line from counter- whatever to political manipulation.

<comment><USER22> Absolutely. It's starting to play "God".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Holy crap:

 _RUSSELL TICE: ...The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito 's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family._

If true, that's... mind boggling. What possible valid reason could the NSA have to secretly monitor the calls of a US Supreme Court justice? And his staff, AND family?

I really hope this allegation is false.

<comment><USER24> I hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused. The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've just contracted HIV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They throw out the claim (~4:10) the facility in utah could store "about 100 years of the world's communications".

Has anyone done the math? How much could that facility store. If they were indeed recording word-for-word content, how many days/months/years could they store?

<comment><USER26> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprint...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprints- of-nsa-data-center-in-utah-suggest-its-storage-capacity-is-less-impressive- than-thought/#comment-10697)

<comment><USER25> Very interesting. The tl;dr seems to be: nobody knows for sure, but yes... it could totally be used for full content storage for some length of time.

<comment><USER27> No, it's not "nobody knows for sure." If you do the right math and don't assume that they have the storage technology not available to the rest of the world (which is a reasonable assumption) it's obvious that the data storage in an accessible way inside that center has an upper bound of an order of around one exabyte (1e18) (a million terabytes). So it's even more probable that it's less, say 0.2 EB.

Now somebody here claims it's around 1e7 B compressed for an hour of phone talk (not transcribed only compressed). That gives 2e10 hours stored. Storing it for 2e8 Americans there's space for 100 hours per person. But they also want the world, not only Americans.

<comment><USER25> You seem very confident of your input parameters. What are you basing 0.2-1EB on? It seems like there is a lot unknown about the utah data center, so all their "expert estimates" sounded more like guesses. Hence my conclusion "nobody knows for sure".

Even if, as you say, the estimate is 100hours per person. How much time does the average person spend on the phone? My current cell plan has 200 _minutes_ per month, and I never go over. Say the average person spends 1000 minutes (16.7 hours), that means you could store a month of rolling phone conversations, and be only at 16.7% capacity. That leaves a fair bit of extra room for persons of interest internationally.

<comment><USER27> Your estimate is correct, somewhere on HN I've read that average young American talks 20 hours per month, older somewhat less. You're also correct that as soon as they decide that not everybody is actually important, the capacity to store communications of "persons of interest" is enough for "the whole life of the persons of interest."

Regarding my estimates, somebody here on HN also sent a link to the highest capacity automated tape libraries, and using them instead of hard disks the estimation of capacity still fits in the same order of magnitude. I still assume hard disks are more convenient than tapes for anything that needs to be accessed "when needed" (who would accept to say "will get the data bout the terrorists regarding the attack tomorrow, but it will take two days." So I can even bet that the main storage there are hard disks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No, says an unnamed NSA "colleague" of a former analyst. Say what you like about Snowden, but at least some of his claims have been backed up by evidence. What have these guys got? Why not name names?

<comment><USER25> Because then they'll have to flee the country like that "traitor" Snowden?

Not saying it wouldn't be the right thing to do, but I am saying it would definitely come at a cost to them and their friends.

<comment><USER3> Why? A colleague of Tice's told him a few weeks ago that every domestic communication is being recorded. Tice is now a private citizen, and he has every right to tell us that colleague's name.

But he won't, and I suspect that the reason is that his claim is fanciful.

<comment><USER28> Recent history tells us there's proof out there, and that it typically follows a denial by Obama or the intelligence communities.

<comment><USER25> I get your emotional position, but this is just some bad logic. "If the government denies it, it must be true" is not a useful tool. How about "recent history says that this kind of thing could potentially be true, and that the government wouldn't admit if it was."

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the condescension, but you misunderstood me: we'll find out after the denial, _when the doc release occurs_. The denial doesn't substitute for the doc release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and > the news media 10 years ago.

That would explain why Obama seems to have become the best sheep ever:

1\. Spy on them

2\. Collect everything that's somehow "embarrassing" for them

3\. Regularly remind them of what happens if they don't do what would want them to do

By that logic, they have probably "vetted" Obama thoroughly, before deciding to _not_ discredit/destroy him completely in front of the public.

<comment><USER29> Indeed. This is the obvious issue every seems to be skirting over. Even the mass media seems not as out rages as it easily could be. Problem is we can never know to what extent this may or may not happen. What is needed is a high ranking politician to come out, admit to something awful and go on record to being black mailed.

See, I cant believe that you get to politician age and have a perfect record. I cant believe that the security services would be interested in politicians back grounds. And now we see the mechanism to get all the information they need to comprehensively check them out. So, I almost cant understand why a security service would not raise such issues with prospective politicians, high ranking business men, media, etc. It would be negligent not to. Well, with out saying opr threatening anything, such people know that the security services have something damaging on them which could be leaked. They don't need to be told, do they? Such people are fairly bright. The implications are obvious. Tow the line, don't dump on the security services. And if asked to support some evil new power, well........

To my mind the blackmail circle and potential to select politicians, and others is too obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> OF COURSE they'd store the contents of our communication, it would be foolish for them not to now that they have the means! The algorithms for speech to text are probably near perfect by now, especially since they have SO MUCH sample data to work with. I doubt you'd need to store the raw audio data, just turn the transcript into full text "metadata".

The main issue is that our information is being stored - INDEFINITELY. You've got to be naive to think this data won't be abused eventually. It will be sold, or it will be used to control. Reading between the lines in some of these news stories, I have to believe that all the walls between the civil and law enforcement agencies are coming down, and it's all one big data mart FTW.

We must bar them from generally capturing and storing information about us. A crime needs to be under investigation about an individual or group before the data capture can begin.

</comment><comment><USER31> Backups! That's the upside of this whole NSA domestic spying brouhaha. How many times have you wanted to replay a phone conversation, or recover an email from a past account, or throw your boss's memo back in his face when he tries to "scope creep" your project?

That's right. Probably every one of us wishes for this capability. And then there's the federal budget deficit, no? I propose to kill two birds with one stone here. NSA can offer to "remember it for you wholesale" as Philip K. Dick put it! Maybe $0.10 per byte (or $0.25/minute for audio) to search and provide on CD virtually anything you have said or done since 1992.

It's actually rather comforting to think that, although they're not very good at their primary mission of stopping terrorism, they have this great ancillary benefit that we can all take advantage of!

</comment><comment><USER32> Should this turn out to be true, the legal rationale is likely that a warrant is only need to read a communication, not to collect it. So "they" archive everything and then promise to look at it only when legal to do so. The NSA can even record American citizens if they promise not to read the data if it turns out to be an American they've recorded (unless the FBI wants the data, of course).

Even if this promise holds, though, people may dislike this policy, to put it mildly. If a robot takes a naked picture of me, it's an invasion of privacy even if no human ever looks at it.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you are tired of having the same discussions _over and over again_ :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935)

</comment><comment><USER33> he's making a list, checking it twice; gonna find out who's naughty and nice...

<comment><USER34> Pretty sure that's God.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Crazy idea: software that would generate TBs of fake communications (email, skype calls, etc) daily to disrupt NSA operations. Possible? Helpful?

<comment><USER22> If you're paying taxes in the US, you would probably hate this concept, b/c:

You spend something like 25% of your work life (taxes) to pay for something that works against you (mass surveillance). Then you start trowing stones at it while continuing to work for it.

<comment><USER35> Nah, doesn't make sense. According to this fighting nazism while being German wouldn't have make sense in 1930s because you pay taxes.

<comment><USER22> What I mean is:

We also need to start getting rid of the _root_ of the problem, not only try to fight some symptoms (patching holes is OK for the short term).

<comment><USER35> Again, similar to Nazi Germany in 1930s. If you have a democratic society where 90% voters are against freedom and vote for all the wars are in favor of all the BS -- there is only this much you can do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


M.B.A. = E.G.O. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hiremebecauseimsmart.com/tagged/mba

<comment><USER2> I agree with Buffett's comments; i was lucky to get to meet Buffett in Omaha while in business school and his insights and analysis of the American economy were quite profound. Reading Berkshire's annual report should be required reading for anyone in business.</comment>


An App Platform for Dumb Phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.dumbsto.re/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea.

Note that if there is a lot of text traffic on a given number, carriers like AT&T, Verizon, et al will block texts to and from that number until the traffic subsides. What's worse is that if you send a message to that number from the Twilio dashboard, its status will be "sent," but you will not actually receive it. Apparently in the world of SMS, "sent" simply means the message has been delivered to the destination carrier, and it is not a delivery receipt like with iMessage or BBM.

Twilio suggests that, to reduce this risk, you load balance across a collection of such numbers, or purchase a short code, which isn't cheap: <http://www.twilio.com/sms/shortcodes>

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to see what this would look like if it was a real business, checkout <http://www.dotgo.com> and <http://dotgo.com/Support/Documentation/>.

DOTGO solves the problem of service discoverability by mapping domain names to shortcodes representing TLDs. Want wikipedia.org? Text "wikipedia" to DOTORG (368674). Want to checkin to Foursquare? Text "foursquare" to DOTCOM (368266).

DOTGO also provides a language of reusable components, known as CMRL (Concise Message Routing Language), it allows you to create hierarchical menus, links and URL callbacks.

They're available in the United States and select countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Previously, I was a web application developer for them, I still think it's a great idea and recommend you guys give it a go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Thanks! We will be studying this thoroughly. I hadn't heard about it before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly off topic, are there actually any good (i.e. recommendable) dumb phones? It has been an interesting market to try to navigate and research.

<comment><USER5> I actually spent some time looking into dumb phones a couple years ago. My favorite would be the motofone. It's got an e-ink display, which is great for battery and sunlight, and 2 antennas which is also great if you _heaven forbid_ make actual calls with it. Also, pretty sturdy, small, and light.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone>

Beware though, if you txt a lot, you won't like it. Not enough real estate for the crazy font they use.

There are also these _printed_ cell phones showing up. Do a google for "card phone". Pretty interesting.

<comment><USER6> I had a Motofone (also called F3) for the last 7 years. It started with a two week working battery life. It's a pain to text message on since it only shows 4 or 5 characters on, but it just _worked_ as a reliable phone. Finally switched to an iPhone 5 after it became vital for me to have full Internet access 24/7 for work. If it weren't for that, I'd still have my F3. I love it as much as I love my iPhone 5.

You can still find some of them on eBay. I'd offer mine, but I'm keeping it as an emergency (911) phone for my car.

<comment><USER7> F3 to iPhone 5 has to be the biggest jump I've heard of lately. I've been meaning to pick up a dumbphone myself, maybe I'll grab an F3 - I remember when they came out, I was dying for one. It's a bit like buying the... junker of your childhood dreams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A very similar concept has been around in India - <http://55444.in/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget that anyone can write a dumb app! Just fork the repository, add your app, and take out a pull request!

<https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea - but how is it being paid for? By the looks of things, it's using Twilio - but that'll get expensive if this becomes popular.

<comment><USER10> I'm doing my best to find change on the ground and in fountains and mailing them to Twilio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems extremely similar to what Intuit has been building in India: Txtweb[1]. The apps support two modes PUSH and PULL. The most common is PULL, where you SMS to some number something like "@appname.optionalExtension <stuff that will be passed on to the application logic", response comes back as SMS. Their experimental PUSH automatically pushes subscribed users with SMSes. I had developed an app, @news a couple of years ago and still see decent traffic on it. The developers are also quite friendly and responsive. If you are interested in a similar platform but in a market that is benefitted from this application a lot more, you should definitely check them out.

[1] <http://www.txtweb.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I've thought about how you could probably get Siri to use SMS as an API to tons of services, like opentable, fandango, etc, etc - this seems to be a great step in that direction - which is actually the opposite of dumb, but instead seems uber smart.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea, it might be a nice replacement in the wake of the Google SMS shutdown. One quick thing: You might want to make app names case insensitive. My phone automatically capitalized Ltrain, resulting in a message stating the app was not found, however when I manually changed it to ltrain it worked. Maybe simple spelling correcting for app names (e.g. off by a letter or a letter is missing) could be added too?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great ideas. Case insensitivity has come up a few times and it's an easy fix. We should have it in soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't like the interface (makes it seem 100x more complicated than it is) but love the idea. I often hit my data cap, am in an area with slow or no data coverage or don't want to load up an app and would be happy to shoot a text off to get a piece of info.

I'm in the UK but this is a far bigger problem in other countries so if executed better this would be very interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean the interface of the website, or how you use it on your phone?

<comment><USER14> The website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat idea. I might recommend allowing at least the first letter (of the app) to be case-insensitive though, since lots of things auto-capitalize. Also I'm not having much luck with 'dir', and some error messages or something would help, but meh - the concept is great!

<comment><AUTHOR> dir can be buggy, depending on how you format your location names. Can you give me an example of what's not working?

<comment><USER15> I wasn't really sure what to expect, so I tried something that Google Maps gets correct: AOL in Palo Alto to Pier 39

I didn't feel like typing too much :) What service does it use?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did an app for rolling dice

<https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/pull/15>

ex:

        roll 1d20+4

        =21 | rolled 17 plus 4 for a total of 21.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just wrote up an app called Rick Roulette. It's like Russian Roulette, but with Rick Astley instead of bullets: <https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/pull/13>

</comment><comment><USER18> Similar services already exist in India and are gaining quite a lot of popularity among users. <http://txtweb.com> <http://55444.in>

</comment><comment><USER19> This is really awesome. Back when I was helping work on Pingie (an rss->sms service), I put some of this functionality into it (weather reports, stock quotes, traffic reports).

Good luck with this!

</comment><comment><USER20> Saw this at the ITP show, will be adding some Twilio apps

<comment><USER10> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I knew my phone would be valuable some day!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is exactly what companies were doing in the .com bubble of early 2000's! SMS "games" and services.

</comment><comment><USER23> for all the technology and cool applications we have today, we can't forget that accessibility is still a key issue. dumbstore FTW.</comment>


Building a CI/CD pipeline on Kubernetes using Jenkins - <AUTHOR> http://blog.karix.io/how-we-build-and-run-karix.io?hn=true <comment><USER2> It's not kubernetes if you don't host your databases using it.</comment>


NSA played key role linking North Korea to Sony hack - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/nsa-played-key-role-linking-north-korea-sony-h/

<comment><USER2> I love how he is getting butthurt (yes, I am using that expression) because outside experts questioned their narrative. However ignoring the fact that the US government brought absolutely no evidence at all to the table (originally) and has a habit of blaming nation states rather than distinct groups with no ties to any specific nation (e.g. some of the "Chinese hacking").

It is like the boy who cried wolf. There might be a wolf (a nation hacking a US company) this time but they've mislead people so many times before nobody believes them out of pure trust anymore. The US government should get used to this. And next time bring even a broad explanation of why they believe so-and- so was responsible.

Just yesterday on the evening news an unnamed "US government intelligence source" claimed that two of the French mass murderers had been captured and a third killed. Which turns out to have been entirely untrue (at that point in time, three are dead today).

</comment><comment><USER3> So those Networks are used "exclusively by North Koreans" \- mostly still running Windows XP - and non of there computers where ever owned?

</comment><comment><USER4> that's well and good, but i personally don't think NK was behind this all by themselves. it just doesn't add up</comment>


An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2018/01/examining-1954-ibm-mainframes-pluggable.html <comment><USER2> _To understand how the inverter works, when the input (pin 2) is high, the current through the tube pulls the plate (pin 1) low. Conversely, when the input is low, the electron flow is blocked and the resistors pull the plate high._

Note that "high" and "low" here are quite different from the usual digital logic conventions of high=+V, low=GND; in this case, high would be near GND while low is a negative voltage. The circuit manual PDF gives low=-30 and high=+10. A lot of other early transistor logic families operated with such "unusual" (for today) signal levels too.

The other notable characteristic of tube circuits is the high resistor values --- this is because they operate at low current (in the mA range) but high voltage (hundreds of voltages). Contrast this with transistor logic which is relatively high current and low voltage.

 _One amusing component I found in the tube module was "Vitamin Q" capacitors._

Those are actually very desired by audiophiles, so it's odd to see them in a digital circuit. They're paper-in-oil capacitors and "Vitamin Q" was Sprague's trade name for the proprietary oil they used.

<comment><USER3> > transistor logic which is relatively high current

Huh? The gate resistance of a FET is hundreds of megaohms, so the input current is measured in nanoamps. That doesn't seem like high current to me.

<comment><USER4> Transistors in TTL logic use mA of input current because they're bipolar, not FET transistors.

<comment><USER3> That's true, but we're talking about computers here. Computer chips don't use TTL, they're all CMOS, which uses FETs (MOSFETs to be precise).

<comment><USER5> CMOS didn't exist when the first transistorized computers were made.

<comment><USER3> Ah, right. I thought the OP was referring to modern CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quite different from a modern key debouncer circuit like [http://zipcpu.com/blog/2017/08/04/debouncing.html](http://zipcpu.com/blog/2017/08/04/debouncing.html) .

The modern FPGA circuit first passes the input through two latches to synchronize it to the system clock, and then has a digital counter to add a delay to rapid bounces. Here the delay is analog, and there is no clock input: the output digital signal is still completely asynchronous.

I wonder if they needed a second module to synchronize the signal and avoid metastability issues, or maybe that doesn't matter at the low clockspeeds they were using?

<comment><USER7> That depends on environment you are working in. Digital debouncer in FPGA (or PLC for that matter) will involve some kind of digital timer as you cannot easily build simple RC low pass filter in such environment.

In discrete logic debouncer designs with RC-filter that are quite similar to this tube circuit are still widely used and to some extent the modern designs are more similar to this when the schmitt trigger is realized as input of some MCU/FPGA and only external parts is the RC filter in contrast to tradditional discrete logic solutions which usually placed the filter between two schmitt trigger gates.

By the way adding such external RC-filter (or even just series capacitor across the contacts) is quite cheap and quick fix for worn-out rotary encoders on various devices when existing (usually software) debouncing logic stops to be sufficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "This signal goes through two inverter circuits, creating a sharp output."

The two inverter-tubes share a common cathode resistor. This provides positive feedback from the second inverter to the first. The circuit is called a Schmitt trigger:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger)

<comment><USER9> And today you get 6 of them in a small package like in the 74XX derived families (74AHC14 for example)

And that's when you're doing a not so streamlined circuit, and can't have them inside your ASIC or something, if you can it gets even smaller

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article mentions that government and business rented these machines. Does anyone know what the actual use cases were? I wonder how they justified the enormous cost to a Dilbert type manager in the 50s. Wow.

<comment><USER11> Same as they do now... money!

One of my mentors was a statistician who got into IT while transitioning a large state labor statistics department to computerization in the 70s. They replaced 2000 clerks and tabulating machines with 1 mainframe and a 4 year project. Ditching the building lease and tabulator maintenance paid for the project!

<comment><USER10> I can see in the 70s being able to justify it as a given that the project would succeed if implemented. But that's a full 20 years after this machine. Completely different technology and probably order of magnitude lower cost per performance unit. So the question is, what workloads were are so high value to justify the risk the project would fail and the enormous cost per compute unit.

<comment><USER11> Payroll and general ledger. It's hard to fathom how many billions of dollars are spent on payroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was kind of amazed at the poor soldering across the board on this module, I wonder what the failure rate was on these things in actual use. I suppose the high heat load kept the joints flexible at least.

<comment><USER13> When I look closely that work actually looks fine. Solder flow is reasonable and I don't see cold joints. The only true WTF was where a resistor had been ripped out for whatever reason. Also it's unclear whether they had flux-core solder yet and they are essentially soldering in 3D. (Former electronics assembler here.)

<comment><USER14> I did a bit of cursory research and it would appear that flux core solder was invented in around the mid-20th century, so there's a very good chance that they weren't using flux cored solder.

<comment><USER15> According to Kester, the solder company, they were formed in 1899 to make flux cored solder. Looking at the 1933 Allied Radio clearly shows Kester rosin core solder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are any 705s running today? I feel like the cost of keeping it up would be prohibitive. I'm also curious as to what tubes are used here.

<comment><USER17> I don't think there are any original vacuum tube computers still running. There are working replicas of the Colossus, ABC, SSEM and (almost complete) EDSAC.

As far as tubes, the 700-series circuit manual [1] shows mostly dual triodes: 6211, 5687, 5965, 6350, 6072, 6528. Also 6136, 6197 pentodes. And probably a variety for special cases (e.g. power supply, core).

[1] [http://www.piercefuller.com/library/700circ.html](http://www.piercefuller.com/library/700circ.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ha! I didn't know what a debouncer was, and then I read this blog and wondered if there's still a version of them in modern hardware and then watched this video [https://youtu.be/D23FbGFrVuo?t=699](https://youtu.be/D23FbGFrVuo?t=699) which specifically discusses the way the default DOS keyboard driver has a built in debouncer.

What a weird coincidence in one day.

<comment><USER7> What the video calls "debounce" is just an autorepeat delay. And on AT and PS/2 keyboards it is not done by any kind of PC side software (neither driver nor keyboard controller firmware), but by the keyboard itself (In late 90's/early 00's there even were PS2 keyboards where you can set the rate manually with key combination). In the protocol layer, autorepeat works by repeating the key down event without key up events in between, so if you are interested in state of the key without the autorepeat you can simply ignore key down events for keys that you already see as down.

The real debouncer hardware is also in the keyboard itself for all standard external keyboards ever used with PC.

On the other hand there were simple keyboard interfaces which involved reading out the whole keyboard as if it was one big shift register and debouncing was then done on the host side in software, two examples from top of the head are Symbolics machines and Wyse terminals. Interface for (S)NES controllers (really for Nintendo controllers up to GameCube) is similar, but I'm not sure whether debouncing is done by controller hardware or not.

<comment><USER19> I hated the PC keyboard repeat rates until I started using X-Windows and found 'xset r rate 160 80'. Warning: don't typo those numbers or you might have a fun time restoring a sane default :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Ars Technica on GNOME3 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/04/ars-reviews-gnome-30-a-shiny-new-ornament-for-your-linux-lawn.ars

<comment><USER2> What is the most popular operating system that will make use of Gnome 3?

I'm a bit confused, I guess, as to how much they show in their screenshots is "GNOME Shell" which would not be shipped with Ubuntu.

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu 11.04 won't include much of GNOME 3 at all, and definitely not shipped or included by default.

Ubuntu 11.10 is likely to be built on the GTK+ 3 and GNOME 3 platform libraries, but will not include either the GNOME Shell or GNOME Classic* user experiences by default (in lieu of Canonical's own Unity).

Both Shell and Classic are likely to be available for installation in 11.10, but unlikely to receive the level of integration attention that Canonical/Ubuntu has previously given to the GNOME user experience.

The best way to experience GNOME 3 at this point is to download one of the openSUSE or Fedora based Live CD/USB images from the website: <http://www.gnome3.org/tryit.html>

At least for the next six months, Fedora 15 will probably be the most popular distro built on GNOME 3 and featuring the GNOME Shell user experience.

* The 2.x style panels and so on, which are maintained by upstream but very much on ice in terms of new development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it time to address to the elephant in the room yet? Can we go ahead and admit to this growing affinity for ripping directly off OSX?

<http://i.imgur.com/SbCBe.png>

<comment><USER5> I think it should be discussed at about the same time that the fact that people use Macbooks to run Linuxes on.

Let me address what seems to be your underlying motivation:

Gnome/KDE aren't just rip offs. For many people, and for many use cases, Linux+Gnome or Linux+KDE is a WAY better choice than Mac OS X.

In fact I wish Apple took some hints like for example giving us a choice of normal (as in Windows/KDE/Gnome like) window management.

<comment><USER6> "Normal" window management is the reason I haven't jumped to Linux yet. The persistent muddle of window > application hierarchy is very annoying, especially for anyone who performs actions in headless GUI applications.

Apple's UI hierarchy is completely different that Windows and Gnome, this is why application commands are represented in the menu bar, which is _separate_ from a single window.

<comment><USER7> If UI what's holding you back, then you don't _need_ Linux.

I use Linux for many reasons. The desktop environment ranks very low among those reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was kind of hoping to see a "shorter" window header. There's a lot of wasted space in all those screenshots. It seems many apps (Chrome, IE, Firefox come to mind) are pushing in that direction - due probably in part to the fact that most monitors are widescreen and vertical real estate is valuable.</comment>


Ask HN: Are PPC ads just legalized gambling for business? - <AUTHOR>

With FB & Google raking in billions and no "odds & payout" disclosures required on their advertising services, they are just cleaning out advertisers IMO.
And yes, FB & Google are not alone. There are many other people offering ads with little chance of payout.
As a small business owner and fairly experienced online marketer, I still think most PPC ads are a ripoff, especially for non-sophisticated advertisers (I've had mild success w/ Reddit ads & FB ads FWIW).
The fact that Facebook will construct a crappy ad for you by scraping your site is alarming (do they still do this?).
It's like a casino offering to bring the black jack table into your room and play your hand for you (and ignoring the probabilities).
I'm just frustrated that there's not a lot of transparency on what you should expect in terms of payout when you advertise on these PPC sites.
The advertiser bears almost all the risk of the ad and can't get a refund if it totally bombs - which if FB is going to do the ad for me, why not offer a refund if it bombs?
The US government makes online gambling illegal but doesn't take a second look at PPC ads? Hypocrisy, IMO.
The isn't the most elegant prose I've written, but I want to see if others share my opinions and if there might be a good solution out there. <comment><USER2> Either you're doing it wrong, or your product is not made for PPC. You'll find it's massively successful for many companies.

And why would there be transparency on payout? There are plethora of variables that are out of control of the network. A why would they bear the risk of your conversion ability? I suspect you're one of these people that 'nothing is their fault'. PPC is no more gambling than Ebay is.</comment>


A Eulogy for RadioShack - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories <comment><USER4> I'd be willing to bet that this is exactly the way it was at most, if not all, corporate RadioShack stores. On the other hand, the franchise stores (which mostly no longer exist) could be great places to shop and to work, because they were owned by actual breathing human beings, not faceless corporate overlords.

My first "real" job after high school was at the local RadioShack, which was owned by one of the most amazing people in my early adult life. I had shopped there for years as a teenager, as it was the only place I could find electronic parts without cracking the Mouser catalog. This was the mid 90s, and there was nearly no e-commerce yet. One day I was in there looking at the HTX-202, RadioShack's entry into 2-meter amateur radio handsets, as I had just been licensed as a Technician Class ham for the first time. Richard said "Hey, Morgan, you still looking for a job?" "Sure, but what happened to Dennis?" I replied. He said "Well, Dennis kinda died." Poor Dennis, his only employee and an elderly gentleman, had suffered an aneurysm and just like that, he was gone. Thus, thanks to the untimely death of a nice old man, I got my first and only RadioShack sales associate position.

Working there was an absolute blast; the pay sucked and the only commission to be had was on Primestar satellite sales, but Richard was like that cool uncle everyone has. I learned a lot about how to run a small business from him, and there was never a day that we didn't have fun. Christmas season could be hectic, but in a good way, with parents who were delighted to see that we carried batteries for all the toys their kids were getting (along with some nifty toys like R/C cars, too).

Even after getting a better full time job a couple of years later, I stayed on part time with Richard for over a year, until he could hire someone to replace me. I still drop in when I'm in my hometown to say hi, and we still keep in touch via email. It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon, but I know his store will continue operating for the foreseeable future. His kind of salesmanship stands far above what you get at the corporate stores.

<comment><USER5> > It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack > name one day soon

Could he turn his shop into a for-profit hackerspace that has inventory for projects?

<comment><USER6> This is an idea I've toyed with for a while, I called it 'prototype electronics' where the 'store' part had inventory that was known to work together so that projects could be designed, built, and sourced out of the store parts. (this was true early in the RS era as well of course)

There are some annoying liability (ie expensive) issues with letting minors operate soldering irons on the premises or while using solder that has lead in it. But mostly people just don't go out. So when you look at the probability of having enough "customers" you find you need a really large population base while maintaining a very small foot print. New York comes to mind or London. Hard to scale it to more spread out places.

<comment><USER7> It's a shame really. I learned to use a soldering iron when I was about 10 years old. My dad used to buy home electronics from Heathkit and we would put them together. I took an electronics course in middle school and we would use soldering irons there also. Also a shop class where we used drill presses, sabre saws, all kinds of oil-based paints and stains, etc. (the table saw was one of the few tools that were "off limits" to the kids).

We're now so scared of liability that kids don't get a chance to learn how to work with their hands.

<comment><USER8> +1. I learnt to solder when I was 14 or so, and did hurt myself a couple of times too. But I lived in India, where there's not many liability issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While it's glib to say that Radio Shack was lost for the want of a space, the change in their corporate identity from "Radio Shack" to "RadioShack" \-- 1995 -- coincides with their slide to irrelevance nicely enough to seem kind of symbolic. _We don 't really know what the Internet is, but we've noticed that cool companies are using CamelCase._

I suspect it's hard for people who are under 30, maybe even 40, to believe how different RS once was from the sad sack we have today. I don't think they were ever really cool -- that air you now get from their '70s and '80s catalog of old white dudes trying to be hip is an air you got from those catalogs even when they were brand new, trust me -- but they had big selections of really interesting stuff, most of which was exclusive to them, and frequently had salespeople who were genuinely enthusiastic about electronics and computers. And the importance of the TRS-80 in the early computer scene seems to be vastly underestimated today, I suspect in part because of that perpetual lack of cool. You might dimly remember "Trash-80" jokes, but you may not remember that for a few years it was the best-selling computer in the world. And unless you followed the company, you almost certainly don't remember that they had separate "Tandy Computer Center" stores, or that they sold an IBM PCjr "clone" called the Tandy 1000 that fixed all of the PCjr's problems and became so popular that big name games had exclusive Tandy 1000 features, or that they actually shipped a frikkin' Xenix workstation (The TRS-80 Model 16) years before most people had any idea what that was or why they should care.

And, really, that last one sums up Radio Shack in a nutshell, especially with computers: always either a few years ahead of their time, or a few years behind it. As someone who grew up with the TRS-80 Model I and later Model 4 (and who did a lot of strange mad science stuff with it up even into the early '90s), I'll miss RS -- but the RS that I have fond memories of has been gone a long time.

<comment><USER10> Quite a few comments about how Radio Shack lost their way and squandered their opportunity, but really their business model was dead. Nothing they could have done would have changed what happened.

It was a store with a very large number of SKUs that they could only sustain through very high profit margins. Sure that works great when it's Sunday and you need that resistor now, but the vast majority of times people would just order online.

<comment><USER11> RS was out of the "grab a part on the weekend for a project" business a decade or so before "order online" was an option.

<comment><USER12> I still use them all the time for just that. You no longer get a choice of 10 different bipolars and 3 different VMOS FETs, but the parts drawer is still pretty useful when all you need is a relay or an Arduino board.

<comment><USER13> Same here, though it depends on the Radio Shack.

There are a few of them near me and one is still a pretty decent "need it right now" electronic components place (with very limited selection) but the other two just sell cellphones and HDMI cables and basically nothing else.

<comment><USER11> Yeah...this is my experience. I hear people say _their_ local RS has components, but all the ones near me are exclusively cell phones, crappy knock-off RC toys and batteries.

Fortunately, my local Frys has a very good components selection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obligatory link to The Onion article "Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business":

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out- ho...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how- radioshack-still-in-b,2190/)

That's from 2007, making the continued existence today even more perplexing.

</comment><comment><USER15> I worked at Radio Shack.

I was in high school and lived with my folks. I had almost no expenses. It didn't occur to me until much later what a bummer it all was.

\- You get paid commission, something like 1% per sale. Commission was pointless because almost everyone already knew what they needed (AA batteries or a headphone adapter...).

\- If your commission didn't add up to minimum wage, you got minimum wage. Since it was nearly impossible to sell $800/hr at Radio Shack, everyone made minimum wage.

\- There was a computer screen in the back room that showed a leaderboard of on-duty employees, and how much each sold for the day in real-time. So even though everyone was making minimum wage, the employees were pitted against each other. This made every employee your enemy.

\- If somehow you made a commission for the day, when the item was ever returned, they dock the commission from your next paycheck. So you ended up making _less_ than minimum wage.

<comment><USER16> This is funny to me because, as a young customer, I distinctly remember thinking, "God, I hate coming to this *$#%@ store. The sales people seem like they're not plugged in. I'm trying to buy an <xyz> and they keep trying to get me to buy an <abc> which has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What are they smoking? They're not even listening to me!"

I had no notion of selling on commission, but I did understand selling someone a bill of goods rather than what they wanted or needed. And that's about when I stopped shopping there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember flipping through the Radio Shack catalogue as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, and making my virtual xmas shopping list (I almost never got the things I actually wanted). radio-controlled cars, walkie-talkies, metal detectors, tape recorders, electronics kits.

I also remember being able to walk into a Radio Shack in my local mall and stroll over to the electronics section and pick out just the right resistor that I needed to complete my circuit project at home. I think I was 12 at the time.

<comment><USER18> Two Christmases in a row, I got a radio-controlled car from Radio Shack. Two years in a row, that car was dead by New Year's. I never asked for one again.

<comment><USER19> Were you recharging them?

<comment><USER6> I suspect he was. I used to take Radio Shack R/C cars and re-purpose them into robots. The best ones used treads as that would allow for differential steering which was _much_ easier on the inverse kinematics than the front wheel steering. And Radio Shack always had a 'closeout/clearance' junk table that said R/C cars would end up on.

That experience lead me to understand that a common failure mode was that the radio receiver circuit had some tuning caps on it that would get jostled about, causing the car to cease responding. Not sure why they went with trim caps other than it meant everything else could be wider tolerances if they just tuned it once fully assembled. It did lead to a lot of fallout though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Radio Shack had a lot in common with Sears, now also on death's doorstep. Sometimes the contract manufacturers making RS's house brand speakers or Sears "Craftsman" power tools or "Kenmore" appliances would turn out a top- performing product for a great price. As the actual manufacturer might change from year-to-year, one could never rely on the brand to deliver a good value. One had to read magazine or other reviews to discover where the diamonds were hidden.

</comment><comment><USER21> I actually remember the point that RS became irrelevant to me. After spending lots of free-time hanging out there in the 80s at the local malls, and getting much of my early computing stuff from them, I ended up with a 386sx bought from another local computer store. It was my real first entry into IBM compatibles and I remember how easy it was to mix and match various parts and cards and extend your machine into something much better than what you bought without too much fuss or expense.

And I remember lots of those old early games had special settings for Tandy computers, special video modes, 3-channel sound, that sort of thing (I don't remember the specifics), I wondered what all the fuss was about since you couldn't buy a Tandy video card or audio card and they weren't really "industry standards" in the way a VGA graphics card or a Sound Blaster was.

I went back and visited my local RS to see one of their Tandy machines and came away singularly unimpressed. I realized then that there was really nothing Radio Shack could offer me that I couldn't get easier and cheaper from dozens of other, larger, stores with better selection.

Years later I stopped by to pick up a cuecat and I've never visited a RS outside of that.

I never understood why they didn't start aggregating their small stores into bigger stores. Heck, even Office Depot offered me more selection than my local Radio Shacks. With the coming and going of Circuit City, the entrance of Frys, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. I never understood why they stuck by the old '70s electronic store tucked away in the corner of a strip mall next to the Laundrymat model.

</comment><comment><USER22> I learned to program in the early 1980s by playing with a TRS-80 floor model for an hour or two at a time while my mom shopped elsewhere in the mall. My first program animated a sine wave in BASIC by printing a single character one line at a time, and letting the lines scroll up the screen. I would've loved to own one of those computers, but my dad refused to buy one because he said it would be too tempting for me. He didn't even want me to have a hand calculator, and gave me his old slide rules instead (which were fun - <USER2> complaining!). I didn't have unfettered access to computers until I went to college a few years later.

I never made a big purchase at RS, but I always appreciated that I could pop in for electronic sundries as needed over the years. My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something. That was very fishy and heralded their sad decline, I think.

RS has been obsolete for years and I really don't know how they've managed to stay in business this long, but I'll miss the name when it's gone.

<comment><USER23> > My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began > insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something.

When I worked for RS just out of high school (1990) that was already corporate policy.

<comment><USER24> Every time I'm asked for a postal code (in Canada) I always use V4G1N4. They never notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's awful to read that and compare it with what Radio Shack was for us geeklings in the 1980s. For those of us living far from big cities, Radio Shack was the source of electric parts, IC chips, LEDs, not to mention hands- on access to actual computers.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. It makes me sad that the only remaining source of electronic parts in many areas is likely to close down.

Even with other options nearby, Radio Shack is still the closest place to me that sells such parts -- and the only one that's open past 5pm, or on Sundays.

I wonder if there's a way for them to double-down on the geek side of their inventory. They're at least picking up a lot of "maker" inventory: Arduino and related kits, etc.

They just need to raise demand. They could, for instance, provide and promote free curriculum plans for schools or clubs that just happened to need the kinds of components you can't buy anywhere locally but Radio Shack.

<comment><USER25> Exactly! With the current maker movement you'd think they would be primed to reinvent themselves.

After reading that article, however, I'm inclined to think that their problems are not so much from a market that changed out from under them, but rather are internal and self-inflicted. If so, then they completely deserve their current situation.

<comment> sjm-lbm Yeah, that's their problem.

They've actually tried somewhat to stock parts that maker movement-types might want: I was in an RS recently, and I was shocked at how much Arduino stuff they had on the shelves, for instance. When you look at their website, though, it's dominated by Beats headphones and iPhone 6s - they've somehow managed to survive for at least 20 years or so without really picking the market they are trying to serve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Some of the locations have started to carry a bigger electronics component selection again (instead of a single pull-out file of resistors and capcitors), along with 3D printing supplies, Arduinos and related parts (retail packed from SparkFun), and so forth.

Unfortunately, they started doing so 4-5 years too late. I was _shocked_ in 2007-2008 when I needed a couple of resistors to finish a project, the local Nerd Palace (Electronic Parts Outlet, in Houston) was closed on a Sunday, and the local Radio Shack actually had that pull-out file of components with what I needed.

</comment><comment><USER28> My Dad worked there in the 80s between contracts for a couple months. "Well this contract ends this month, and I've got an awesome database migration contract starting in 6 months, so I've gotta find something to do meanwhile (decades before FOSS type stuff), and I've spent tons of money at RS since it was allied radio and I was a kid ..." This was before they turned into Cell Phone Shack. About half the time they got well over minimum wage back then, even on low sales stores. Sounds like they earn even less now than in the 80s, not adjusted for inflation! One thing that didn't change was the Shack expanding to own your life, so it starts as part time and somehow 3 months later you're an asst mgr (why?) and "working" 90 hours and then a couple months later you're all WTF am I doing here at 100 hrs a week, my contract job starts next week, bye!

The article had a lot of weird stuff about not understanding why people wouldn't leave a crappy job. Well, perhaps 90% of the time the only crappy part was the paycheck, you just hung out and screwed around and occasionally sold stuff to people. So I'd take the city bus to his store after school and we'd play video/computer games for HOURS during the slow times. We had kind of a game on betting when the last customer would come in, maybe 6pm or so most days, then we had the store to ourselves till 10 or so, literally a kid in a toy store. It honestly was a lot of fun almost all the time, just not much pay. You could make a ton of money at lunch and after work rush, and saturdays, like $40/hr (which in the 80s was a lot), but you had to hang out all night long at minimum wage if you wanted the plum hours. Sales were extremely uneven over time. I still don't understand why they ever opened before noon or were open after 6pm or so.

I can prove he worked there... in the mid 80s each shipment contained a hopeless VCR tape of sales blather not for public consumption. Sell Sell Sell!

</comment><comment><USER29> That's certainly an interesting read... and one I can't really argue with the anecdata of from my own experiences. So I'll add one:

After it was too late by that author's reckoning, the parent of Radio Shack tried another venture, a "big box" store called The Incredible Universe. When that failed and they wrote it off, it wiped out the entire profit of Radio Shack thousands of stores for that financial year.

I still think of it when I'm trying to understand the machinations of large companies.

And I, too hope that the folks I worked with at RS in the 20C found better jobs, especially the poor store managers.

<comment><USER30> The Fry's in Dallas is in the space of a former Incredible Universe. The Fry's is decorated like a cattle ranch, but Incredible Universe was like a rock concert. The first time I went in there, I immediately thought they were trying too hard to be cool. It was completely over the top, so I'm not surprised they wiped out all of their profits. It's too bad they couldn't find a happy medium.

<comment><USER31> Yep the San Diego Fry's also moved into an Incredible Universe after they closed down (probably 15 years ago). Fry's never gave it a theme though and never even took the Incredible Universe logo off the delivery trucks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think Radio Shack could be reborn if it did a few things. Get rid of the cheap toys. Go back to just electronic parts, and today's technology--like having the Ardino and Rasberry always in stock--along with all the less know electronic kits. Try to keep the prices down. Keep all radios and cell phone stuff, but get rid of the advertisements(I don't like to walk into loud stores). I would also devote a small section of each store to used/recycled/surplus stuff. The workers shouldn't be required to wear ties.

<comment><USER33> I wonder how big the market is for Arduino/Raspberry Pi kits at a brick and mortar store when it's so easy (not to mention inexpensive) to buy them online at hobbyist sites like Adafruit.

<comment><USER34> Microcenter has a lot of this stuff now a days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business > model that is completely unviable in 2014.

We have good evidence to suggest that the RS business model is indeed viable in 2014: it's Maplin [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621) (followup [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953) ).

<comment><USER36> Maplin has been doing ecommerce for over twenty years - anyone else remember CASHTel?

<comment><USER37> Yep. My Maplin customer number is only 4 digits - which always throws the staff if they use it/

Mind you, Maplin has turned into a UK Tandy and is really no longer a sane source for electronic components. Wouldn't be surprised if they eventually went down the pan or shrunk their stores base.

Remember the orange/green/white collectable discount vouchers you'd receive with your orders.

<comment><USER38> Yes, I thought they were turning into a strange PC-World / odd electrical bits shop too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So last month I was in US for the first time and I was dying to walk into a RadioShack, the temple of cool things as I have been hearing about on obscure and popular electronics hobby forums since I was 16. After checking out 6 stores in 4 cities, I was really disappointed. No cool stuff. All I could find was phone cases, cheap earphones and a few IC's(mildly interesting). To be honest, I didn't know what I was expecting but certainly not what I saw.

<comment><USER40> That's what RadioShack was like up until the 90s - lots of cool stuff there, and an easy place to get electronic parts for hobbiests. There were Laser Discs on display in the 80s, TRS-80 CoCos (color computers), followed by Tandy PCs. I remember having free access to play with a TRS-80 hooked up to a thermal printer and dot matrix printer so you could figure out what you preferred - big and noisy or small and silent.

I also remember my friend in high school picking up a special ordered US Robotics 14.4k HST modem with his Tandy PC in 1989 from Radio Shack - I was still on 1200 baud on my c64 and I lost a $5 bet that such a fast modem even existed. I was utterly blown away by the speed.

At some point management decided it needed to be another CarPhoneWarehouse or RandomTechJunkShack

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wish RadioShack would transition to selling hackable electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, stuff on SparkFun, Maker Bots, etc). That's how they started and now as they're nearing bankruptcy, that market is finally back and getting bigger. Further, most of these parts are made by small-time businesses with suboptimal distribution and RadioShack could be enormously helpful. And I see blogs all the time about how if you have the inside connections to factory owners in China you can get all sorts of cool stuff at very low prices-- RadioShack could resell all this.

Edit: but I think RadioShack's future is in the hands of Wall Street types who only see it as an interesting financial instrument where they can cheat some fools out of money before totally liquidating.

</comment><comment><USER42> Radioshack, want to save you business? Turn every single one of your stores into a hackerspace.

You don't even need much. Get a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a drill press, free WiFi, some tables, and a stack of arduinos and you'll be doing awesome.

Then build an instructables-esque community website for people to show off their projects.

I'll even consult with you guys on this if you make a big enough donation to the hackerspace I help run in Phoenix.

<comment><USER43> I tried to tell this to the RS closest to my home, they won't. I even offered to give them a 3d printer for two months to try, they won't. The manager there told me that the electronics stuff is basically overhead, they're there to sell phones 11 months a year and RC cars in December. The funny part is, the guy is a hardcore libertarian.

<comment><USER44> I suspect he is telling you the truth, that most of their net revenue comes from phones and toys. It's risky to change to something that sounds like a current loss leader as the primary business, even if in reality there is a significantly different emphasis.

Sadly, the opportunity costs of running a 2nd rate phone store must suck. Sounds like it would be more profitable to use the space to make and sell hamburgers or pizza.

Hmmm. Maybe they could have a "maker" workshop that also sells pizza and beer???

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The Radio Shack where I grew up gave out free batteries once a month. I did a science fair project that compared how good Radio Shack batteries were to Duracell, etc, and they were superior by far. It's sad that they are basically dead, but it's the Circle of Life, I suppose, and a good reminder to never rest on your laurels or take it for granted.

<comment><USER46> Yup, when I was a kid my local RS had the 'battery of the month' club. I remember the card they'd punch and everything. The town was small so the guy knew all of us so we couldn't cheat (although none of us would have even considered it).

I remember being excited to get my free 9v every month. Simpler times.

<comment><USER47> I was a member of the Battery of the Month Club, too. The local Radio Shack was next to a record store named Licorice Pizza, and they usually had a jar of free licorice next to the register. I'd swing by, get some red licorice, then go next door and pick up a free battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> While Radio Shack deserves the scorn, it had two big problems at a crucial time.

1) Charles Tandy died in late 1978. This was right as the computer revolution was taking off and his loss of vision was bad news.

2) IIRC, one of the corporate officers embezzled an enormous amount of cash in the 1980's right as the IBM PC clone business was taking off. This stalled the company at a point when it needed to be pivoting. Unfortunately, I have only my memory to rely on as I can't seem to pull this out of any of the web search engines.

</comment><comment><USER49> Radio Shack at this point is a sad caricature of itself. I remember being able to buy all sorts of ICs, analog parts, interesting radios and kits. Now it peddles cell phones and overly prices things -- I recall needing a battery for my cordless phone recently, they wanted $23 for a battery for a $50 phone? Uh, no.

Two other bay area places that have changed a lot are Frys and the now closed Quement Electronics. Fry's still has a few components, but nothing like the 80s and 90s.

RIP.

<comment><USER50> > I remember being able to buy all sorts of ICs, analog parts, interesting > radios and kits.

They still do. Most radioshacks I've visited carry arduino kits and ICs, electronic parts, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, etc.

<comment><USER51> IME it depends on whether they're inside a mall or not. The ones inside malls tend to just be glorified mobile phone sales depots, but you can actually get components at the standalone ones.

<comment><USER52> A lot of the standalone stores are franchises, where most of the mall locations are corporate. Big difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I applied to work at a Radio Shack when I was 16. I didn't get a job there. The guy interviewing me spent most of the time making sure I knew the difference between being paid hourly, and being paid on commission, and making sure I _really_ knew what a spiff was. In retrospect it was kind of weird. It was kind of weird at the time, too.

Reading these, I don't feel like I missed out on too much.

</comment><comment><USER54> Radio Shack was always two stores in my memory. There was the legit geeky side with electronic parts, and there's the Realistic/Tandy side hawking so-so also-ran consumer electronics. The perspective always seemed to be that parts were sort of a loss-leader for consumables.

The employees almost never knew anything technical, and were often suspicious of nerdy kids like me lingering in the parts section. I remember one time I was building a circuit and needed a .22uF cap. I asked if a .22pF was the same (I was like 10 or 11). Instead of saying "I don't know" the sales guy just kind of stared at the package and then shrugged and said "Yep". My circuit did not work.

I hear people floating the idea of RS reinventing itself as more of a hacker- friendly place, but from an investor's perspective you'd be switching from a giant consumer market to a much smaller niche market. Personally, I think that's a great idea, but I'm not sure you could ever convince investors of that.

<comment><USER55> Ha ha, 0.2 pF are strictly RF SMT caps. Probably was 22 pF.

<comment><USER54> I think you're right, 22pF. Definitely wasn't anything SMT, this was 1984 or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I actually think RadioShack can turn things around. "Hacking" electronics is gaining ground esp with Arduino, Rpi, etc. Here's what I would do: \- Beef up stock of "maker" electronics, Arduino's, Rpi, modules, kits etc. \- Buy/build modules/kits, work with suppliers like SparkFun, Shmart, Adafruit for help in this area \- Create "recipes" for building electronics and guide customers through purchasing the materials \- Clear out all the rip-off electronics unless you are willing to match Amazon prices. \- Get rid of smartphones, who buys these from Radio Shack??? \- Most importantly, hold regular (weekly) free "maker sessions" for kids to learn principles of electronics and get them excited about it...similar to what Home Depot does

The more they focus on building/diy electronics the better, this is higher margin (and lower price) than simply retailing finished electronics, although they'll need to do some of that too I suppose.

<comment><USER57> If you've been to Radio Shack recently, they have a decent number of Arduino kits and the like.. however I don't think people are not dense enough to pay $60 for a kit you can purchase for $20 on Amazon. I think their was a point where they could have course corrected though I think they missed the exit half a decade ago.

<comment><USER58> I bet they'd pay 10 bucks an hour for shop time with access to tools and advice, and buy arduinos at a slight premium out of impatience to get projects done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Radio Shack was my toy store as a kid, as far back as I can remember. My favorite toys were volt meters, little electric motors, power adapters, LEDs, bread boards, and those little electronics kits with the spring terminals. Radio Shack deserves some of the blame for making me who I am today. :)

<comment><USER60> Preach!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> What saddens me most is that RadioShack was one of the pioneers that sparked the personal computer revolution. I can easily remember my first interactions with a TRS-80 (a clone - I live in Brazil), reading avidly their manuals, understanding how their block graphics worked and writing my own small programs I would go to a computer store to test.

It's a little bit tragic, but we all know RadioShack's time has passed. We appear to be living in a time of rapid transformation. RadioShack will soon no longer exist. Like payphones, printed newspapers and magazines and soon books and bookstores will follow the video rentals and record stores into history. Change can be difficult for those who live through it, but in return, we get stories to tell our grandkids.

It's not that bad a deal.

</comment><comment><USER62> This isn't really a story about Radio Shack. It's about how awful it is to be a retail employee. You could have written this about the working conditions inside any retail store in any dying shopping mall: Forced to work off the clock, no overtime pay, pay structure resulting in pay below minimum wage, capricious, last-minute schedule changes, do-it-or-leave ultimatums, callous, abusive management, exhausted and overworked management, management-by- screaming-at-people, nonsensical rules and policies from corporate, revolving door for employees and management, and widespread apathy. Nothing here specific to Radio Shack, folks, this is the standard retail work environment in the USA.

<comment><USER63> I don't know if that's entirely accurate. I did a good stint of retail early in my college career and Radio Shack, at least in my experience, was on a whole different level.

I think the author nailed it on the head with this statement:

>Working at RadioShack was sort of the worst of two worlds: there was the poverty-level income of a blue-collar retail job, coupled with the expectations, political nonsense, and corporate soullessness of the white- collar environment.

There was a non-stop, life or death pressure from management to sell -- especially phones and "add ons." I was once written up for selling a phone without attaching 3 accessories.

One day the manager stuck a clipboard behind the counter with stack of paper on it. After __every __customer interaction, we were supposed to log What phone they had, what service they had, when they 're due for an upgrade, and like 2-3 other things that I can't remember. Failure to do this would result in a write up, and eventual termination.

With a Target or Publix gig, you can more or less mind your own business and stock shelves -- helping customers is actually an awesome break from the monotony in that case. At Radio Shack, every customer interaction was painful because it was turned into an awkward interrogation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's not just the company is odd and off the mark. The bond holders are also screwy: [http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-13/radioshack- lende...](http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-13/radioshack-lenders-seen- escalating-default-risk-distressed-debt.html)

The bond holders stopped them from closing unprofitable stores...

</comment><comment><USER65> Honestly, I don't know what to make of the "news" of RS' imminent demise. Just 2 days ago I visited a nearby RS store and bought stuff there. The store was well-stocked and I wasn't the only customer in the store. The employees didn't have that unhappy, "short-timer" look either, that is, didn't emit even a whiff that the store was closing down.

Besides, there are at least 6 RS stores in this city, the furthest I know of being maybe 10 miles away, so I'm guessing there must be a few RS stores out there that I don't know about. Since they've all stayed in business for many years, they have to be selling _some_ items or services or _something_.

I can report at least two positive aspects of my RS visit. The guy at the cash register actually knew something about the gear I was interesting in and could answer technical questions. Second, prices were low and the quality of items seemed pretty good.

So yeah, there are reasons I would hate to see them go...

</comment><comment><USER66> Ah RadioShack, where I acquired Jazz Jackrabbit and a circuit board toy with my dad. It's sad that RadioShack isn't as fun as I remember it being, but last time I was in I saw a similar circuit board toy which is nice. It's always sad to hear that a company treats their employees as though they are no more than cattle tugging a plow.

</comment><comment><USER67> I read this post, felt sorry for RadioShack, and decided I would give them one last shot and try their price matching policy for a pair of beats solo headphones. I hoped to avoid the long lines at some of the bigger retail outlets and, by utilizing their advertised "extra 10% off" price matching, avoid mail in rebates as well. Long story short, after waiting close to an hour for one of the two working associates to become available I was denied a price match. They ended up losing my sale because of this and leaving me wondering how they have lasted this long. I had a bit of sympathy for them earlier but the only sympathy I have left is for the people still working for them.

[https://twitter.com/MatthewTavares/status/538138578208169984](https://twitter.com/MatthewTavares/status/538138578208169984)

</comment><comment><USER68> As of today (Nov 26), Yahoo Finance shows RadioShack as having 3-ish billion USD in revenue, and a market cap of of 83 million USD. I guess there isn't a lot of faith on Wall St. that RadioShack is going to turn itself around.

</comment><comment><USER69> My SO worked at RS corporate for a few years during late 2000s. The Internet is definitely what killed this company. They had loyalty with a older generation and that's how they survived until now. They never found out how to bring young people into the stores in an Internet age. That's what the whole "the shack" thing was all about. It failed. Now that loyal customer segment they did have is 1) aging out of the market 2) coming around to online shopping.

I can't really say much about how store ops ran, but I'm sure it was a result of the financial pressures the company was under just trying to survive.

</comment><comment><USER70> In Canada radioshack rebranded itself as "The Source". I used to pop into radioshack to find plugs, adapters, and the occasional electronics component. They stopped carrying those years ago and now, if I want anything like that, I either drive across town to a hobby shop or order online. Since "The Source" now seems to specialize in overpriced junk, I haven't set foot in one for years. This article makes me feel good about that decision. It would be better for ratshack's workers to be out of a job and then in a job that treats them as human beings.

</comment><comment><USER71> I guess one of Radio Shacks biggest problem is the same as most brick and mortar stores, many us just want to order it online have it show up.

They could have tried/could try to become the home tech store. Take your home to the newest level, LED lighting all around, wireless integration of home automation and security. Sharing video all around the home. Then show it off in store. Hell, sell solar panels or such, I don't care. Just give today's geek a reason to come in. I don't need a phone or a computer; but a specialized home automation turn key system... well...

</comment><comment><USER72> Just tonight my father-in-law's new TV required a HDMI cable. He suggested RadioShack. I said "I'm going to Target. At RadioShack you have to talk to people."

The days of high-touch service are over.

<comment><USER73> I might like to talk to people if they weren't all hiding incompetence behind a sales pitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I shopped at RadioShack just one time in the '90s. I bought some walkie talkies, and the cashier insisted that I provide my name and address to make the purchase. I said I didn't want junk mail. He assured me that it was only for recordkeeping purposes and that my info wouldn't end up on a mailing list. Within weeks, I started receiving RadioShack catalogues and flyers. I'm pretty sure they spent more on postage, paper and ink over the next few years than I had originally spent on the walkie talkies.

</comment><comment><USER75> Christ, I can't imagine what their corporate IT must be like.

Probably the Windows XP syndrome of never ever ever never investing into your infrastructure, but stretched over fourty years.

<comment><USER76> It's all TRS-80's with null modem cables, as far as the eye can see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> My earliest memory of Radio Shack(which is probably circa 1990, so even before the name change) is that I walked in accompanied by my mother and attempted to play the display miniature pinball game, and then was yelled at by the manager for this crime.

I've had better experiences, I even got a microSD from them the other day(after being tipped by a friend that they were cost competitive on this one item). But it has never been warm fuzzies.

</comment><comment><USER78> Part of the fall of Radio Shack is that the market for discrete components isn't what it used to be. This is because not as many people take up electronics as a hobby. And that, in turn, is because a lot of people that would go into electronics, got sucked into computer programming instead. After all, the decline of Radio Shack coincides with the rise of affordable personal computers.

</comment><comment><USER79> I still have a cuecat!!! I never intended to use it for it's intended purpose,but thought it was great to get a free bar code reader.

<comment><USER80> I always associated CueCat with WIRED magazine, I had no idea RadioShack was an investor.

<comment><USER46> Same here, and when Cranky Geeks was still going one of the regulars was Dave Mathews; who I always thought was the inventor. (And according to [http://www.crunchbase.com/person/dave- mathews](http://www.crunchbase.com/person/dave-mathews), he is.) Never heard of this Hutton Pulizer guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> It saddens me to read this I bought my first computer from Radio Shack a Tandy 1000EX, it's now gutted and hanging on the wall above my desk,my nephew said,look mom a computer with a typewriter built into it !. Upon discovering ,how I memorialized my first computer , my nephew went on a search for his first phone..rest in peace RS.

</comment><comment><USER82> The RadioShack employee I spoke with had no idea there was a Mini-Maker Faire in Portland. RadioShack could have had a presence there. When the company finally dies, where can you go to grab some Arduino kits or components? I hope another company takes its place. Places like BestBuy don't even carry cables, let alone components.

</comment><comment><USER83> Here is a good blog post on the history of the TRS-80 that also discusses RadioShack's corporate culture. [http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the- trash-80-part-1/](http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER84> Surprised that nobody has mentioned BatteriesPlus. Checking their website, they have at least 586 stores selling batteries - cell phone, laptop, car, etc. - and light bulbs.

Focusing in those areas seems exactly what RadioShack could and should have been doing.

</comment><comment><USER85> Maybe I have a sad life otherwise, but I was laughing so hard sometimes. Thanks for this.

</comment><comment><USER86> No matter what happens to RadioShack the stories were told masterfully. Stoned Craig is my hero, who reminds me of myself. Hacking the merchandise in an anti-social way is what being a RadioShack customer is all about!

</comment><comment><USER87> If you think working on Thanksgiving is bad, the crummy retail store I work at (bookstore in Canada) is open New Years Day. Its actually open every day of the year except Christmas Day.

</comment><comment><USER88> Oh RadioShack, I hardly knew ye. I do regret getting that crappy Virgin Mobile smartphone, which was the only thing I bought ever from a RadioShack. RIP in pieces.

</comment><comment><USER89> "We all line up in expectation of hordes of customers. Six on one side of the store, six on the other side, pallbearers of an invisible casket." Lol.

</comment><comment><USER90> for nostalgia sake

[http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html](http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html)

</comment><comment><USER91> I just read a description of a business calibrated to "Kafka Settings", or at least a feature biography in "Zombie Business Today".

</comment><comment><USER92> This reads like a revolting Douglas Coupland novel.

Well done.

<not_sarcastic/>

</comment><comment><USER93> The person who wrote this seems reasonably intelligent. Why did he work at Radioshack for so long if it was so horrible?

</comment><comment><USER94> One thing the local radioshack is good for is to recycle old batteries - <USER3> have to find a new place to do that.

</comment><comment><USER95> This honestly reminds me of Sears Electronics Department, I worked there for 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER96> Brum did not have a song.

<comment><USER46> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsEHRfsp4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsEHRfsp4k)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> arrow

</comment><comment><USER97> Food for thought: any organization is vulnerable to such stagnation and dysfunction, particularly when it was born for and evolved with a state of affairs that no longer exists. Either the organization must adapt, or it should die. Thankfully, the death of dysfunctional organizations is a given in free markets -- perhaps even a reason for bittersweet celebration.

Governmental organizations, in contrast, have no incentives to adapt, and no "recycling" mechanism. Failure is emphatically _not_ an option. Worse, bureaucracy inevitably takes on the primary mission of preserving itself.

<comment><USER73> Your food for thought is hundreds of years old and getting a bit stale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Nice bashing of a company fighting for their life. Point being it's easy if you are awash in profitability to do the right things, hire the best people in management, pay for the top consultants. [1] And of course give people massages and free lunch and all sorts of benies. Or if you have been funded with funny money that gives you "runway" to burn through.

The highest quality people don't generally decide they want to join a sinking ship (let's say a store manager or district manager). The quality people are either happy elsewhere already (and not looking) or they take advantage (as a general rule) of the better opportunities either because they can or because they are smart enough to recognize those opportunities and pursue them. At my first company there were people that didn't even show up for interviews. Maybe they saw the facility and didn't like the way that it looked.

Separately, presumably if the author had a better opportunity he wouldn't have suffered for "three and a half years as a RadioShack employee".

[1] But even then if your basic model is not viable you aren't going to stand a big chance of making it. This isn't something like "People still buy cars Chrysler just can't make a car that people want".</comment>


The State of Kubernetes Configuration Management: An Unsolved Problem - <AUTHOR> https://blog.argoproj.io/the-state-of-kubernetes-configuration-management-d8b06c1205 <comment><USER2> This is an excellent overview.</comment>