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According to Bloomberg Amazon is in talks to buy some of RadioShack's stores:
Amazon has considered using the RadioShack stores as showcases for the Seattle-based company’s hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private.
RadioShack is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and according to other reports, it has also been in talks with wireless carrier Sprint about selling some of its stores. The deal with Amazon may not happen, but nonetheless, it shows where Amazon is headed.
To head off competition from Wal-Mart—one of the few retailers that could pose a legitimate threat to Amazon—and to expand its operation, the company has adopted a new hybrid business model, combining e-commerce with offline services.
Originally spotted at Wired, and also linked at HackerNews.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:09PM
Yeah, you're on a completely different level from me. I'm the kind of guy who will look up a schematic online, build it exactly as specified (as far as I can tell, anyway)...and nine times out of ten, the damn thing still doesn't work. Even the classic, ubiquitous circuit to toggle a relay from a microcontroller -- one transistor, one diode, one relay. Sometimes I can't even get that to work right on the first or fifth try (although these days the most common failure is that I've fried the relay already). And basic schematics like that don't give part numbers. I've tried building stuff from components from Mouser -- didn't work, I never figured out why, and I still have those components about six years later because I've never found anything useful to do with them. But I can take one of those simple schematics, walk down to RS and if it calls for an NPN transistor for example, I grab any NPN from those bins and there's about a 90% chance it will work. If not, I go back and buy the other variant and that does it.
Radioshack parts basically let you do electronics Lego instead of electrical engineering. I've been quite happy paying their massively inflated prices for that convenience. I'm not trying to build some big complicated circuit, I'm not buying hundreds of dollars of parts every month. I'm just trying to get my Raspberry Pi to hit the power button on the projector. By drilling a hole through the projector and wiring a relay across the button contacts, because IR schematics are intimidating, lol
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @09:43PM
There used to be an old ARRL project book about designing transistor RF circuits that said something along the lines of the only way to learn RF design was blowing up a bunch of (expensive) transistors and we're both pretty much on that path, although I've blown more stuff up. Electronics work is very much like a first person shooter, that way.