Newegg hassles sister over brother’s debt, freezes her account

Boing Boing: “Top gadget shop Newegg.com is holding a woman’s account hostage until she gets her brother to reverse a chargeback. From The Consumerist:

When she tried to place an order using her own name and credit card
number, but with the same shipping address as her brother, her account
was suspended. Jenn figured she could resolve the problem with a
conversation or two with Newegg’s customer service department, but as
you’ll see from the transcript below, Newegg’s CSR blatantly says
Jenn’s account won’t be approved until her brother reverses his
chargeback.

Who needs a collection agency when you can put the screw on family
members? It even told her his account number and other personal details
when she contacted them. The plot thickened, however, when she filed a
Better Business Bureau complaint. Newegg blew it off—a stunning act for an online retailer—now asserting that her address is blacklisted in perpetuity.

Perhaps Newegg suspected a scam was afoot, given the same last name
and the same address. But what kind of fraudster files reports with the
BB? If the address had been blacklisted years earlier, as Newegg
claimed, how was her brother able to order something to later issue a
chargeback on?

It’s particularly interesting because of Newegg’s halo of propriety:
it built a reputation on not behaving like other thin-marging online
catalog stores. It’s been my main gadget-supplier for years. Is there a
word for when a retailer Jumps the Shark? Overstocked, perhaps?”

Newegg.com Holds Woman’s Account Hostage Until She Gets Her Brother To Reverse Chargeback [Consumerist]

The Emperor Workstation

Neatorama:

“Wouldn’t you love controlling the Empire playing games or even (gasp) working in this workstation from the Dark Side Novelquest? Available in July.”

Link -via Gizmodo

Microwave oven PC case mod

Boing Boing:

“This microwave case mod may not be ingenious — the PC guts are
crammed inside, a small LCD is bolted to the inside of the door — but
it’s a fine medium of display for the endless looping of any “mewling
baby on high” vid that might be found in the archives of the Stile
Project.”

Crazy PC Case Mods [Hacked Gadgets]

Holy sweetness…..

DVICE:

“This
elegant desk hides a fully-functioning computer inside, saving space
and allowing you to keep the space on or under it free and clear. It
also has a monitor built in and attached at the back, meaning the only
space you’ll need to take up on the desk will be a keyboard and mouse.
The rest of the surface is yours to use as you see fit.

You can access the computer’s goodies such as the ports and drives
on the side, and the cable comes out the back all hidden-like. It’s a
slick-looking number, too, making it something I wouldn’t mind keeping
in my house if I hadn’t moved on to laptops years ago. Oh well.”

DDDXYZ, via Boing Boing Gadgets

Netflix Streaming is here! $100+9/mo for unlimited downloads

Digg: “Netflix’s first streaming box is finally here and it’s pretty damn
brilliant of a set up. First of all, the box is 100 bucks, and designed
by Roku. It’s fanless and quiet; has HDMI and optical outputs; and is
about the size of 5 CD cases stacked together. Any Netflix disc mailing
plan over $9 gets you unlimited streaming of almost 10,000 titles.”

Giant working (!) NES controller/coffee table

Boing Boing:

“Kyle Downes of the aptly named “Ultra Awesome” blog built this genius coffee table that’s an enormous, working NES controller! It opens to reveal storage space for tons of game-carts.”

LINK

Current crop of graphics cards compared, ranked by price

Engadget: “Although NVIDIA’s pledged to simplify its lineup
for consumers and ATI’s been getting better, the current state of the
graphics card market is still a pretty wild alphabet soup of model
numbers and specs lists, so the crew over at The Tech Report decided to
break things down using the only stat that matters: price. While the
results aren’t exactly shocking (surprise: more dollars equals more
FPS), what’s interesting is that multi-GPU rigs are really quite
cost-effective, delivering performance on par with higher-end cards at
significantly lower prices. For example, two Radeon HD 3850s run nearly
as fast as a single Radeon HD 3870 X2, even though they cost a fair bit
less, and two GeForce 9600 GTs can potentially outgun a GeForce 8800
Ultra. That’s always been the promise of SLI and CrossFire, and it
looks like it’s paying off — any system-builders out there care to
share their experiences?”

Powered by Lemarchand: the Hell’s Illusion Mini PC

Boing Boing:

“Granted, the Hell’s Illusion Mini PC is a mod that only a lifetime Fangoria
subscriber could love. Luckily, I am that subscriber. Who needs a Mac
Mini when you can drive your home media center with a computer powered
by the frickin’ Lament Configuration? Utterly ridiculous, but I don’t care. Truly, a computer for explorers in the further regions of experience… demons to some, angels to others, Vista users to all. Jesus wept.”

The Hell’s Illusion PC [Techeblog]

A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

Slashdot: “”David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks
division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a
yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson
made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system
that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with
820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of
platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup
XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters.”

Video of the motorized R2-D2 projector in action (omg)

I admit, I drooled over this too….

Digg: “We knew that there was a motorized, fully-articulated R2-D2 projector
with built-in DVD, iPod dock, all kinds of digital media inputs, and
Millennium Falcon remote control, but we never—EVER—imagined it would
be so amazingly drooltastic as this video shows.” I can’t believe this.
*must*resist*buying*impulse*