Those Brits really have a way with words. The witty writers at British IT rag The Register summed it up so well: "CompUSA goes tits up." The computer retailer, which closed a number of stores earlier this year (including one half a mile from my house, natch), has sold itself to Gordon Brothers, a "restructuring specialist" which plans to close CompUSA's remaining 103 locations. The stores will run through Christmas and offer "attractive bargains" to shoppers. CompUSA.com will be closed once current purchases are shipped. This, folks, is why they call Best Buy a "category killer." (Photo by cubicleman)

Video-software maker and online-music retailer RealNetworks has laid off 100 of its 1,800 employees — two-thirds in Asia and one-third in its hometown of Seattle — to reduce redundancies produced from a recent spree of acquisitions. No word on when RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer is an also-ran to Adobe's Flash and whose Rhapsody store is hopelessly behind Apple's iTunes, will figure out the other 1,700 are redundant, too. [Seattle P-I]

Skype will fire 30 employees in London and Estonia, Om Malik reports. Skype, a subsidiary of eBay, has not yet confirmed the news. The 30 headed for the door will join Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, who in October resigned as Skype CEO as eBay took a $1.4 billion asset-impairment charge on the company it purchased for $2.5 billion in 2005.

"FYI, Google is about to layoff all of their temp/contract recruiters to do some cost cutting," whispers a tipster. We knew it had to happen sometime, but didn't Google exec Marissa Mayer just say laying off surplus employees would indicate Google has become "too dry, too corporate, too much about making money."? Oh, wait. That was her defense for keeping around the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button which costs the company $110 million a year, by some estimates. Mayer's no efficiency expert, so let's not rely on her opinions. Laying off recruiters, people who get paid for adding bodies willy-nilly, is a sensible first step to curing Google's hiring bloat. Next, how about some executives?

A T.V. pal of ours says layoffs were expected this week at the Oxygen network. And now our inbox says: "Someone just told me that everyone got canned today." Ruh roh?

A soon-to-be former AOL employee confirms the rumors of mid-December layoff. The holidays are always an embarrassing time to let employees go, but what's worse is the way management delivered the bad news. Our source tells us that "when the brain trusts sent out the holiday party email they only sent it to people who would still be here — even though some of us hadn't been notified we were on the block yet." Dear employee, you're not invited to continue working at the company. Yours cordially, Mgmt.

A tipster tells us mid-level managers at AOL started getting word yesterday from their directors that they're getting what they always wanted for Christmas: a severance package. AOL already laid off 2,000 employees this fall, and its not over yet.

"It's been kind of a depressing day," said Bill O'Meara, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, when we asked him how Times staffers were taking the news today of layoffs in the newsroom. "It went all through the building very quickly, people were not happy," he said.

About an hour ago, New York Times staffers received a holiday gift from executive editor Bill Keller—an announcement of layoffs! The cuts will come from the newsroom "for the first time in recent memory," according to the memo. A dozen "support positions" will be eliminated from the newsroom, along with "a number" of clerical administrative jobs; next year, several admin management positions will be cut. The Times apparently put a hiring freeze into place several weeks ago, and "except for those jobs that are critically important to our future ambitions, we intend to enforce it," Keller writes. Full memo after the jump.

Pay By Touch, the biometric payments firm run into the ground by cocaine addict and convicted felon CEO John Rogers, will announce layoffs "immediately after the Thanksgiving holiday," a tipster tells us. Who among Pay By Touch's 700-plus employees can expect their sudden parole?

We always hear about layoffs in production departments, or foreign bureaus, or "a little bit of everywhere," in the case of MTV—but it's rare these days that you get to see an outfit chop up its web staff. But that's what Court TV is doing right this second—with fellow Time Warner company CNN.com going big on plans for CNN.com/crime, Court TV (soon to be called truTV) no longer needs 16 of the staffers at their website. 15 will remain.

Mass layoffs are coming today and tomorrow at Symantec, according to a confidential HR document seen by a Valleywag source. The job-slashing exercise even has its own codename, "Project Xpress." Which areas are going to get hit the hardest? Clues can be found in the anodyne patter of Symantec CEO John Thompson during last quarter's earnings call:

AOL founder Steve Case's Revolution Health will lay off 60 employees in the next 24 hours, according to an internal memo. The bloodletting comes a day earlier than Valleywag reported yesterday. Lowlights from the bloody memo after the jump.

Um, whoa! Buried in the bottom of the 3rd quarter statement from the New York Times is this: "The following expectations are for the fourth quarter of 2007.... Staff reduction costs - $14 to $16 million. This range can vary significantly based on seniority and the timing of implementation." Hey what now? In the first quarter, when they shuttered the Boston Globe foreign bureaus, giving buyouts to 125 workers or so, they reported "Staff reduction costs of $7.8 million." In the second quarter, when workers were eliminated at the Edison, NJ, printing plant, they reported "staff reduction costs were $5.0 million." So presumably a good chunk of people are about to get canned. But who? Update: The Times claims that "most" of these costs are associated with the sale of the printing plants—one of which, as we already noted above, closed half a year ago. Hmm!

A tipster tells us AOL founder Steve Case's Revolution Health continues to "hemorrhage cash" and that layoffs are coming to the company's D.C.-area workforce this Thursday. About 70 out of 250 employees will be let go, says the source. Apparently, the only revenue generator the company is its CarePages unit, a community website it acquired.

I've never thought of AOL as having particularly attractive employees. I mean, come on: What would you expect from Dulles, Va.? But AOL France is another story. Or was. I don't think AOL CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant, the inseparable management duo known on campus as "Smithers and Burns," knew much about the French employees they laid off in last week's spasm of cost-cutting. But ... damn. If Rondy had only gotten a gander at them. AOL France reportedly lost 90 of its extremely good-looking 140 employees, most of whom apparently spent their last day on the job creating this stupendous single-take music video to the tune of "L'amour a la française."

Hey, folks! Check it out: The Washington Post has done a really well-researched story about layoffs at AOL. I wonder where they got all that incredible detail. [Washington Post]

When Snocap and music retailer CD Baby ended their partnership earlier this month, Snocap made like it pulled the plug. But today CD Baby president Derek Sivers put out numbers that show why it's no surprise Snocap had to lay off 31 of its 57 employees. Its partnership with CD Baby only generated $12,000 in revenues.

So everyman AOLer, you made through bloody Tuesday and got a good laugh at your fallen colleagues. Think you're safe? Not according to our latest tipster. He reports that one employee, after watching his team get hit hard on Tuesday, thinking his job was safe, got the dreaded layoff email last night. "This is pretty messed up," our source writes. Did our tipster's friend suffer from a network snafu or is AOL still culling the herd? Let us know what you're hearing.

Those of us who actually work all day at our tech startup jobs — unlike AOL staffers, apparently — saw the drunken, typo-strewn missive from an AOL employee and thought, whoa, seems funny but I've no time to read all this — can you text me a summary? Here's the SMS-sized edit of the AOL epic.