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Domain: theari.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to theari.com.

Comments · 8

  1. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  2. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  3. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  4. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  5. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  6. Mod parent up by ari_j · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.

    On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).

  7. Already Been Done by ari_j · · Score: 1 · on Distributed Computing "Advances"

    For my Honors thesis, I produced a general-purpose platform-independent distributed computing system with the added benefit of presence awareness/work accounting. (As in it immediately reassigns your work unit when you go offline, rather than waiting indefinitely for you to return the results. This is reasonable because almost everyone who would run a distributed computing client has a 24/7 Internet connection.) See the PDF version of my thesis for more information.

  8. A Better Way by ari_j · · Score: 2, Interesting · on New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects

    I wrote my Honors thesis on general-purpose distributed computing. I also implemented something I think more projects should use, which is presence awareness and work accounting. No more downloading of work units and sitting on them without ever uploading the results - with my system, you can immediately reassign a work unit when someone stops working on it. This eliminates double simultaneous assignment of individual work units. I used Jabber for my communications, and it would be pretty easy to implement hashing and cryptographic signing of work units and shared objects to ensure the integrity of your computation.