Ali Kuru » Hardware

Update: my DealExtreme order arrived in 100 days, not more

Ali Kuru — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:25:34 +0000

Remember my complaint about how slow is DealExtreme? I wrote in a post that it would probably take more than hundred days for them to deliver my item, and I think I owe them an apology now. I forgot to mention that my item has been arrived last Saturday, 2^nd of April to be exact, which means the DealExtreme were able to deliver my item in exactly 100 days, not more :)

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

More than hundred days to deliver an item? DealExtreme no more!

Ali Kuru — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 23:25:03 +0000

DealExtreme is one of those Hong Kong online retailers which you can find a lot of goodies at no price with free shipping. I’ve bought a lot of things from them in the past and, although their service was little bit slower than usual when considered to local sources, I was overall happy with their service. Their support were able respond you in a couple of days and they always returned with a reasonable solution.

Unfortunately, they appear to left those good days far behind.

Here is what happened with my last order; I ordered four different items as a package. After couple of weeks, they told me that they couldn’t find the memory card reader I ordered, hence they split my order in two shipments. They sent the first three item after their message and told me that they’ll send the remaining item when it’ll become available.

A few more weeks later, I wondered about my card reader and tried contacting them through their online chat support. After waiting almost half an hour before I could find someone to talk to, I told my problem to the staff. She told me that they are still waiting for the supplier.

Thought since I have a pending order in the system, I might try adding a new item to my order. Since my first order has tracking because total was higher than $15, my pending order will certainly have tracking as well and I can use that opportunity to add free tracking to my new order, which was below $15 by itself.

Asked her that how long will it take them to get the item I was thinking add to my pending order. She told me that the item is out of their stock and she can’t give any ETA. Because the item I was thinking to add was listed as “in stock” on the site, I was surprised with her answer. When I asked her about this inconsistency between the site and her answer, she copy&pasted this fine-print from the footer of the site to me:

Note: Stock and Availability shown on this site is for your reference only. While we strive to provide the most accurate and timely stock and availability information, availability information may become out of date and may change between the time you added an item to cart and the time your order is received.

After her responses, I gave up the idea of adding a new item to my pending order and decided wait. And I waited a lot!

I’ve put my order on 24th December 2010 and they’ve send me an email only 4 days ago stating that my they’ve shipped my last item. Yes, exactly 89 days after my purchase. Considering item hasn’t arrived yet and probably won’t for another two weeks, it’ll take more than hundred days to get an item from DealExtreme.

I will definitely not buy anything from them in the future and I suggest you to do the same. There are a lot of alternatives, try them instead.

Looks like Arçelik is going to be the first DLNA certified Turkish manufacturer

Ali Kuru — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 20:10:51 +0000

According to official DLNA web site, Arçelik is going to be the first Turkish manufacturer to offer a DLNA certified product: an LCD TV in an unknown size with a LAN connection, which will act as a “digital media player”.

According to DLNA, the model of the certified product is 32SXCR6 and certificate date shows 8/30/2010, yet couldn’t find any news about the new LCD TV neither on Arçelik’s official web site, nor on Google.

No wireless network interface according to certificate, wonder if it is going to have an internal drive.

Here is the given certificate (PDF).

Update: Seems like Arçelik won’t be the only Turkish electronics manufacturer with DLNA certified goods in their product line. Vestel says (Turkish, sorry) that they’ve already demonstrated their “DLNA TV” at IFA 2010. It’s really interesting to hear that they’ve demonstrated their DLNA capable product before they got the certification though :)

To keep pace with Moore’s Law, IBM studying ‘DNA origami’ to build next-gen microchips

Ali Kuru — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:47:03 +0000

Moore’s Law assumes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years, which means chip makers have to squeeze an increasing number of transistors onto every chip. According to Wired Gadgets, IBM is experimenting DNA Origami to create smaller chips;

Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.

“The idea is to combine leading edge lithography that can offer feature size of 25 nanometers with some chemical magic to access much smaller dimensions,” says Robert Allen, senior manager of chemistry and materials at IBM Almaden Research. “This allows us to place nano objects with 6-nanometer resolution. You don’t have a hope of doing that with lithography today.”

Giving DNA to our computers? I guess we can start counting down for Skynet after that :)