- cross-posted to:
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
What, you expect the flash drives they hand out for free at trade shows to be decent quality?
They are intended to be used to distribute advertising materials, not be rewritten multiple times.
E-waste, I say no to these same as I say no to straws, or plastic forks for takeout.
A business card with a link to the content would be a lot less wasteful.
Yep, and everyone understands a QR code these days
I remember some kid at a job fair in college handing out his resume on flash drives. I remember one of the booths saying “yeah, that’s not getting read.”
It’d be an awful security risk if they did. You can’t trust that the USB stick contains the resume to begin with.
A smart kid would have written a Stuxnet type malware that finds its way to any payroll system and adds him silently to it.
A smarter kid would then have it auto email their cyber dept with their resume and point out the vulnerability, and have their malware autoremove himself from the system before getting paid so he doesn’t go to jail for it. And even then, it’s illegal and a risky move just to try to get a job.
Since their brand is on it, yeah. I would expect that if the company wants my business, they wouldn’t put their name on shit quality products. Especially if it can lead to their would-be customers losing data. It kind of baffles me that they think this is a good way to impress me.
My guess is that the factories manufacturing the storage chips are making money on the side by selling off chips tuat failed quality control to companies that make these cheap USB drives or the factory is meaking the cheap USB drives themselves from the QC failed chips on the side and is selling them
It’s also why you see a lot of rip off products from China because the factories line to make money on the side
https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/18/iphones-made-from-rejected-parts/
They don’t exactly fail the quality checks, they get binned into a lower grade. It’s a common practice in many industries when reworking isn’t possible or financially viable.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Consumers can save some money when they don’t need top performance, the company gets some revenue, and the products don’t go into a landfill right away.
So it’s not good enough for the main product and gets put into a different pile? That sure sounds like a failed QC check to me. I agree with you though about the excess.
it fails the top tier qc check, but passes a low tier qc check. That’s how different price points/tiers for CPUs exist.
And then there’s those who fail the low tier check and “some friend” gets them for scrap en masse.
Depends on the nature of the failure. This is super common in CPUs for example. The absolutely perfect ones go in the top quality bin, those are your i9 and Ryzen 9 CPUs. Ones that are functionally fine, but a bit unstable at the higher clock speeds end up in the next lower quality bin, so something like an i7 or a Ryzen 7. Then you have ones that maybe have a failed core or two, those ones have the failed cores fused off and go in the next lower bin with lower core counts. Etc.
In the case of a flash memory chip as long as it isn’t corrupting data at a certain speed I’d expect it to be binned down to a lower quality bin. Assuming whoever buys that chip runs it at the clock speed the binning says to run it at it should be fine. Where you’d run into problems is if whoever buys it ignores what they were told and runs it at the full speed, in which case you’re going to end up with corrupted data.
Likewise other things that could lead to a usable but lower quality chip is if certain areas of memory were bad. As long as you disable those failed memory regions and sell it as a lower capacity chip that’s also fine. Once again though if the buyer re-enables the failed memory regions then that’s a problem.
Just happened to me the other day at THE worst possible moment. I bought a new mainboard which needed a BIOS update to work with my new CPU.
Me of course being a cheapskate I bought the cheapest one with no Bios flashback. So I put the files on a cheap USB, start the upate and compleatly bricked the mainboard.
After that I plugged the USB back into my PC and the fking USB corrupted the files.
Luckily I managed to save the BIOS but absolutley lost it in that moment.
That’s fucking rough! Crappily produced electronics are a plague.