7 ms·

Living and working in China, I quickly discovered that it's a buyer-beware market. Within a few weeks I had learned to always buy my electronics from the offici

by slacka 13y ago

Living and working in China, I quickly discovered that it's a buyer-beware market. Within a few weeks I had learned to always buy my electronics from the official stores in shops like Guomao. From ICs to smartphones, the fakes run the whole gamut. In shops like Shenzhen's SEG, I've watched them apply brand stickers in public. When asked if they're real, they told me with a straight face that it was and came from the same factory. Yeah right. One of my coworkers lost all his photos from the trip, when his fake SD with a bogus size reached the internal limit and started overwriting his earliest pictures.

yardie 13y ago
One of those fakes cost me my contract. I bought a USB key from a big box store. And used it to store some client work on it. Brought it into their office and nothing worked. I tested it on my servers and everything was fine. A few days later after constantly trying to debug it I copied the version from my USB key to my servers and bam! I finally get the same errors as the client. In the end I wasted needless hours and missed a deadline over a $20 USB key (you know the cheap ones they keep at the checkout line).
- driverdan 13y ago
  1. Why do you think it was a fake? 2. If you knew a deadline was approaching why would you waste your time debugging a USB drive? There are plenty of other ways (including a new USB drive) to transfer the data.
  - yardie 13y ago
    1. Because the advertised capacity was 8GB but the real capacity was <1GB. There was a lot of coverage about this a few years ago. Including Bunnie Huang who had a problem with bad, fake SD cards being in his Chumbys'. The controller reported 8GB to the OS and so as it reached real capacity the controller would overwrite the first blocks. 2. If the code works on your computer yet doesn't work on the clients computer you would be lead to believe the problem is on the client's side. Honestly, how many people actually check their storage media? I didn't debug the USB drive I ran the code from the USB drive after recompiling 50 million times. I don't see a lot of programmers trying to run diskcheck or memcheck every time they have an unexplainable crash.

by slacka 13y ago

yardie 13y ago

One of those fakes cost me my contract. I bought a USB key from a big box store. And used it to store some client work on it. Brought it into their office and nothing worked. I tested it on my servers and everything was fine. A few days later after constantly trying to debug it I copied the version from my USB key to my servers and bam! I finally get the same errors as the client. In the end I wasted needless hours and missed a deadline over a $20 USB key (you know the cheap ones they keep at the checkout line).

driverdan 13y ago
1. Why do you think it was a fake? 2. If you knew a deadline was approaching why would you waste your time debugging a USB drive? There are plenty of other ways (including a new USB drive) to transfer the data.
- yardie 13y ago
  1. Because the advertised capacity was 8GB but the real capacity was <1GB. There was a lot of coverage about this a few years ago. Including Bunnie Huang who had a problem with bad, fake SD cards being in his Chumbys'. The controller reported 8GB to the OS and so as it reached real capacity the controller would overwrite the first blocks. 2. If the code works on your computer yet doesn't work on the clients computer you would be lead to believe the problem is on the client's side. Honestly, how many people actually check their storage media? I didn't debug the USB drive I ran the code from the USB drive after recompiling 50 million times. I don't see a lot of programmers trying to run diskcheck or memcheck every time they have an unexplainable crash.