BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "I want a technical opinion: what do you think of these?" the Director asks, indicating an item in a glossy brochure. "It's a four-gig USB key. A cheap four-gig USB key." "How do you know it's cheap?" "A, because it's a four-gig USB key, and B, your brochure says they'll give a …
That was called "reading comprehension skills" when I was in school.
There is a separate grade for the transcoding-the-written-symbols-into-pronounceable-sound-symbols. If I recall correctly, that was referred to as "technical reading skills"
Sorry I recall there is only a few in my class that had competent reading comprehension skills.
Most could only transcode from written to sound without any comprehension worth of mentioning.
I remember I got a lot of trouble when I asked the teacher
why they don't make the students repeat the course, until reading comprehension is competent.
They labeled me insensitive and marked me for forced emotional indoctrination lessons concerning others.
But I went to the school in the USA where education is abused and neglected to support favorite social controversies of the day.
Did you pass your SATS recently?
"The government has defended tests for Year 6 pupils across England, after some parents and teachers said a paper in this week's Sats was too difficult.
One head teacher said the English reading test included some "GCSE-level" questions. Some pupils were left in tears and did not finish the paper."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65570684
I expect that we shall not get an El Reg article about the SATS, so I'll just hang this thought here. There is a place, perhaps, for tests that are well beyond the capabilities of any student to complete and score 100%. If that was the norm, then no child would be upset that they hadn't completed everything perfectly, (because that would not be expected) and there would be a scale for determining relative capabilities and progress all the way to the top.
This is reminiscent of the old marking scheme: "Clears high walls with a single bound" (the criterion for a Principal Scientific Officer) and "Leaves perceptible dents high on walls", relevant to Senior S.O.s
Icon only for the last bit!
The Cambridge Maths Tripos Part III is a fourth year of university which prepares students for a career in mathematical research. The questions on the exam paper are often of the form "Prove or counter-example the following proposition". Legend has it that the exam setters don't always know the answer.
When preparing for the Fundamentals of Engineering exam in the US, I was told that it's expected I wouldn't know the way to answer each question. That's intentional; they expect the students to be able to sort the easy questions from the hard ones, get all the easy ones done, and only then start on the hard problems. That's a useful skill and a clever way to test for it.
"There is a place, perhaps, for tests that are well beyond the capabilities of any student to complete and score 100%. If that was the norm, then no child would be upset that they hadn't completed everything perfectly, (because that would not be expected) and there would be a scale for determining relative capabilities and progress all the way to the top."
I've certainly experienced professors who gave those, and I didn't appreciate them. That's perhaps not a big surprise given that getting lots of questions that are intentionally unanswerable with the education provided feels pointless. However, I think there are some big problems with doing that consistently.
It's not the way that many other things work. If you get several tasks at work, you will be expected to complete them all satisfactorily. If you can't, you need to go to some effort to prove why you can't and ideally that nobody can, or your boss will be angry with you. If you were faced with a manager who constantly asked you to do impossible or impractical things, what would you do? I don't mean the occasional request which proves untenable, or even a request where they first ask you to comment on its feasibility; I mean that almost every goal they provide you is presented as a straightforward task despite being infeasible to complete. I can't answer for you, but I would assume that it indicated they didn't have an understanding of what was practical and they were demonstrating their ignorance. I'd be concerned that pointing that out wouldn't be taken nicely, that failing to do all these things would make them angry, and I'd likely try to get a new boss. If it turned out that the manager concerned was testing me, I would find it disrespectful and pointless.
It also gives students a bad understanding of their success. Most of the time, they should be able to get 100% of the test completed if they put in enough effort to learn the material. If a test is set up where the best students are getting 35%, as some of my professors liked to do, every student leaves the test wondering if they've just failed the course. They'll be worried about that, and some of them will try to learn all the things covered in tests they were never expected to know. If that stuff isn't expected, it's probably either so advanced that the student doesn't have the basis to understand it yet or it's useless enough that it's not planned to teach them at all. Either way, they're likely to waste their time as a consequence of not understanding that they did fine.
This leaves us another option for how to make a test more difficult, one that I've personally seen infrequently but others have reported: just make the quantity untenable. Have a one-hour test with a hundred questions, and see what happens. Once again, a work parallel is useful here. We all know that you can get your work done well or you can rush through it and probably make some mistakes, but at least in that case, you'll be choosing between the options based on a situation you can understand and plan for. Not so with the overly long test, where you have to guess whether twenty perfect proofs and eighty blanks is better than sixty quick guesses and forty blanks. You're not really learning about whether the student can do the activity. Nor are you really learning about their time management skills. You're learning what their last-minute guess was and judging them on that.
Thanks for the well-argued rebuttal, and I agree that (a) a test which tests knowledge not taught is not useful, and (b) that any 'open-ended' test should not be simply made open-ended by quantity, driving the 'guess-all-the-answers-quickly' strategy. I guess that there's a difference between testing mathematics, where there is a definitely right answer, and testing language comprehension/criticism (which I believe was what the recent SATS kerfuffle was all about). A mathematics paper ought to be capable of completion with 100% success, and just adding a question asking for a counter-example to some current conjecture would be pointless. However, we ought to be able to derive open-ended tests for many educational goals that aren't as rigorous as maths?
As far as the Real Life analogies go, I would sometimes ask job candidates what they would do if their boss made impossible demands on their time or resources. The answer I was hoping for would be something along the lines of 'ask my boss for guidance on prioritization', (though any well-reasoned response would have been acceptable!) but more often the candidate would say 'oh, work harder 'til it's done' or 'bear down harder on my own staff'. I once had a young lady tell me that she would be able to cope with impossible demands, because she was female and 'we can multi-task'.
I remember taking a course in Electrodynamics in my 3rd year of a B.Sc. and asking the 4th year students how they did on the notorious exam. One said he finished one and a half questions on the four-question exam and managed an A. So I went into the exam and managed to finish a whole two questions, and left the exam feeling pretty good. One of my classmates was grumbling into his beer that he failed because he didn't quite finish two questions, and I joyfully told him that he got an A! He looked at me with intense scorn, as if I was completely insane.
The following term, it turned out he DID get an A, but he'd forgotten our exchange so he still thought I was a nutter. No good deed goes unpunished...
Note: The course was based on "Classical Electrodynamics" By Jackson.
There is an anectode around the web about a student that gets late to his Class. The teacher has a set of problems on the board. Because he is late, he thinks he is supposed to solve them. He took a while to solve, but he managed. It turned out to be a famous set of problems, like the Fermat Theorem or thereabouts, and this student solved it.
Found the source: the student was George Dantzig and the Class was about statistical theory, and he solved it, thinking it was an assignment.
So those tests with impossible questions, well... some day somebody might solve them out of the blue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
The Daily Mail take on it (as screamy as you'd expect) was that a union said some of their members (otherwise known as "teachers") didn't know the answers. I suppose that explains a lot about the deplorable state of education, which is ironically why these tests were introduced.
Personally I didn't consider the questions particularly unreasonable for 11 year olds. There were some hard ones, but that's the point, it's supposed to be a challenge. Tests that are easy are a delusion designed to make people feel good about themselves, not to see if they've bothered to remember what a subordinate clause is.
transcode from written to sound without any comprehension worth of mentioning.
Otherwise known as 'phonics', a teaching method popular in the 1960s, suddenly trendy again in the 2010s and to most right-minded people a surefire way of achieving the goal of reading-without-comprehension. Glad to see it falling out of fashion again.
M.
There was an ad in Greek in a computer magazine. I asked the group secretary (born Istanbul) what it said -- but she left Turkey at age 5+-, never learnt to READ Greek.
I have the Greek alphabet, and no more; I read it to her, she told me what it said.
So I had reading without comprehension, she had comprehension without reading (in Greek, that is -- we are both quite literate in general)
I'm a bit confused, why would you expect someone with a Turkish background to understand Greek? There hasn't been a significant Greek minority in Turkey since the early 1920s, and the Turkish language is completely unrelated to Greek.
(In fact, modern Turkish has a fascinating history as it was essentially invented in the 1920s as replacement for Ottoman Turkish).
That's a big kettle of ball games there.
In the USA and UK the Behaviourist and Market Economy alliance have made mechanical decoding skills the measure and method for the teaching of reading. aka "Phonics". Decades of research about what readers actually do, like Margaret Clarke's Young Fluent Readers (1976) to the Goodmans in the 80s we've known that sounding out words wasn't the main part of how we read.But complicated, sophisticated reading models don't make for easily measurable, easy to programme, easy to understand, marketable teaching methods that politicians can latch on to and promote as a solution to the "falling standards" that people have been complaining about since at least the 17th or 18thC.*
*Sorry, I can't member which 17thC philosopher wrote about falling educational standards, it was 4 decades ago that I read that stuff.It might have been Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But then again it might not. The passing of the years does that to us all.
On the other hand, I was taught English under a system that percieved grammar as a crypto-fascist system to force young minds into a rigid authoritarian mindset.
It drove our French teacher mad as we had no concept of, or the vocabulary of, grammar. It was also a bit of a bastard when I got to Germany where they take their grammar seriously.
We also never learned to avoid creulty to the common comma.
In my school we didn't have things like verbs and adverbs, we had "doing words" and "action words" and some of the kids were encouraged to use different coloured pens for the different types of words.
Does make it a little awkward when doing French and I'm expected to identify phrasal verbs, propositions, etc and I need to go Wiki to translate the rubbish I was taught into "this is what grown ups call it".
The context I was expecting/assuming was a technical context, so my mental and Google searches ran in that direction, and thus, came up with no relevant hits. Yes, my bad for 'assuming', but I think my doing so was a variation on "people see what they expect to see" (and its corollary, "people don't see what they don't expect to see").
Thanks to DJO for giving a straight answer, and I'm off to withdraw my post as I am, only semi-rightfully, I think, drowning in downvotes. No, scratch that, withdrawing my post will delete an entire thread, so instead I'll just suffer the downvotes.
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The trick is to get the good stuff that OTHER companies give away.
My 16 GB Amphenol USB stick is now so well used that the logo has been completely worn off..
Oh.. And order some engraved pens from pens.com, and you will continue to get free engraved samples of various pens and other nicknack for years to come. Nice to distribute among the colleagues.
Meh, one of our projects gave the people involved a multi-ended usb charger cable. At least that is useful (and a nice colour). And since it is a cheap(ish) one it can sefely stay in the office at my desk. No big loss if it disappears (though I admit it is convenient to have it around for when I forgot to charge the phone, or the headset, or the second phone that my desk phone is forwarded to, which I won't answer after hours, or one of my colleagues forgets to charge their [list of stuff]).
That assumes it can actually identify as being capable of delivering that much power. I had my phone on it for a while and the cable did not feel warm. (but, yeah, you are right). And it would only set the office on fire, not sure if that counts as a big loss. Besides, I use it there during business hours, I guess risk is minimal.
Sounds like a nice attack though :) (and no, I do not have isopropy alcohol in a can WTCLOI)
You'd also have to have a USB socket to plug it into that is capable of delivering that much power. The average laptop USB socket will put out half an amp at 5V, or, if you're lucky and have a USB 3.0 one, 900 mA. 3.5W is hardly a fire-starting amount of power.
Use aluminium wires with an iron oxide coating-- thermite cables, no additional oxygen required. Though I'm not sure the heat of the aluminium would be sufficient to start the reaction with the iron oxide, but the point stands: include the oxidizer in the cable.
Ha, amateur effort!
As a schoolchild in the 60s a friend and I got interested in making gunpowder. We realised that a "fine grind" was the thing to achieve, resulting in the construction of a small mill from Meccano, an Andrews Liver Salts tin and some marbles. Worked a treat. Only exploded once!
The results were placed in a pill bottle with wires from a toy train transformer joined with a sliver of cooking foil to act as a fuse. Screwing on the top meant that things went off with a very satisfying bang!
That said, I did hear the sound of a shard of glass flying past my ear, so was probably inches from losing an eye.
Hardly a "challenge", very thin wire and some magnesium powder and possibly an oxidant (potassium permanganate would be good here) and away you go.
Yeah I know - I'm very irresponsible but I concluded anybody with access to magnesium powder and potassium permanganate already knows exactly what they can do.
A real BOFH would already have a special drawer of self made 'O.MG cable' type cables with various payloads designated by cable colour. Linus of LTT has recently done a run through of what the cables can/could do, I'm never trusting an unknown cable again!
"Stupid crap that a company gives away is almost always gathering dust soon after..."
Back in the dawn of prehistory when no-one outside of a small circle of financial hell knew what a "subprime mortgage" was, the company I worked for was rather generous with their Christmas gifts, including a high-quality wine set (opening set, ice bucket, tray and glasses) that is still in regular use almost 20 years later.
But yes, other than that my experience of company Christmas gifts has been 'instant landfill'. Christmas bonuses, however small, were always much more appreciated!
My memory has faded somewhat, so the numbers might be shite, but around 2000, Xerox stock was plummeting, so far that it ceased trading in the exchange, and the company was close to closing doors. Employees were flooding out, threatening death from a different method, when corporate offered a choice:
$5k retention bonus
$15k worth of stock options at $22/share
Nearly everyone took the cash. They had to break their contract when too many people took the cash. The stock options expired long before the stock reached the strike price.
Because I'm an idiot, I took the options.
Always take teh cash.
Once had a line manager who had come from the mining world. Although the company had a general rule that there should always be someone from our department on duty - so ordinarily we were supposed to take staggered lunch breaks - he insisted we all had Friday lunch together, and would personally pop down to the chipshop and buy tons of chips.
It was one of the most productive hours of our week, exchanging news across the table and spluttering bits of chip everywhere.
M.
On a related note, does anyone else find it irritating the way so many job adverts list the things which are supposedly enticements, but which are actually either legally required (pension fund, etc), or are pointless crap?
No, I don't see an "employee assistance" helpline as a benefit because they are useless and I wouldn't trust their impartiality. No, I don't want unspecified 'discounts' for junk from some shops I would never buy anything from anyway. No, I'm not interested in cycle to work schemes or electric car loans...
"or electric car loans..."
Our company tried that, via Octopus. When I looked, their prices where so much higher than other sources that it almost entirely negated the tax-free salary sacrifice scheme "benefits" and, buried a number of clicks into the site, after you'd given your details, it was a lease scheme, not a purchase/loan scheme and I never did find out if there was a purchase option at the end of the lease. No way in hell am I spend 15-20+ grand on a car with nothing to show for it after 5 years. Total rip-off IMHO.
My company has just sent details of a cycle to work scheme. Leaving aside the fact that I am not the only employee with a totally-impractical-for-bike commute (even including public transport), I looked at the cheapest bike in the scheme. After discount, and including dubious salary-sacrifice accounting, it was actually £50 cheaper direct from the manufacturer!
This is a bit like the products offered to teachers and local authority staff by our unions (Unison and NUT (when I was still teaching)). Almost every single item or offer was cheaper elsewhere. Even loans were offered at a higher rate than the banks.
We had one of the schemes at work, and in addition to the cost and limited number of suppliers (many bike shops realised it was too much hassle) it also took up a disproportionate amount of time administering it - plus as I recall it was a hire purchase so the bike ended up as the property of the employer at the end, and they had to either sell it to the employee (presumably for a nominal amount), or duspose of it.
Unsurprisingly, there weren't many takers...
Or the vouchers redeemable at outlets where you pay more to start with.
Something really usable like Amazon voucher codes, oh no far too usable for what you might actually want.
But no doubt there's not enough margin for the likes of Edenred to have a cut from the middle...
At Microsoft, they gave out patent plaques. Usually in the mail, but when one got presented at a group meeting, I saw a senior mathematician's eyes pop out -- she just plain wanted one!
My rule: "with my name on it, it's a Victoria cross. With no name, it's a piece of cheap plastic"
> Stupid crap that a company gives away is almost always gathering dust soon after.
For some values of "almost".
I was gifted a CompuServe shirt, nice long-sleeve khaki, about 1995. Still have it. May be the peak of my wardrobe.
In 2006, for 30 years of service, I was 'awarded' a Bulova atomic clock. Yes, it is really a radio-clock, it may crap-out next time WWV's budget gets nicked. And yeah it is a $3 movement in a $5 hardboard "walnut" case but Bulova charged my employer $60 in bulk (about a dozen of us turned 30 years that year). But when it can catch the wave it is inarguably accurate for domestic time.
I had some POS 'staff gift' from my school that was so pathetic that I hung onto it..... Ah! The Damn Dean Bag! Looks like a shopping bag, has the school logo painted very nice. Won't hold chit and falls-down trying.
Cash rules. Now for the company logo. It can be either on the company check, or on the nice pieces of paper with either the Queen's picture on it or deceased presidents, or other elder statesmen from the country in question. If you need to apply a logo (WTCLOI) a rubber stanp ought to function nicely. I'll take it in $100 bills please!
I don't think there are any notes with the newly anointed King on it (yet).
The only reason cash has value is that you can exchange it for food and other things necessary for living. Consider two sorts of money, one sort you can exchange for anything except food, water and shelter, the other sort which you can exchange for anything including food, water and shelter. Which would you want to be paid in? In ancient times people were paid in beer and bread, salt, wine etc. as there was no actual money around. I believe that the UK's Poet Laureate is theoretically paid in wine, but this tradition has sadly succumbed to vulgar money.
Historically, the Poet Laureate received a gift of wine from the monarch. In 1790 Henry Pye asked if he could be paid a salary and the ‘butt of canary wine’ was discontinued until the 20th century.
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/question/is-the-poet-laureate-paid/#:~:text=The%20Poet%20Laureate%27s%20current%20annual,of%20wine%20from%20the%20monarch.
Being so valuable, soldiers in the Roman army were sometimes paid with salt instead of money. Their monthly allowance was called "salarium" ("sal" being the Latin word for salt). This Latin root can be recognized in the French word "salaire" — and it eventually made it into the English language as the word "salary."
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/11/08/362478685/from-salt-to-salary-linguists-take-a-page-from-science#:~:text=Being%20so%20valuable%2C%20soldiers%20in,the%20Latin%20word%20for%20salt).
Upvote for correctness.
The latest we're all in it together help/reward scheme we have is - to be able to load money onto purchase cards from a few supermarket chains. Woohoo, yeah, thanks. So much more useful than an actual pay rise.
Though some years ago we did get one item WTCLOI that was then (and still is) of use - a fleece jacket. So whilst WFH with the heating off, as it costs too much to keep it on all day, I can wear that.
"CASH always rules. Stupid crap that a company gives away is almost always gathering dust soon after."
Oh, I dunno. We all got a sent a quite nice F&M Christmas hamper during the pandemic instead of the usual Xmas party the company pays for. Some complained, but then maybe they just have no taste? As someone based too far away from London to make attending the Xmas party viable, I found it a welcome change from the effective nothing I usually get from the company at Xmas :-)
Yeah, but stupid shit got as a job lot can be claimed as being worth X, while the actually price paid was X shifted a few times to the right.
Manglement don't want things that might interfere with the budget (and thus their bonuses) so they'll bleat endlessly about some feel-good bollocks they read in Management For Dummies and completely ignore the fact that for most employees, it's cold hard cash.
CASH always rules. Stupid crap that a company gives away is almost always gathering dust soon after.
When will manglement understand that?
An acquaintance was let go from a company that liberally doled out t-shirts, sweatshirts and jackets expensively embroidered with the company logo. She was rather upset with the firing. The company headquarters was located in a dodgy area of the city, lots of homeless people on the streets. She was bemoaning that after working there for a long time, she had quite a wardrobe of company-logo stuff she never wanted to see again. I suggested she make a distribution of all the tat to the local homeless, improving their lives and getting petty revenge on her ex-company.
Icon for one of the recipients.
I find it amazing that it took about 30 years for the designers of USB stick casings to make one that wouldnt fall off your keyring due to a plastic ring snapping , or metal u-clip coming inclipped etc etc
Basically all you need is a hole of useable size, but that seemed to be beyond them.
A requirement of mine is that the stick be easily removable from the key-ring when required. One reason being that having the weight of a big bunch of keys is not good for the connectors. Another might be that the bunch of keys makes it too conspicuous.
A further requirement is that when not in use the connector should be protected from pocket lint.
I have on my desk, a nice, small solid metal one with the appropriate size hole, marked "DTSE9". It's 8 GB (yes, I got it several years ago), but it still works. I's about 4cm long, and USB connector width and thickness. I have a short loop of bead chain through the hole, and use that to clip it onto one of those "NOT FOR CLIMBING" carabiner clips.
Ah! It's a Kingston...and they still have it, in 128GB and USB3! https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-128GB-Traveler-DTSE9G2
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I've had some ones that lasted longer. The one I remember the most was a metal-cased 1 GB stick, mostly because it was small enough to be useless for most things. That turned out to be an asset because it meant that I never erased it for a temporary Linux or Windows installation disk, and therefore my system repair image could always be found on it. It lasted about a decade, and I think I lost it rather than it breaking.
I'm waiting for that to happen here.
Already they have banned connecting to *anything* on a "foreign" network (e.g. my home network), which makes printing while WFH a bit more challenging (mail a PDF to my personal email (also a no-no), then print it from my home system).
I'm all for information security, but when it gets in the way of me doing my job...
When I was a Micron employee in 2007, management came around delivering our Micron-branded 128MB (Yes, MB) USB sticks. They had to do it in person, because we had to sign the roster acknowledging receipt.
The reason we were being given such princely gifts was because they were built with Micron NAND flash that didn't pass QA to be sold at retail.
The best thing we ever got was a Bluetooth speaker, it's portable, sounds reasonably good for being about the size of your fist. Now, Simon, get out of my mind! The worst were the USB keys that were shaped like a key! Horrible design and sloooow. And the previous disk shaped housing where the drive swiveled out really sucked with only 512mb... If you're so hard up to find a suitable gift and fail so miserably, maybe you need to save the money for the company?
I worked for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) at the time they 'merged' with Compaq (1998).
At the office staff meeting to announce the merger, they also decided to give out prizes to staff that had been nominated by management for obscure reasons (this had never happened before, so was a bit strange).
I, somehow, had been nominated for something like 'being very helpful' or something like that.
My prize? A pair of sweat pants and a hoodie (without a hood) emblazoned with the now defunct Digital equipment Corporation logo.
Other 'winners' received similar DEC logo'd merch as well.
They'd obviously gone through the cupboards and decided they need to get rid of the old company branded stuff, since they wouldn't be able to give use it anymore.
I must admit, the clothes were both warm and comfy and lasted many years. The track pants lasted about 10 years and I only finally threw out the hoodie earlier this year since it was pretty much worn out and I haven't worn it for a few years.
Whilst looking for a picture to illustrate the shite design of most of the cases, I just saw a 2TB stick on ebay for £5!
I'm sure thats really reliable
It got me thinking and made me realise that USB stick are going the same way as CDsand the floppys before them - not really as necassary in a high-speed connected world .
...or maybe its because i no longer feel the need to boot off them to fiddle with computers
I think it's mostly because companies want to spend rather little on the gift, and if they gave their employees a bonus of the amount they're going to spend, the employees might find it more insulting than getting nothing. If your employer gave you a £20 bonus, I'm imagining several people who would find that disappointing and would react with indignation. While getting significantly more in cash is best for everyone, there are cases where companies, or more often some group within them, can't or won't spend more on such a thing. An event with free food might be a better use of that amount of money, but it doesn't work for people who work remotely or if such things are just unpopular.
Oddly enough I still have one from '90s with the Digital [DEC] now faded logo that still works - takes an AAA battery. Has the original bulb still but there is a spare in the base of the torch which I know is a Maglite thing but I like to think it embodied the DEC way of thinking. I was wondering whether I could replace the original bulbs with a LED device but realized the 1.5V isn't enough to drive a LED without an active component to pump up the voltage :(
Sometime just before Compaq I received a wooden DEC chess set (for no particular reason) which not long afterwards some impoverished student admired, and was soon placed in possession of said chess set.
BOFH & PFY's discussion of violent acts involving flamable liquids and WTCLOI - the context rather made me think more World Trade Centres' loss of integrity.
I cannot imagine the BOFH would have had much use for a chess set either - defenestration is so much more effective and immediate than any cunning strategem. On slow Tuesday afternoons I imagine he descends to the car park and reminisces over the blood stains the foolhardy left on the pavement.
You should investigate the possibility of converting it to use an LED "bulb".
I have done this to my Maglite, and the increase in lifetime is significant, over an incandescent bulb (as would be expected). Unless you're interested in focusing or the far better IR output of an incandescent bulb, the LED options available are a huge improvement.
As to batteries, I prefer the CR123 Lithiums. More expensive, yes, and an oddball size, also require a new flashlight, but for light when you need it, they are an improvement over alkaline cells, and I have yet to have one leak. The torch/flashlight in my cars has CR123s, since their shelf life far exceeds that of alkalines. LED light sources, of course. Chinese 2xCR123 LED torches/flashlights in aluminum are available quite reasonably at Amazon.
"It's a four-gig USB key. A cheap four-gig USB key."
"How do you know it's cheap?"
The correct answer to this question is: "I can tell it's cheap, because the tongue in the USB connector isn't blue coloured".
(After USB 3 became commonplace, and my boss was still ordering USB 2 stick drives for many months afterwards, I had to 'diplomatically' ask them whether our official supplier didn't also sell USB 3 sticks, as writing OS install ISO images on to USB 2 sticks was taking an increasingly tedious amount of time… The worrying thing is that they weren't aware of the significant speed difference between the two. More fool me, I guess: if I hadn't mentioned it, I could maybe have continued to spend more time reading The Register carrying out important online research while waiting for the image writing to complete…
The other worrying thing is that even now you still see far too many shops, including large chains, happily selling numerous varieties of USB 2 sticks in store, and often only marginally cheaper than the USB 3 sticks next to them on the shelves. Why on earth are they still stocking and selling these? You can use a USB 3 device in a USB 2 port, but it will only work at USB 2 speeds, of course. There is surely no (or virtually no) use case where buying a new USB 2 stick makes sense nowadays, and if, for some reason (exceptionally picky ancient hardware, perhaps?) someone really does need one, surely they should probably be online 'special order only' these days?)
"Why on earth are they still stocking and selling these?"
Because
"often only marginally cheaper than the USB 3 sticks next to them on the shelves."
Some people WILL buy on price alone, because they think, rightly or wrongly, that all they need is a "USB pendrivekeythingy", and when they see one priced at X and another of the same capacity priced at X+n, they'll not unreasonable conclude that the former is the one to go for, because they genuinely don't see any benefit in paying the extra for the one next to it.
And let's not be blind to the reality of life these days - if you NEED a USB stick (e.g. you've been asked to provide one for your child to store homework) but money is tight, then you probably aren't going to want to spend any more than the bare minimum possible even if you know full well that you're buying something that isn't nearly as good as it could be if you could just spare an extra couple of local currency units.
In the case you outlined, cheap is better for two additional reasons.
1. Chances are the amount of data needing to be transported is pretty small, so speed is not really an issue, and
2. There is a high possibility that it will go missing, at which time cheap becomes important.
"when they see one priced at X and another of the same capacity priced at X+n, they'll not unreasonable conclude that the former is the one to go for, because they genuinely don't see any benefit in paying the extra for the one next to it."
And also the reverse: some people will get the more expensive one because "it's more expensive, so it's obviously better". You make a bigger % markup on the more expensive one, and you've got the consumers coming *and* going.
Why on earth are they still stocking and selling these?
They're selling them because they have them in stock. The person responsible for doing so was probably a bean counter who got a price break of 0.01% at 100,000 units, oblivious to the fact that they'd be obsolete and written off before half of them had been sold.
As an example of this, I use a USB2 SD card reader/writer to put gcode on to transfer to the 3D printer. Since it's generally only a few MB (I don't tend to print complicated sculptures etc, mostly functional items such as brackets and the like) then USB2 is easily fast enough. If I were transferring the software to another machine (Cura & Freecad) I'd generally use the network or if I had to use USB I'd instead use one of my USB3 sticks.
None of the responders hit the real reason - The store gets the USB2 for a dime per thousand, and the USB3 at a more realistic price. They then sell the USB2 for a few cents less than the USB3. Each USB3 sold might net them a nickel profit, but the slightly cheaper USB2 is practically nothing but profit.
Them beancounters are short sighted, but short sighted is not the same as stupid.
The store doesn't get those profits, the reseller does. And the reseller will make it a condition that the store offers both and with a price difference of at least a certain percentage. And just to be sure they'll have a nation wide monopoly on the big brands, so the store has to buy through them.
"Why on earth are they still stocking and selling these? "
I'm happy they do because I have a number of test equipment and industrial kit which refuses to boot from USB3 sticks.
Yes, in theory, USB3 sticks should be backward compatible, but in reality that doesn't always work.
"There is surely no (or virtually no) use case where buying a new USB 2 stick makes sense nowadays"
I don't know. I was recently purchasing a USB disk intended to stay permanently attached to a piece of hardware which only has a USB 2.0 port and isn't working with particularly large files anyway. I considered choosing a USB2 disk for that purpose, even though nothing would break if I used a USB3 one, just because why spend extra on speed that would never be used? I ended up going with a USB3 one anyway, but other than a slightly quicker population of the data from my computer, it has never used the extra speed it could have. I wouldn't make a lot of them, but I'm guessing there are massive warehouses full of the things and we might as well still use them in cases where they fit.
Here
Cash.... best morale booster ever
Boss : Christmas party(no beer provided)
Us: nope cash please
Boss: Summer bbq (no beer provided)
Us : Nope cash please
Boss: Free beer or free cash
Us : Eeerrrrrrrr rr . does not compute..... must have cash , must have beer .. need cash..need beer ..... error error error cannot decide error
I have kept the merch I got at a conference in Australia some years ago. (It's never been used, honestly, but was worth keeping just for the amusement it creates.)
It's an IBM-branded vibrator.
Actually, it's labelled as a USB-powered personal massage device. But WE KNOW.
A desk tidy for several different sizes of Post-It notes. There are no known sizes of Post-It notes that fit it.
OTOH, this being on the early days of mobiles, I was in an office with a shop on the ground floor. The carrier bags were considered wonderfully cool for the kids to take their stuff to school in.
#1 worst: Various useless gifts reminding you to take care of your mental and physical health, care for the environment, and be at one with nature. I only open the box to remove the plastic bits before dropping the whole thing in the paper recycling bin. Real mindfulness would have been hiring more people to stop the burnouts.
#2 worst: Tickets for free "memorable" activities. Cave tours, whitewater rafting, zip-lines, balloon rides, classic car drives, etc. The ticket usually buys 1/10 of the normal event so it's something like 2km of Sherpa through Tibet. Tibet? Oh, yes, it's a global catalog. With blackout dates. Thanks.
#3 worst: Giant oddly shaped insulated beverage mug that's not dishwasher safe. Can't give these away for free. Can't recycle them.
#4 worst: Company logo clothing in odd sizes. Fleece jacket with extra-large waist and stick-man sleeves. Synthetic, of course. A cotton one could at least be burned for fuel.
@Kevin McMurtie
"Company logo clothing"
My son worked for the software part of an oil industry support company. They were all entitled to free offshore jackets with the company logo embroidered on it. Not survival, but good quality stuff, light and wind- and weatherproof with an inside pocket that can hold an A4 clipboard. I appropriated it when he left the company and was going to throw it out.
A couple of lifetimes ago I worked for a screenprinting shop that also did embroidery and could order logo'ed tchotchkes. Strange business to be in, pretending to be excited about a new line of [* thingie *] knowing 99% of them will be broken or landfilled outright inside a week.
Another thing to consider is that the company could no doubt write off the cost of the branded merch as an advertising expense, so not only is the company giving employees stuff they don't want, the company isn't really paying for it either. Gee, thanks.
"Another thing to consider is that the company could no doubt write off the cost of the branded merch as an advertising expense, so not only is the company giving employees stuff they don't want, the company isn't really paying for it either. Gee, thanks."
And, just for clarification, if they are writing off the cost, that's a tax break and therefore the recipient is paying a fraction of that cost in the tax paid from their wages. Triple whammy!
A certain company had been well known for its employee Christmas gifts for years (a bench top BBQ WTCLOI, a picnic cooler bag with built in boom box WTCLOI, company themed monopoly game, etc) but at the change of a managing director, influenced by a few people in HR who think Christmas gifts are heteronormative and white supremacist, it dropped off sharply. The first year under the new MD we got four Lindt chocolate balls in a paper gift bag. This year we got a pair of socks. Seriously, I'd rather they just decide not to give gifts.
When my former company achieved a whole 10 years of trading, the employees were given ballpoint pens manufactured by Cross with the above legend printed / engraved. They must have cost several pounds each, mine still works. I find the balance a bit too top-heavy for normal use though. I must admit that the lettering is so faint you have to look quite hard to see it, so not too embarrassing. Although not quite a Montblanc Meisterstück, I assume that the owners were actually proud of their company. (They made me redundant a few years later, after selling the company to an IT 'behemoth' for loadsamoney, but I have the pen to remind me of such 'happy' memories.)
AC for obvious reasons.
When offspring started work with a certain big 3 letter tech company as a grad they were sent various "on boarding" (shudder) gift items. with logo. But rather nasty cheap stuff. To the point of not exactly being something that would enhance said company's reputation if anyone saw it. Which no one would because it sits in a cupboard at our house taking up a (small) amount of otherwise useful space.
When I retired from my previous position, I engineered my own retirement gift.
The group I was in did product design. I thought we needed a group coffee mug, so I crowdsourced the design (we have some very good artists in the group) and sent it out to a company that did this sort of thing. Got several dozen back (enough for everyone and a few extras for new hires/gifts, etc) and handed them out, asking for a completely voluntary amount to defray the cost of having them made (which I advanced...it was a relatively reasonable amount).
They were well received and I believe the back stock is almost gone. My memory is cast in ceramic WTCLOI...:-)
At the height of the pandemic working in an Emergency Department suffering from access block (all ward beds full, so patients who need to be in a real hospital bed left sitting on an uncomfortable* ED trolley), the C-suite thought it a good idea to give out a self-care pack to the afflicted long-stayers: in this case a drawstring bag with a scented candle, some hand sanitiser and a disposable electronic thermometer - all WTCLOI.
I pointed out that, with a source of ignition, what they'd given to each person spending 36h+ in ED was a rectal thermometer and a Molotov cocktail.
*If you've ever wondered why the beds are so uncomfortable in an Emergency Department, every one of them has to be ready to have CPR commenced on its occupant within about 3 seconds, which is not true of your run of the mill hospital bed.
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