Magical Chinese Hard Drive

jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"

Comments

Caveat Emptor and Xenophobia.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When the seller is not looking for repeat customers, they will do anything they can get away with. You see it tourist spots where they sell shoddy goods to the tourists. The proverbial user car salesmen do high pressure sales and scams because most of them are not looking for repeat customers. And your local grocery store is working on wafer thin margins. Still it would gladly refund the cost of a bag of chips if you go back and tell them "The bag of chips I bought yesterday was no good, it was stale" just on your word.

When there is not much of repeat custom, sometimes a trusted third party would certify the goods as good. Only when trust develops between buyer and seller the economy would flourish. Can I explain the important role played by that federal bureaucrat who defines the difference between tomato sauce and tomato ketchup to a tea partier in 30 seconds? No way. Well, that would off topic here too.

I saw several anti-Chinese racist comments in that link. I am very sure there are anti-American racist comments in Chinese sites ranting against Standard & Poor granting top AAA ratings to CDOs structured by cows. It is not the race, it is just commerce. In Chapter 13, Nice Guys Finish First, in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins gives a very nice theory of the development of trust and altruism purely based on self interest.