Eugene Miya wrote:

In article ,
Roland Hutchinson wrote:
I'm still somewhat in awe of the fact that the new Micro Center store in
northern New Jersey can afford to hand out 2 GB flash memory devices as
promotional swag. (They sent out a mailing a couple of weeks ago: one per
customer with the mailing flyer, but also a 1 GB freebee for a friend with
the pass-along card from the flyer. Your choice of card or USB stick.
Admittedly, the stick came with that dreadful U3 software and I had to
borrow a Windows machine to reflash its firmware to get rid of it.)

Don't be in awe too long.

I'm not that much in awe.

It's useful to track flash drive price at Fry's.

I miss having a Fry's retail store nearby. The nearest one appears to be a
tad over 700 miles from here.

They also sometimes limit purchases to 1 per customer (another useful
metric). Before these devices it was Photon lights, teeshirts (of course,
and they will still be collectors items; I'm doing a run of 3 dozen
shortly), laser pointers ($6 for 1), and for a little more work
(competitive contests, or multi booth vendor visits) small hand held TVs,
iPods (of course), Walkmen (ancient), and then the bigger ticket items
from things like drawings (but you really have to interest geeks).
O'Reilly does good book giveaways but the thing to watch for with Tim
are his slew of new tech talent meetings like Foo Camp and Makerfaire.
And more.

Oh, there is indeed swag and then there is swag:

My current -- well, six-year-old but still current -- Linux laptop is an IBM
Thinkpad that was one of six raffled off by IBM at LinuxWorld Expo the year
that they announced their billion-dollar committment to Linux. It was
Microsoft-free out of the box, too (came with spitCaldera/spit eDesktop
2.something preinstalled; now happily running the latest and greatest
Ubuntu).

I don't go to out-of-town-tech events much (LinuxWorld Expo used to be
local, but it's absquatulated to Boston), so I think that's probably far
and away the best swag I'm likely to see for a while.

--
Roland Hutchinson Will play viola da gamba for food.

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