|> Cost cutting.
|
|buhahahaha, you gotta be kiddin`
|a flimsy piece of sticky tape with a few numbers on it?
Obviously you have no idea these things are made. The PCBs are assembled
by machine. The surface mount compoents are deposited on the PCB, the
larger chips held in place with dabs of temporary glue, solder paste is
deposited at the pads and the whole things is put under high temperature
to melt the solder and make the joints. The NIC then goes into another
station where the MAC address is written into the serial EEPROM
automatically. This can be done insitu, the NIC controller chips have a
feature where you can program the EEPROM and then disable further access
to it by writing a particular location of the EEPROM.
Now if you wanted to put the MAC address and bar code on a sticker,
you'd need another machine to print and attach the sticker. When you are
a Taiwanese manufacturer turning out these things for $10 each (the
other $10 goes to profit and middlemen), an extra 20c makes a
difference. Look, some of these mfrs don't even give you a floppy, they
expect that the driver will be already with the OS, or you get it from
their web site.
If you pay for a name brand like 3Com or Intel you will get a sticker.
Sysadmins with a bar code wand can read the product code and MAC address
into their assets database. But forget any idea of trained gorillas
putting stickers on the cheap models.
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