As a matter of fact, I'm releasing a product soon that falls exactly into this category. I specifically chose to keep the VID/PID unmodified, as the product has a mode where it needs to look like an ordinary serial port.

Sure, I could get modified OSX, Windows and Linux drivers to teach it about a new PID so that ordinary comms software works, but it's far simpler and less risky for a small guy like me (we're talking a few hundred units total) to just go with the flow and make it work with the generic drivers everyone likely already has.

You're technically correct that the chip hasn't been physically damaged. However, it's effectively dead, and FTDI's EULA revision makes it clear that they intend to render non-functional any clones they detect:

Use of the Software as a driver for, or installation of the Software onto, a component that is not a Genuine FTDI Component, including without limitation counterfeit components, MAY IRRETRIEVABLY DAMAGE THAT COMPONENT.

I recently built a big pile of boards with an FTDI USB chip on them, as part of my retrogaming hobby. I bought from a reputable source, I think. But if it turns out that I got an illegitimate batch of FTDI chips, I now own a pile of bricks until I pay to get them reworked. I don't know yet, since I haven't tested them in Windows with the latest driver.

Counterfeiting harms the original producer of the chips, and this extends the harm to OEMs that use the chips (who may or may not be innocent), and their customers (who most certainly are innocent).

I can't see how this is a good thing for anyone.

As someone said recently at work: "Deposits to the 'trust bank' are always small. Withdrawals are always large." In other words, it takes years to build trust, but you can obliterate it in seconds. FTDI may have done just that.

Ok, so I wasn't the only one.

Ah, apparently he auctioned off his fully commented disassembly

Carl Mueller, Jr. discovered these when he reverse engineered Donkey Kong a few years ago. He implemented them in his clone for the Intellivision, also. I believe he had had blog posts about these, but I can't find them.

Seems to be an exclusive or. "Ron Paul" or "somebody sane", which implies Ron Paul isn't in the sane set.

My work laptop has 4GB of RAM on it and Windows 7 and it runs just fine. The only thing that slows it down is when the corporate-mandated management scripts run and start pegging the hard drive with virus scans, audits and the like. More RAM wouldn't help that. Switching to an SSD did.

According to Resource Monitor, I'm using about 3GB, with 850MB of that used as cache. A bit over 1GB of that is Firefox.

So, yeah, I could see 1GB really sucking when used with a modern web browser and many tabs open (like I do). 4GB, though, hasn't really held me back much.

Apparently, at least part of Vista's memory woes stemmed from the poorly tuned "SuperCache" feature, that would aggressively try to pre-cache data in RAM. Its appetite was apparently too large. It apparently also didn't manage its disk buffers very well. (This is all third or fourth hand knowledge and so could be shaky. I've never run Vista myself. If someone has more details, pipe up!)

Thank you for the detailed, thoughtful reply, including all the numbers.

Ah yes. I knew there was a term for it. It's been a while since I took my thermo class. Specific heat is normalized to mass, though, and both granite and basalt are more dense than seawater. Granite is ~2700 kg/m^3, basalt is ~3000kg/m^3, while seawater at high depths is around 1050kg/m^3.

When you factor that in, water still wins, but only by a factor of 1.5 to 2.

Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?

It was implemented against the Win16 API, and required a Windows runtime to operate. It was no less a Windows program than any other Windows program at the time. You could launch it from DOS, sure, but if that's your criteria, there wasn't a Windows program before Win95, the first Windows version to boot directly to Windows rather than launching from DOS.

Oh, yeah, I definitely remember the pain of bank-switching vs. segmented memory. I was there and programmed both. It stunk.

At least the Apple ][gs could directly address 16MB, although the 65816's addressing modes I hear were less than awesome. I must admit I never wrote any native 65816 code.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I definitely prefer a more style-sheet oriented way of declaring how a document should look, and then writing my document tagged in the elements of that style. Something style-sheet oriented is vastly superior to something more formatting-oriented at a lower level.

The problem is that most GUIs, in an effort to reduce clutter, make it at best cumbersome and at worst impossible to determine if your cursor is inside or outside of a formatting tag. (And then there's Word and Outlook, who add a bunch of heuristic behaviors on top of that that just make it worse. I've had to nuke whole paragraphs just because there's some weird 'hot point' in the middle of a line somewhere that keeps making the editor go gonzo. FrameMaker is not as bad, but it gets weird in other ways, especially with figures, tables, their anchors and their captions. And then there's the brokenness of nearly every browser-based rich-text editing widget ever.)

I would much rather have a WYSIWYG preview and a separate, less WYSIWYG editing mode that was more tag oriented. Heck, I'd write my specifications in TeX or LaTeX if they let me. But, alas, I'm stuck with FrameMaker and Word. At least with FM, they force us to never use local formatting overrides and stick to the style sheet. They strip all formatting overrides when compiling a book.

Ah, boundary conditions on the dates. Makes sense.

I had read that Excel had preview copies out in 1984 (which is fairly quick, considering the Mac itself launched in 1984), but didn't launch officially until 1985. And I suppose, since Windows was still deridingly referred to as "Wintendo" in some circles and generally not widely adopted on PCs, it makes sense that Microsoft would go with an "Excel for MS-DOS 3" marketing stance, even though it really was a Windows app.

FWIW, WordPerfect, my favorite word processor of the early-to-mid-90s (replacing AppleWorks and ///EasyPieces on the Apple //e and Apple ///) got subsumed in the same way as Lotus 1-2-3 did by Excel. While Word for DOS was nothing special, Word for Windows actually was a proper Windows application by the time Word 6 came out. WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS was great, but WordPerfect 6 lost it somehow. The DOS version overreached, trying to bring WYSIWYG into the character-oriented DOS world. The Windows version clung too strongly to their DOS traditions and never really embraced the GUI properly. It was a messy disaster. Microsoft Word 6, for all its faults, was at least largely consistent with itself and the Windows environment around it. (I still miss Reveal Codes though, to this day.)