From the sounds of it, that's pretty much what they're going to do.

I'm totally fine with TFDI disallowing counterfeit devices, even tho the consumer will get boned in the end they will have to go back to the manufacturer that tried to save a few bucks by buying what is unquestionably a counterfeit chip at counterfeit price. There's no pleading ignorance when the official suppliers charge a certain amount and these back ally dealers are a fraction of the price. Any authorized fab is going to have a fixed license fee that's going to keep the price relatively high compared to the unlicensed fabs. Crucifying FTDI because they're disallowing the devices is unfair with out putting most of the blame on the companies sourcing the questionable chips.

LAWSUIT! I was expecting news for nerds, stuff that matters! Not something about Apple and a company that built it's foundation on rumors that it didn't bother trying to distance it self from thus being responsible for the hole they dug them self.

I demand stuff that matters!

I think the question should be, is this patch they're applying that's bricking these devices a functional patch that does benefit the official FTDI hardware? If the answer is yes then there's no malicious intent or action being taken place here. You cant expect the company to test an update against counterfit hardware and you cant expect them to lose any sleep over it.

Now if what they're doing is specifically targeted at doing this and doesnt change anythign at all on official hardware? Then there may be a legal argument here. Like if their hardware you cant set a particular register/fuse but the counterfit hardware you can burn said fuse then ya they're trying to brick it.

McDonald's does that here too. I don't understand it either since it doesn't help anything being backwards - many into one. It's opposite to what Erlang worked on.

A guy named Agner Erlang solved most of this already, and we can thank the telephone. He took his work on how to figure out the optimal number of trunk lines for a town and used that to model cash register lines. Erlang worked out that one line into many registers is the fastest and most efficient, so if one line backs up but another one moves quickly, people don't bunch up at the register that was slow. You can see this system at work at Walmart of all places, their express checkout section where they tell you what register to go to is based on this model. If there's a bottleneck beyond the register, say the ice truck, then have a second queue where individuals are provided with something like a receipt for them to obtain the ice directly from the truck. This also has the benefit of individuals being able to buy more than one bag of ice and can come back and enter the ice truck queue to fill the remainder of the order later rather than requeue in the register line. Obviously there are risks to that but ultimately the risk would be the consumers. Both of these methods are in use today and even at the same time in some cases, I saw it just last summer at a beer festival. We went through one queue to get beer tokens, and then there were multiple vendors who accepted those tokens for you to redeem it. Then the vendors redeemed their tokens from the festival operators.

My biggest problem with ads is they are designed to steal your attention from the content. I've mentioned this numerous times whenever a website starts crying about Adblocking. If you want me to read your content, don't put full motion video ads on the side right next to the content I'm trying to read. Don't make 2/3rds of the page giant clickable area to redirect me to your sponsor. I'm not visiting your site to see the ads, I'm there for the content that you put so much work into. Ads are typically designed to steal your attention and be obtrusive. Slashdot's ads are pretty much safe, even though I even have the option to disable ads here.

I don't recall who it was but one big site posted a editorial on why they think Adblock is bullshit. It was the same day they had full page sponsorship and basically clicking anywhere that had empty space would direct you to that sponsor and they had every kind of obnoxious ad possible on the site at the same time. If everybody was sensible about ads then I wouldn't use an adblock, I do have the option enabled to allow unobtrusive ads so at least I'm not that big of a dirtbag.

Basically the internet is turning into Idiocracy more and more every day. Animated ads all around and some times with in the content you're trying to read. NOW GO AWAY IM BAITIN.

They need to work on their design principals a little harder. Right now it looks like "Just copy MacOSX" Just watching the video on the site about Freya makes me wonder how apple hasn't sent a C&D yet. Mute the audio, show the demo to somebody who doesn't know and ask them what OS it is.

It's not just generic Grey gradient/brushed steel feel. All its missing is the buttons for resize, minimize and close. In the demo they have the iTunes rip off, The File manager that looks identical, and then on top of all that they still add in the dock.

"draws a lot of comparisons to Mac OS X" or Draws a lot of cues from OSX?

Drawing a comparison would suggest its different but comparable, and not inspired by. Straight up copying as it is I wouldn't even suggest saying it's drawing cues.

If I wanted OS X I'd run OS X. I'm not sure why Slashdot is bothering to cover a distro whose claim to fame is ripping off somebody elses design. Or at least cover it and act like they're doing something unique.

So what's special about this chip that Intel's Xeon Phi (first demonstrated in 2007 as Knights Landing with 80 or so cores) isn't already doing? Or is this just a rehash of 7 year old technology that's already in production? It sounds like a copy/paste of Intel's research.

"Intel's research chip has 80 cores, or "tiles," Rattner said. Each tile has a computing element and a router, allowing it to crunch data individually and transport that data to neighboring tiles." - Feb 11, 2007

I think the real moral of the story is, not that it isn't his job but it's a job for a whole team. There should be an engineering team (testing updates, finding the issues and improvements etc) and a change/ops team who does the leg work when deploying these kinds of processes. One guy responsible for a big ass pile of servers and is also responsible for all of this other stuff is at least two full time jobs.

Sorry, I like SparkFun and all but this does look a lot like Fluke industrial design. Ok so the colour isn't EXACTLY the same shade of yellow, but if you removed the branding from it and asked somebody what brand it looks like they'll say Fluke assuming they've poked around the market any or are in the industry. Granted it would be cool of Fluke saying something like "OK This ONE time" since SparkFun is all about hobbyists who might eventually become Fluke customers. SparkFun should have thought of this before ordering a container full of them, pleading ignorance that your multimeter is DAMN CLOSE to somebody else's product and not expect trouble is dubious at best. It looks a lot like a Fluke 17b with out the buttons.

But the problem is you still thought there was an autism risk and it took you an extra 2 seconds to do it. This is the underlying issue. Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent paper on the subject stating that vaccinations cause this and got a celebrity to basically endorse it because she (Jenny McCarthy) was looking for a reason why her child was autistic. If it wasn't for JMC being desperate to find an excuse that doesn't include any self blame this would never have gotten even a tiny fraction of the attention it has.

An effective slide show should not:
Be primary source of information
Exceed 7 words on 4 lines
Contain unrelated graphs and images
Discourage discussion of the slides contents

This is my example of an effective powerpoint slide. This slide while only containing 22 words should probably take a few minutes to talk about. A powerpoint of maybe 10 slides for me often ends up being about an hour long. I build in a degree of Q/A and questions directed to the audience to keep them engaged and interested in the content. A presentation should be a discussion and not a group reading exercise. Clearly these scientists are great at science, but terrible at sharing it if they can't use a slide show effectively.