Chips are designed for the max freq of the specification. If they fail that spec, they are retested at a lower spec, and if they pass that spec, they are sold at that frequency. Why else do you find many diffrent chips in the same family run at diffrent speeds?

Many times the chip is %100 capable of running at faster speeds, but they had too much of the higher bin, and not enough of the lower bin.

But yes, taking a chip that didn't pass a higher speed, flashing it to the firmware of its faster/more capable cousin, and then selling it as such is ripping people off.

Except in the world of GPUs, there are enough "crazy people" out there who want the best of the best. So much so that the top bin is almost always empty - so you'll never have top-end chips binned as lower spec ones.

At best, you'll find possibly the low end chips that could be mid-range chips, but given the low end generally isn't too popular when mid-range chips are the most common and most desired.

Shortages of the top-end cards isn't unheard of - either people who are still trying to make a go at it for bitcoins, or gamers. (And given the price of the high end, they could come down a bit before binning takes place - they're still big profit centers).

Considered that the article refers to him as a "worker" and not an "ex-employee" he may not have even been fired yet. If he wasn't fired before he definitely will be now and no unemployment benefits as it is termination for cause.

Well, he does have SOME benefits. He'd get free room and board and meals for a number of years now.

Why the hell did the industry move away from using red LEDs for power indicators?

Because people wanted to be "trendy" and "futuristic" and thus started putting blue LEDs (which only came out two decades ago) in their equipment. Red was dull and boring (being done way back in the 60s) as was yellow. Green as we know it today (rather than a sickly yellow-puke-green) was a mid-90's invention. Blue LEDs came out in the mid-late 90s.

So since they were so recent and popular, people stuck them on everything to show they were progressive.

Whats illegal is taping them without their knowledge. They could potentially make a call to their lawyer or doctor after they park it and you could unintentionally record privileged information. At some point such systems will be so common you wont have to mention it anymore.

While true, taking personal calls on the job is generally considered very poor form (and many service-oriented places do not allow it, like restaurants), especially where a motor vehicle is being operated. And given most valet driving trips last under a minute, it doesn't seem unreasonable to hold the call until the driving is done and the valet has exited the vehicle.

So practically speaking, I'd consider that scenario a non-issue.

Anyhow, the easy solution is since most cars have an LCD display for navigation as well as in the instrument cluster, when the valet key is used (which limits the car to certain abilities anyways) the displays could all say "This vehicle is under audio and video surveillance" constantly. After all, the LCD in the instrument cluster typically shows information valid for driving and irrelevant otherwise (e.g., fuel efficiency, trip routes, etc, none of which are needed to go between the entrance and the parking lot), and the radio/navigation screen isn't needed (I would hope the valet knows how to get to the parking lot!, and they shouldn't be touching your radio anyways - perhaps even have it be off if the valet key is used?).

Add in a notice on the valet keyfob as well and I think all possibilities are covered. Bonus is that there's no tacky stickers or signs for normal driving.

now we are saving the planet by putting crappy appliances in a landfill every few years.

If you're doing that, you're really doing it wrong, because appliances are generally highly recyclable - being made of mostly steel.

The real question is - is it cheaper to recycle steel versus the freshwater saved, or is it cheaper to use more freshwater to save the recycling.

It's not an easy question, but in general freshwater is a tiny part (under 1%) of the Earth's available water supply and something that is expected to be at the forefront for war because climate change is causing existing water supplies to dry up.

I suspect Intel spent $10M on chip R&D while my coffee was brewing.

And that's only part of it.

A set of basic masks for an IC costs around $1M. Very basic 2-metal process that is.

Each mask is around $100K to produce, which is why in semiconductor design, there are piles of unconnected transistors and gates that are fabbed into every IC so small revisions can be done by changing the metal layers of the mask only - minimizing the number of mask changes minimizes a huge expense.

A modern IC generally is at least a 10-metal process which eats up that $10M alarmingly quickly.

I too got scanned.

But because I know I didn't want to sit around patching my webserver continually, I disabled all CGI scripts and stick wi th static content. (Not being a web developer, I didn't do CGI scripting anyways.

198.20.69.74 - - [25/Sep/2014:14:55:28 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 667 "() { :; }; /bin/ping -c 1 104.131.0.69" "() { :; }; /bin/ping -c 1 104.131.0.69"
198.20.69.74 - - [25/Sep/2014:14:58:20 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 667 "() { :; }; /bin/ping -c 1 104.131.0.69" "() { :; }; /bin/ping -c 1 104.131.0.69"

Hrm. My index.html page is also static, too.

And unless you run a small website, that can happen way too easily.

Every e-commerce site has database failures usually around peak shopping periods - it's usually the weakest point because no matter how many instances you run, it's the bottleneck as the database's view of the has to be consistent across all database servers.

And sometimes, well, the sheer crunch of users buying stuff topples that.

Even a good /.'ing in the past would return errors of the form "Could not connect to database".

Anyhow, I thought one point of the cloud was it was separated from hardware - if you need to reboot the host machine the servers were transparently moved to another machine while the host resets. The actual details or even which machine the cloud instance runs on is a detail that's not required in order to use it. As long as the guest OS is OK, it doesn't matter what piece of actual hardware it's running on.

Or maybe, just maybe, they innovated and solved key problems to make ti cheaper.

But we can't have that, can we? American steel is stronger than Indian steel.

Let's just give credit where it's due and learn from their success. We can't put our noses up and say our space program is a 2015 Cadillac Escalade whereas yours is a 1999 Honda Accord.

Or maybe India "played it safe". The relative success of Mars missions is quite low - there have been many, many, many more attempts at Mars than missions that actually got there.

It's a lot cheaper and lot easier to do things if you rely on the experience of others to help you along the way - basically they study all the scientific papers and everything else each mission generates and then apply it. And they study the failures so they don't repeat the same mistake, either.

Or, put another way, someone else did all the hard work and they just stuck to tried and true, and avoiding mistakes that caused other missions to fail.

From my understanding the update is fine. The problem is in installing the update.

I expect the actual cause isn't in the code, but a setting in their method of pushing software. They probably kept the iPhone 6 values secrete, until it was released and they didn't quite setup the update to automatically handle the 6s yet.

I bet in a few days we will get a working fix.

No, apparently the OTA update is broken (the update that is just a delta and can be downloaded to the device to update it. The OTA update is basically just a huge patch containing just the files that changed. Almost always it means Apple missed a file.

The iTunes update is fine because iTunes basically erases the entire partition and puts down a fresh copy of everything. It's why iTunes has to download a 1GB file to update, when your phone just gets a tiny update.

(if you want to really clean it, you do a factory restore which erases everything and then puts on a fresh copy of the OS and reformats the user partition, then you restore it from backup).

That's one of the core problems with wind and solar. It's great for shaving off peak demand but after a certain point it will be investments into useless overcapacity(it's also a great way to make renewables competitive with grid prices though as grid inefficiency costs are offloaded to end users)

Wind, on land is generally powered by the sun - winds pick up during the day and die at night (generally). Solar is the same.

And you know what? Peak power consumption is during the day as well, right when the renewables are producing the most power. (All those air conditioners have to run during the hottest parts of the day, after all). At night, when demand lessens, so does the output of solar and wind turbines.

Solar especially is valuable because it produces the most power right when most power is consumed by the grid. Sure, at home it's fairly "pointless" as household demand is low during the day (it peaks in early evening), but overall power consumption across all consumers has peak consumption during the day.

Apple is somewhat special. See, for example:

Institutional ownership of Apple shares has declined as funds question the companyâ(TM)s ability to increase revenue long term, Morgan Stanley said in a report this week. Appleâ(TM)s 30 largest shareholders own a record low 30 percent of shares outstanding, down from a peak of 40 percent in 2009, according to the report.

In other words, Apple has managed to get rid of investors who are in it for the money and instead get a bunch of investors who are investing because they believe in the company and its vision.

Remember, institutional investors are great for instant cash, but they demand things that can be quite harmful for the company like short term profits over long term growth.

Anyhow. Dell always had a higher end brand - they called it XPS and it was supposed to offer premium products (higher end products) and services - including technical support where they shunted you to special XPS reps who can get your issue resolved quicker. Of course, that was a few years ago and now it's just more of a marketing thing that offers nothing over the cheap PCs.

well yes, that works, but it's a two handed task that is hard to do on-the-sly. Also takes a couple seconds longer that is ideal when you have a knife to your chest or a tazer in your eye.

Actually, given you must use a passcode if you fail TouchID 3 times in a row, all you need to do is use the tip of your finger or palm of your hand 3 times.

Remember, the rules for TouchID:

1) Must use passcode on boot
2) Must use passcode if TouchID not used within previous 48 hours
3) Must use passcode if TouchID fails 3 times in a row.

The passcode is always the fallback and always good to make more secure than 4 digits because you aren't entering it all the time.

A lot of people don't have passcodes because it's inconvenient to enter it to unlock your phone to glance at information (studies have shown that interaction times for phones is generally on the order of 1 minute or less). With TouchID, you can have not only just a PIN, but a "complex passcode" that's full alphanumeric+special characters + longer than 4 characters. But that's even more of a pain to enter.

so just tap the sensor on the edge 3 times and you'll lockout TouchID.

ONE scientist can be right and every single other one on earth can be wrong. Science is not a popularity contest and it is not a democracy. YOU are thinking politically. Science is not politics.

Yeah, and think of all the money being channeled into funding anti-AGW theories. The fact that there's a LOT of special interests and few scientists to spend it on means they actually have a ton of money to throw around.

People are spending millions trying to find a sound scientific basis to deny AGW. If there are credible theories, then the incredible resources available to do those studies should find it. And it's unlikely such a theory would consume all the resources, so it's possible to repeat the tests over and over again and come up with results that are convincing.

Interests are such that if you're anti-AGW, grant money should be basically turning on a tap. And if the people really cared, it can be repeated over and over again for a number of years to prove the theory correct.

Money available for AGW - a lot, but spread over lots of people.

Money available for anti-AGW - a lot, but spread over less people and thus more resources to spend.

No, you can thank Robert "the packaged goods" Kotick that sacrificed fun at the altar of profit.

That's what I said. He's into milking. Make as much money as possible. Hell, he's the main reason why Xbone and PS4 games in Canada cost $70 rather than $60.

Welp, since there's no PC version of Destiny.....me and mine won't be playing it.

Well, there's a lot of talk about it. And if there's money to be made releasing it for PC, you can bet it'll come out. Even if it's a completely crappy port and they charge $70 for it (ever notice how PC games cost as much as console games nowadays?), if they can make a buck, they'll do it.

Though, given the middling reviews, I'm glad I decided to hold off the purchase.

they're not waiting long: DLCs will be about before the end of the year. Extra-cost DLCs.

3 months is ages for DLC. I'm guessing it's to build up the audience - don't scare 'em away too much by presenting them with $40 of DLCs they may "need" to get. After 3 months, you'll get the Christmas rush and then you can generate post-Christmas buzz with the DLC and slap newcomers with plenty of extra-cost catch-up DLC.

Remember, this is the era of day-1 DLC.