It took me embarrassingly long to realize that it's not 64-bit bus, it's a 64-bit chip... holding an amazing 4x16bits=64bits of data total.

Just goes to show it's hard to be sure where your unspoken assumptions may lie.... :-)

For those of us that were, seeing "64-bit" and "TTL" together immediately told us it was a chip that stored 64 bits worth of data.

final project was a 4 bit computer with 64 bits of ram. I remember spending many hours in the lab debugging my wiring. But it was super cool to toggle in data, advance the pc, toggle in an op, advance the pc and toggle in more data. i think i demonstrated 4 + 5 - 7 * 2

fun class.

Three years ago I posted a link on HN about TTL (Lransister-Lransister Logic) being 50 years old, entitled "50 years of TTL". Similarly, many people unsurprisingly expected it to be a story about a weird Time To Live field.

I think at that point, you report them to Ebay for fraud, don't you? Or is that just spitting in the ocean?

Turns out she opened too many cases and they "suspended" her account, which is an eBay euphemism for being banned for life. That means that her account that she'd been using since 2000 was dead and gone forever, and she was no longer welcome on the site.

I agree with other posters. The eBay of old is effectively dead. You are better off buying things from Amazon or Ali Express 99% of the time. The days of great deals on items are pretty much gone. You can still find some rare and unusual stuff that is worth buying, but the dominance of eBay now means that most things are very close to market rate unless (or even if!) they are counterfeit or some other scam. More like a dollar store than an online auction house.

In my case, they sent a warning saying I would not be able to contest any more purchases for some period of time and that my account was at risk of being suspended.

I try to avoid eBay as much as possible now. When their response to rampant fraud is "we're gonna suspend your account if you point it out again," it's time to move on. The only people left there seem to be scammers who know how to navigate the system.

AliExpress is usually cheaper for the China-direct items anyway, and those seem to comprise most of the listings on eBay nowadays.

I wouldn't say that. I buy from both, and it's a matter of know what you're getting into.

For example, in eBay, it's much more obvious which the location of the shop is (although, it can be tricked as well). At the same time, the client protection process is somewhat simpler in Amazon.

Were they ever there? Back when I could be bothered regularly dealing with the irritation farm that is eBay I found that buyers tended to pay a little over the odds. Both when I was selling or trying to buy.

There was definitely a time between early eBay hitting a critical mass of sellers and eBay getting saturated with professionals and robots, when the deals COULD BE incredible. You still needed to suss them out, but they were a regular occurrence

One case was a fake flash key, another a scammer trying to "buy" my laptop with fake bank transfer receipts, and the last one a genuine SD card, but destined to the chinese market.

In all cases Ebay didn't care much; in the first, I even lost my money.

Nowadays, when something similar happens, I just report the item as not arrived; although this is not 100% ethical, for clients it's sadly the safest way.

This is in reality part of a much larger issue, where the portals profit from being more lenient, so that they have a larger amount of sellers (and sales) of cheap crap, rather than being more punishing, and losing sales.

I definitely advise to report items as not arrived, rather than risking through reporting frauds.

OTOH being more punishing also incentivizes false reporting by competitors, which isn't at all rare.

Anyone who wants an easy startup: it's literally impossible to find high-quality aftermarket laptop batteries, the market is swamped with shitty Chinese knockoffs that die in a couple months (or sooner). The battery cells themselves are usually the part that dies, it's pretty straightforward to refurbish the battery by replacing the cells. But right now there is just no place to buy decent-quality replacement packs, it's OEM direct from the supplier or cheap chinese junk, nothing in between.

I have no idea why SterlingTek or Wasabi Power or some of the other companies that fill this niche for camera batteries haven't jumped into these other markets, but they haven't, and the niche remains unfilled.

The most recent was an extended battery for a 2012(?) Acer Chromebook, which cost about $12.

I would imagine part of the reason why large brands don't jump on this market is that there are so many models, so you might not be producing 10k+ of each model. Given everything apart from the plastic case is standard (or at least applies to a wide range of models) it's economical to produce these on a smaller scale than is usual for large brands.

eBay guidelines are not to return counterfeit items, and there's a good chance the seller will be buying in bulk anyway.

Maybe they were printed in the same Fab and a whole batch of these got mislabeled? Maybe someone intentionally relabeled them years ago back when they were worth more?

Claiming that it was "damaged in shipping" is the shadiest part of the whole deal. It pretty much guarantees the intentional fraud of the seller.

I have four (4!) copies of a Raymond Chandler paperback; a major online retailer named after a ditto river had it listed as a hardcover edition; I receive my first paperback, get in touch stating I ordered a hardcover, got a paperback, please advise. They told me to keep the defective item, new being shipped immediately, very sorry &c.

2nd paperback arrive, I tell them again that what I ordered was a hardcover; very sorry, keep it, correct item coming soon.

3rd paperback arrive; I beg them to just check their inventory; book must have been wrongly classified. "Very sorry. Keep it, we'll send you a new one." I gave up.

4th book arrived. Anyone interested in a nice copy of "Killer in the rain"? Two copies? Pleeease?

I don't want to pay $30+ on shipping to return an item that was incorrectly sent to me.

I'm assuming you are talking about Amazon, but this phrase caught my eye, and a quick net search turned up nothing: what on earth is a "ditto river"?

ditto can be used as a noun (meaning the same again, e.g. in a list when you don't want to repeat something in the row below) or an adverb (as it is here, meaning likewise).

Have you ever seen the show "Storage Wars"? It's really dumb, but basically people go bid on abandoned storage lockers. I assume everything on that show gets sold on eBay. The people on the show are not exactly the best and brightest...

Essentially, I'd agree only if it could be proven that they knew the goods were shady but had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy and only used the ignorance as a shield to give them plausible deniability.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

Even if the buyer doesn't scam me, by the time I've paid eBay fees and PayPal fees and postage, it's eaten into the small value fairly substantially.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's what some of the fake carts are. I ordered an X-in-1 card for DS recently (haven't seen one since the OG GameBoy days and was curious), and it was just a generic DS flashcart with a QA sticker covering the SD slot. Same seller was selling a bunch of single DS games without box and suspiciously cheap, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were essentially the same thing.

[1] Potentially NSFW: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=10..., SFW summary: https://www.engadget.com/2004/05/14/scamming-the-scammer/

This sounds obscure. Small/Tiny mark up. Small market. High fake detection rate. I wonder if there is something about the story that we miss.

Also, pushing fakes in small quantities may not be such a bad idea; after all - rip someone off for $1 and chances are he'll curse you and let it go; rip someone off for $1M and chances are he'll curse you and get law enforcement involved.

Either that or a plain old mistake. The new guy loaded the wrong data into the printer.

I'd also like to think that Hanlon's Razor applies here. Chips were mislabeled, wasn't worth the time / effort / ink to relabel something that costs pennies to manufacture so they're earmarked for the incinerator but somehow end up back in the supply chain. Stuff like this happens.

Maybe not in time. The companies buy lots of stuff that never gets used. It seems totally plausible for them to use up their end-of-year-budget stocking up on parts they don't necessarily need or expect to use through non-conventional channels.

Plus, unless you dig into it like this guy did, he can just say what he did and give a refund.

I seem to recall a few years ago, when looking for arcade ICs (Defender RAM IIRC) that unscrupulous sellers would put working ICs at either end of the tube, and fakes/faulty parts in the middle. Unless you were using them all to do a full RAM replacement, you wouldn't know your spares were faulty.

There are surprisingly many things in computer which you don't actually need and don't know if those are working or not.

I'm just looking at the pdf they link to in this article: https://www.semiconductors.org/clientuploads/Anti-Counterfei...

In the summary they say, the following on how to 'win the battle'

"The key to winning the battle against counterfeit semiconductors is elegantly simple: Exclusively buy semiconductor products either directly from the Original Component Manufacturer (OCM) or directly from the OCM’s Authorized Distributors/Resellers."

I wonder if they have hardware to test the functioning of chips, like testing them to ensure they meet the parameters on the datasheets (like current consumption etc.).

Before I got into robotics, I worked in the semiconductor world as a test and product engineer for a couple of IC manufacturers. A lot of my job involved figuring out how to test every parameter we were going to put on the datasheet, writing code to test it quickly, and then doing statistical analysis of the results over thousands upon thousands of devices to make sure they met requirements. It was an interesting experience. We used some very high end test equipment, made by companies like Teradyne, and for each part (or family of parts in some cases), we would make a custom board which would mate to the test equipment on one side, and had sockets for the part we were testing, along with any support circuitry required.

I think the problem with doing some sort of acceptance testing is that unless you buy the parts directly from the manufacturer or their distributors, it's very hard to verify that the part meets it's specs, unless you already have this kind of dedicated testing equipment and code, especially when you want to start measuring analog parameters (current consumption, logic levels, etc.), and don't think it would be worth the trouble in most cases.

(Military / Space may be a special case, where critical parts may stop being manufactured by the original manufacturer and they do have to do this sort of thing, but as far as I know, it isn't typical).

Also I'd never heard of Teradyne before, they seem to produce some very interesting hardware.

Through some kind of magic, the process would be tweaked by the engineers over time and the yields for the more expensive parts would often increase to the point where they wouldn't even end up with enough of the low cost parts so they would just stamp the low cost numbers on the chips that could actually run under much more demanding conditions.

What typically happens is that engineers do the best they can before release to model the process and experiment with building devices at different process "corners". This gives an idea of what the distribution of different electrical parameters will look like over the range of expected process variation (logic levels of FETs, sheet resistances, etc. etc.).

Obviously this data is imperfect, because there are a TON of steps in a modern semiconductor process, and a TON of variables in each one. (For example, I worked on Ion Implanters, and we recorded hundreds of variables for our customers during the run, from vacuum levels, to gas dosages to voltages and currents in the various accelerator stages).

As parent said, there is another group, who IMO are probably the original "big data" folks, usually called manufacturing or process engineers. They monitor the yields, binning and specific electrical measurements of all the wafers and parts coming off the line, along with process data for all the nanufacturing steps the wafer has gone through. These guys do the black magic of figuring out what needs to be tweaked in the process. At the higher levels it involves a mix of knowledge -- not only statistics and optimization, but also the semiconductor physics of how these parts actually operate, (since experiments can get expensive, you want to justify the knobs you are going to tweak!)

They're also the kind of organisation that does "whole life" buys, so they'll take the whole lot they'll ever need, sample some for QC purposes, and warehouse them until actually required for manufacturing.

One, the government does occasionally purchase chips themselves. It's uncommon and they're difficult to work with but it happens.

Two, work on legacy designs is very common, and not being able to source the components from reputable vendors is also very common.

Other people - scam artists - see what's being searched for, and take a different IC in the same package and remove the existing markings, and put new fake markings on. They then sell this as the other IC.

By the time the ICs are tested the money has gone. (Which should be a hint - if they're not offering regular invoicing and 30 days payment they might not be trustworthy).

tl;dr not enough people design _for production_, and it makes things much harder.

PS. I am newbie software engineer (c/networking) and recently fascinated and drawn towards electronics.

...but that last bit has a caveat: These books are only expensive if you opt for "the latest edition". If you are doing this at a hobby level (vs taking a dedicated college course or similar), purchasing an older edition will serve you just as well. Electronics haven't changed that much between today and when the book's prior revision was published (or the revision before that - or even 5+ revisions ago).

Most of the changes are likely going to be very small and minor errata (spelling mistakes most likely).

All that said, Art of Electronics doesn't appear too expensive, even for a current edition (provided you stay away from the academic hardcover version, I'd imagine). Grob's is on a different level price-wise, but again, you can find cheaper versions.

I'd also like to point out Forrest M. Mims III's "Engineer's Mini Notebooks" series as something to go along with the above two books as well (or alone, if you just want the quick-n-dirty hack-on-electronics thing). They were originally sold by Radio Shack back in the day, but today can be picked up via Mims' site (which I think just redirects to Amazon). Old "vintage" copies (the new version combine multiple notebooks into one) can also be had fairly cheaply. They don't go into as much depth as the earlier mentioned books, but they can prove to give a quick and good understanding of the basics (provided you consume them in the proper order of course).

But if you're serious about electronics, they can't substitute for the previous mentioned volumes; get those first, then get the Mims volumes later (IIRC, Mims did write a separate book on learning electronics - it's probably mentioned on his site).

Here's the take home clinch for the story, "physical viscerality"...

I wonder about the future of the spy genre in our digital, post-historical era. The essence of espionage is information—specifically, information about the capabilities and intentions of friends and adversaries. The mechanics of this trade has always been the bread and butter of the spy thriller. The whole first half of Le Carré’s masterpiece Smiley’s People, for example, turns on the physical transportation of a single incriminating frame of negative film across national frontiers by couriers, several of whom end up dead. That was the analog world of the Cold War. Our digital world, in which the contents of the Library of Congress can be encrypted and transmitted across the globe with the touch of a key, is far less dramatic and does not lend itself as easily to romance. Kim Philby spent the better part of two decades transcribing the crown jewels of British and American intelligence secrets by hand and turning them over to the KGB. As current headlines attest, a single computer hack or anonymous leak today can yield a far bigger cache of secrets. Do spies still use dead drops? Brush passes? Microdots? Invisible ink? Do they still meet their contacts in smoky cafes and secluded parks? Many of these gritty noir devices may have been retired and replaced by banks of computer screens in the sub-basements of Northern Virginia office parks. All of which makes the spy genre poorer and more antiseptic. We are left with stylish but vapid movies about superheroes like Jason Bourne, pursued by cartoonish CIA assassins.

The digital world also changes our perceptions of political crime, of which espionage is a sub-species. Without the physical Watergate break-in and the amateur-hour rifling through DNC file cabinets, there would have been no scandal. In contrast, the political scandals of the last election cycle seem mired in the geek-squad arcana of passwords, servers, and hard drives. They lack the visceral physicality of Watergate, which is why they are unlikely to amount to much, despite the wishes of political partisans. https://www.city-journal.org/html/alan-fursts-world-spies-15...

Mine bitcoin with paper and pencil? Is anyone else in the world even thinking about something so far out?

Ken's review of the 3101 is here: http://www.righto.com/2017/07/inside-intels-first-product-31...

This is the first IC ever produced by Intel.

My dad had a few of these chips from an old computer. Some of the 3101 chips are from such early runs they don't even have the usual date stamps on the packages, and were outsourced by Intel into generic wirebonded IC packages.

That's kind of a profound observation, even though it's obvious once you think about it. It never occurred to me that a maximal-length shift register is actually a simpler, more efficient logic structure than either a carry-chain adder or a ring counter.

The underlying thing that makes the shift register more efficient is that you can build a dynamic shift register stage with two inverters and two pass transistor pairs, while the flip flop for a counter stage is probably six gates.

Because it's maybe a mistake?

Some of the people people working at the factory don't know a potato chip from a silicon chip?

True counterfeit chips use the correct die. It is stolen, but the knock-offs cut corners: you're getting something that is not quality controlled, or perhaps even a reject off the factory floor (that might just work in your use case so you won't notice).

Sometimes counterfeit chips use a different implementation, but of the right general spec. Well sort of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14685671 ("Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot ").

Indeed, Ken was in group #1 (collector) but a very unusual kind who then proceeded to tear down the chip.

1. this chip supposed to be old era memory chip (64bit of data -> 8 bytes) it wouldn't work on your PC

2. It was DTMF chip not memory chip, so it couldn't work at all as a memory chip

I guess the idea was that it costed $1, the seller shipped it, the chip would never work, but cost of shipping it back would be greater, so you would just eat the cost and move on.

As with other kinds of fakes, they try to emulate the functionality, and often work, some even surprisingly better than expected, but they are always worse than originals. So either you won't get performance that's mentioned in the spec, or it break sooner or has some other issues that get apparent once you start using it.

Not talking about this particular case, but maybe case of a RAM not working in general.

On the other hand I've seen memory module with sufficiently unfortunate pattern of broken bits, that it could not be detected by memtest86. Even such tools need some part of memory that they run from and thus does not get tested (also some memory is reserved for BIOS). The problem manifested itself by completely unusable Windows and occassionally flipped bits in files downloaded from network on Linux (I assume that on Linux the faulty bit ended up in DMA bounce buffer, while on windows in something significantly more critical). To confirm my hunch, that it was memory related I netcat'ed few GB worth of CHARGEN output and analyzed the pattern of bit errors, which were perfectly aligned on some boundary. Finding which module was faulty then involved rearranging modules, running memtest86 and repeating the CHARGEN experiment.

Edit: actually diagnosing this took about month and half. memtest86 was passing and there was unrelated known hardware bug in used network card which I though might be related to observed behavior. Experiment with chargen was motivated by finding out whether the bit errors were somehow aligned to TCP segment boundaries, instead I found out they were aligned on some quite large power of two, which clearly pointed to memory issue.

General wisdom is that it is security hazard and not useful for anything on the open internet, but having some server with so called "simple TCP/IP services" in your internal testing LAN is useful for exactly this kind of debugging.

Edit: this whole debugging happened around january 2009, so at the time when chargen was long dead and certainly not a service offered by almost anyone on the internet.

If you need to check external memory (GPU, IoT, etc) then there is some tools online.

Note that memtest86 doesn't test against Rowhammer like attacks probabilities.

You can also use some overclocking features in advanced motherboard to push the memory beyond factory settings and see how far it gets before it starts to misbehave.

But perhaps they had a large stockpile of DTMF chips they wanted to get rid of.