On Tuesday 24 February 2009, Jeff Walther wrote:
And how is it more profitable to them to let this
stuff sit in
(costly) storage somewhere, rather than selling fifty pieces to
someone who could use them?
IMHO: They do not have them sitting in storage. What they have
is a small hand-run chip-labeling machine and a bunch of random
chips. They grind off the original part numbers and label them
to whatever you wanted to buy. And they have a website with a bunch
of part numbers culled from various databases.
Google "counterfeit chips" and "counterfeit transistors".
Tim.