I concur this may be getting a touch off-topic, but the fence definition is spot on in any language culture you choose to define it, and you are sat right on top of it (thus it must hurt after a while so get off it!).

If you are not on either side of the fence, by definition you are bang on the fence (and after a while, it must hurt)!
Also I believe you'll find that you speak just as loud with your money if you purchase old hardware ..... but I stand to be corrected on that last one.

I bet you (and I know their last one was less than a day ago), but if the BTC rate hovers over $300 and looks like holding there, then there will be another price hike today.

We do not all have the benefit of living in a despotic banana republic where energy costs to the consumer are no where near the cost of energy production. I am also pretty sure the uptake of bitcoin (or crypto-currencies) in such countries is no where near to that in the countries that have utility companies supplying energy at realistic market values ..... I think that alone qualifies any so called whining (let alone that this is a public forum).

You need to get off that fence ...... it must hurt after a while!

Well the cocks will be coming home to roost for innosilicon if indeed they sold bitmine.ch grades c/d chips at over twice the market value for grade a chips. Question is, where is the evidence to dispell that?

the pc industry needed to standardise because they had to sell to the masses, with bitcoin asics, they do not have to sell to the masses (only bitmain still do!).
And be careful what you wish for in terms of build as you will have to pay a pretty penny for it! Flip side is asic mining rigs are throw away devices, and bitmain must have realised the ills of their design with the S3 (on a technical note, all my open S3's, i.e built from the S1 to S3 kits, perform better than the enclosed ones at any freq), thus the S5's design.

Watch that BTC rate ........ now S5 up to $439
You thought $399 was tight .......?! (who needs to hedge with LTC when you can simply hoard S5's?)

The picture tells a different story. 1st pool is alive but clearly says the rig has Never sent any shares, so it seems to have failed over to the 2nd pool which is dead thus again failed over to the 3rd pool, which is the one being mined at the time of the screenshot (and ever since the miner was switched on 5hrs+ to the screenshot).
Your share diff on the solo pool will be adjusted to your rig's speed .... not the network diff.

^^^ You are mining on your last pool which shows an LSDiff of 302

It takes some testing to establish it is the controller that's gone .... and that would not stop you from accessing the rig anyway.
You can also "try" and get a replacement one from what is left of bitmain support (crap service IMHO but depends on what region you are, I am in the UK and they are hopeless!). I once got quoted a price of $25 plus $5 shipping .....

I am out! Hopefully someone with more knowledge can help you out.

You can not miss the distinction from the inside as the S3++ is a string design (only sold in China). I once saw an image and if I recall rightly, it is quite distinct from an S3+ (even a regular S3) though the same form-factor.

If all fails in finding the S3 on the router, then you'll have to connect it directly to your laptop / computer, but you need to have the computer disconnected from the network (ethernet and/or WIFI). You can then browse to the S3 for the single task of turning its network to DHCP. As soon as that is done, you'll then have to reconnect both the S3 aand the computer to the network / router and find the S3 there.

First, get the IP of your computer. If it is in the 192.168.xx.xx range try 192.168.1.99 (the old static default ip) else you'll have to get a network-scanner.

It does take quite a bit to properly fry these things ..... but of course I am not psychic enough to know for sure what the state of your S3 is, but I can hazard an educated guess that it is actually OK (the panic that engulfed you was just that, panic).

If it failed to load with an error, then your S3 shipped with the faulty firmware (and I assume the page that failed to load is the miner status page). If that is the case, then you have two options.
1. update the firmware with one from the bitmain site (do this via the ui)
2. update cgminer with kano's latest (this is my recomended route but you have to do this via SSH).

You most likely had one of the older S3's that do not revert to DHCP when reset. Look for the S3 on your network as it most likely has reverted to a static IP by doing the reset (the earlier ones had 192.168.1.99 as the default so you can try and browse to that too).

bitmain are a real business and they have their numbers worked out pretty well (or have some good brains behind their money), so if you want to make any analysis on their possible move(s) it better be based on empirical evidence (not an un-informed hunch) or sound business logic (even both plus many others!). Unlike some bitcoin chip fabricating ventures, they seem to have got some kind of balance and (presumably) use the home mining market as an outlet for the gear they need to decomission (or as a testbed) as clearly it is more profitable by magnitudes to self mine.
Anyway, your memory probably let you down on this one as bitmain have previously raised the price (of the S5 no other ...) more than once in a single day.

^^^^ Well, well ..... any specs available?