Wow this is extremely disappointing, how can bitmain release a product that would only be able to mine for 1.5 years. Im sure theres a lot of people myself included that will now never ROI on the E3's we bought. Having said that, all my 4gb GPU's still mine ETC perfectly fine, there must be a firmware to correct this problem.
Firmware issues generally fix software problems and not hardware. This seems like a hardware issue where the built in RAM is not large enough. I am guessing that Bitmain underestimated how much of the 4GB would actually be useable.
Read your article. Good info. However since it's 10 Epoch away it's more like 50 days so almost 2 more months. So sometime in May or so. At this point it really doesn't matter since in July the ASIC would be useless anyways since ETH is forking to ProgPOW.