Wow. And I just stumbled upon a post from BFL_Nasser on the butterfly labs forum from yesterday:
Hi Everyone,
We've been very busy recently, unfortunately I couldn't catch up with the forums. There is a correction to be made: Chips are not and were not flawed. We decided to add certain clock buffers to improve noise-resistance and possibly increase frequency even further. The improve in noise resistance was our real goal (average frequency increase across a full wafer can be a bi-product). The decision was made to increase the near 100% chance of success even more. We'll keep you posted. If you had any questions, please let us know.
Best Regards,
Nasser
I don't know who "Nasser" is, but this indicates that the chip design is still being tweaked and tested *after* the expected release date. How can you have a projected shipment date before you have gotten test chip samples and finalized the design? This sounds like R&D to me. How long will it take to iterate through their testing? Another 2 weeks to get the next batch of chips; if there's another problem, how much longer will it be delayed?
Even if the next batch is perfect, they must be ordering in very small quantities until they are sure it is correct; this could be millions of dollars as stake. How many products is BFL promising to ship in their first wave?
It's hard for me to see how they could work through this and have products in customers' hands in less than 2 months. If I were BFL, I would not want to accept any pre-orders until I had a finalized chip design; why risk having people question your credibility when your product can speak for itself? Sitting on a pile of pre-order money is a dangerous thing.
How many people here would sit on thousands (millions?) of dollars in pre-orders and not misappropriate even a fraction of those funds? Look at what happens to pension funds, social security, etc. In my book, you don't want to expose yourself to temptation; there are many people who have started out legitimately and been trapped by the Sirens' call.
Oh well thats just fucken lovely! I have said this in my other posts on here and in the bfl forum as of Jan 1 I'm cancelling my order and just going to forget this whole mining bull shit.
I might not be the only one either. I'm not angry about delays, I'm not angry about difficulty rising daily, I'm not even angry about performance issues or anything else other than being lied to.
If you said in OCTOBER that we wont be getting any shipments until March of 2013 I would of been ok with that but to bullshit me on a week by week bases is just fucked up and makes me look like an ass.
When the waves of cancellations start pouring in they can tweek their nipples and knobs all they fucken want after.
Personally I smell collusion between the 3 manufacturers. This would be my first attempt in actually purchasing equipment and to be honest I feel like a IDIOT every day I hear of another fucken delay.
Jan 01 = Cancellation
I suggest you stop playing around and get the fucken work done. Play time is over Fuckers
BFL Big Fucken Liers imo