First I need to criticize you a bit, Freequant. Assuming you are being sincere in your questioning and not just lacking the balls to say "I think you are full of shit".
So you think that people under a pseudonym calling each other names without any actual evidence are being courageous?
We must have a very different notion of courage.
To answer what I think is your question, I am not at all sure what to think about Inaba.
As I said earlier, in one hand, if BFL turns out to be scam, Inaba would be the ideal candidate for the role of the con artist, but he could also be a naive victim however unlikely that would be.
In the other hand, it is also very possible that BFL is legit in spite of their questionnable marketing policy, in which case Inaba would really be the helpful guy he appears to be.
Short of evidence, I am not going to jump to any hastly conclusion, nor to call Inaba and BFL names, neither am I going to believe BFL and Inaba without questionning.
That being said, there is definitely something fishy with this 30 Nov testing so I'd like to understand what happened.
In any case, until evidence is clearly made in favor or agains BFL's legitimacy, I'd like to advise people to apply healthy skepticism in everything they read on this forum, including testimony of seemingly trustable but isolated people.
Then is the title including, "testing for Dummies" really condusive to getting ones questions answered? And why the need for so much text? It just seems way overdone for just being thorough.
You have to expect that tracking what has been said over 87+ pages and two threads is going to take some space.
This is the price to pay to reproduce the entire context, and have a discussion backed with facts and not blurry gut feelings.
Now, if you do not have any doubt about the way the testing was done and reported, no one forces you to read it all..
I mean, if the intention of being so critical is to help 'protect' the community that's great. But at the same time it also basicly is saying to everyone that they are stupid and not capable of making an informed decision on their own.
I am not being critical. I am being inquisitive.
I decided to lay down all the evidence and start from there after Makomk asked exactly what I had on my mind on 9 Dec, and Inaba somehow dodged the question that IMO was legitimate (cf quotation below)
That is BFL's laptop, not mine. The one I plan on using for the test is an HP that BFL has not seen/had access to yet.
So let me get this straight... you wrote all that stuff about compiling the code from source and about how the board and test machine didn't have any kind of internet connection, and then you neglected to mention that you'd used a laptop set up and provided by BFL which could've had a hidden wireless connection to anywhere. Did you even make sure that the binaries you were running actually corresponded to the source code you received, or did you use binaries that BFL provided too?
Neglected to mention it for what? We haven't done the test yet... How can I not mention something that hasn't even happened?
Well, cheers to you both for taking action on behalf of the community whatever the outcome may be.
If only BFL could stop taking orders for products that they are not ready to ship yet, and resume ordering once they have enough stock to ship within the charge back delay of paypal.
That would eliminate once and for all the growing doubt in the community that they are just trying to buy some time.
P.S. Fix the freaking "1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500)". It comes off as being very purposely biased to everyone who knows you are smarter than that...
The unit was never priced at $500. It was $599. There were pre-orders with a set date at $499. Anyone who ordered by that date has not been asked to pay more money.
The title is a copy / paste of previous thread title.
The question of the original price being totally irrelevant to the topic, that shouldn't be a big issue.