Topic: Visit to BFL (Read 5349 times)

I carry a small leatherman.  Handier than hell.  I am pretty careful about alarming people at work when I use it though.  Different cultures have different sensitivities about such things.

There is no earthy excuse for fucking around with a knife when some perspective customer stops by to chat.  By Occam's, it seems strongly likely that the guy hoped to leverages some childish intimidation thing (or the OP is flat out lying.)

BFL has always leveraged juvenile fantasies.  It permeates their marketing material.  I remember one of the countless examples being Josh linking to some action/adventure car chase film as a representation of transferring material from the bumping facility to the factory.

Whether the BFL perps are of a juvenile mindset themselves or simply hope to appeal to their target victims (that is, people who are juveniles in mind at least and often in body) is unclear.  What is crystal clear is that they are anything but trustworthy business partners on any level.

I have carried pocket knives for a really long time.  I have also been around a lot of other guys who daily carry.  Anybody who plays with their knife like that around a stranger has some issues.  They are usually either incredibly immature or they have significant social issues.  I get really uncomfortable around them, almost like they will think it is funny to swing the knife at you and possibly stab you on accident.

Time for Mythbusters to get in there and TEST some stuff out...

My second fave video of BFL http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=C4SnUObMd0o

note you should turn on Captioning.

All of Josh's tells on where they were in the process of development back in early January are well documented in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZUPniBo5UQ

FINALLY!

They are ( ) Ready to ship Zotak motherboards!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eF6FSdur8k

This ^ is my favorite BFL video.

Don't forget the giant pile of 'pre-order' funds.

Now this post appears to have a lot less fluff than any BFL announcement. Meaning there is hard truth in this post.

Large  VCs/Investors looking to have a sizeable mining footprint will not touch BFL until they have successfully been reviewed by notable news outlets thoroughly. And no not the 1 jally review. i'm talking a review with many duplicate devices of BFL and getting average hash power consumption rates etc. Flaws or errors etc.

BFL customers/investors you can thank the founder as well as INABA/Josh for all the BFL has produced....VAPORWARE essentially.

What are your thoughts to date on everything you have seen? (unofficial review)

Just as an interesting aside, I write for a major hardware enthusiast web site. I won't say which one, but traffic is in the millions of pages per day on average. I emailed BFL a few weeks back to ask about the possibility of buying a Jalepeno for review, pointing out that we have hundreds of thousands of readers. No response. None. Based on that alone, I'm not buying anything from them. Why? Because if they're not interested in talking with press, it means they have so many orders that they can't possibly fill them all any time soon. Actually, a response saying something to that effect would have been more encouraging, as it would mean they at least know they're a ways out. My guess is that the "Jalapenos shipping!" announcement gave them a huge influx of cash, but based on previous delays it will be half a year before they can use that money to have more wafers fabricated and shipped back, plus more delays for assembly. At this stage, they should just start buying Avalon chips and working with those, and customers would be likely to get hardware in hand much sooner.

Put another way:
$1250 for a 30GHash/s rig would be an absolute steal right now. In fact, $275 for a 5GH/s Jalapeno would be an absolute steal. You would more than pay for the hardware within two weeks...if it was legit. If BFL had any real quantity of hardware, they should be mining like crazy while they "delay", and then ship all at once "to be fair" or something like that. But there's no massive surge in hash rates going on -- 10% every two weeks is nothing! LTC by comparison just shot up 25% in 2.5 days. It's now to the point where BTC is once more the more profitable mining option for GPUs, which wouldn't make sense if there were a lot of ASICs coming online. A couple months from now, I expect a much larger ASIC boom, and while BFL units would still be profitable, by the time thousands of BFL units are actually out in the wild I suspect the ROI will be in the realm of four or more months -- never mind the 18+ months you've been waiting by then.

I agree, thank you going to BFL OP.

I don't find the office visit in the OP as alarming. If he only got as much information as was put out in the BFL forums, then that just tells me that they are simply consistent. From it, my impression of BFL has not changed for the better or worse.

As for the person maybe seeming rigid or cold, that is just one of the possible personalities one could expect from meeting a random (non-customer representative) person at any company. Even though I appreciate his attempt to squeeze out some info, he did arrive unexpectedly. Nice try, I suppose.

 I'm surprised Josh has not nuked that entire thread from orbit in a fit of rage.

 I'm pretty much willing to bet that I'll received my 20 Erupter USB sticks before my day one BFL Single SC 60 GH/s unit pre-order ships.

 Pathetic.

Weeks? http://store.avalon-asics.com/?product=avalon-asic-chips-10000 My 500+ chips will take minimum 8 weeks at least longer to get to me from the drop site in the US. Then hoping that BKKcoins has a winning board ready I can either buy his or use his open design to have boards READY here in Indonesia and reflow the chips to the boards. Time tick tick tick.

So actually 2 months minimum more likely 2.5 to 3 months but "weeks" sounds sexier though. If I get something running in what July... I will be happy. August still happy... September still happy.

Nice to see the BFL customers are taking it in a calm way though.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1860-we-just-got-fucked-avalon-selling-tons-asics-chips-~25%24-per-gigahash-~6w-ghs-2.html

LMAO!

sure BFL bought some sticjs from friencat fo the jala

It would probably get some monkeys off their backs in a legal sense.  They are already almost certain to be a giant FAIL with respect to performance predictions.  They may as well buy some Block Erupters from ~friedcat and say that they delivered something.  It would be hilarious if a 'SC' ended up being a cardboard box full of USB sticks

Pride will be hurt so bad. I think it is possible BFL/Josh may not bring themselves to use their competition's chips to ship their almost 1 year preorders that are still UNSHIPPED.

Time will tell...tick tock

I've been predicting that for months.  I stipulated it in a bet with somebody how/if/when BFL ships since I didn't want to lose on a technicality such as that.

At least now with proven open source technology becoming available there is a glimmer of hope that BFL customers might one day get something which can hash.