And Jody is the General Manager.  Unfortunately, in small organisations job titles often bear little resemblance to actual areas of competence or responsibility.  Josh is clearly not the project leader and he appears to be getting much of his information second-hand.  Jody's last blog post was ridiculous coming from a General Manager.  

There needs to be one person giving updates and that person needs to be someone who actually knows what the fuck is going on rather than someone who's been cast in the role of community liaison because they run a mining pool and can "relate" to miners.  If Josh is going to be given that role, then the project lead needs to be giving him regular, accurate information about where things are at rather than Josh always chasing information. I don't get the impression that Josh is the one setting deadlines at all.  My impression is that he makes extrapolations based on the information given to him by others and has little direct control over anything.  

It's quite odd given that the original plan was for Josh to personally walk the chips through all the remaining steps once they left the fab, but perhaps that plan was more something which Josh hoped to do rather than something which was actually approved.  I'm not sure how you can oversee a technical project if you don't know - for instance - that blank alignment wafers even exist and that not having one will slow down the bumping process.

My perception is that it's easy for the people who are actually responsible to hide behind Josh and let him take the blame for any inaccurate information given to the community because they refuse to make official updates on the BFL website themselves.

You haven't asked for advice but I'm going to give you some anyway.  Hook up with some childhood leukaemia support groups.  Thousands of parents have trodden this path before you and their insight and support will be invaluable.  They can link you up with the best organisations to give you practical assistance - and there are very many for childhood cancers - as well.

You cannot help your son if you don't take care of yourself.  Your priorities will be changed by this and a lot of things will now seem unimportant, but don't let taking care of yourself slip to the bottom of the list.  Now, more than ever, you still need to laugh and smile and have fun.

It might be helpful if you put some examples of your work online, because there are so many "I'll write your paper" services out there which don't actually do that but just provide people with one of the many thousands of papers which have been uploaded by people who scored well.  Many academic institutions are wise to people buying those papers off the net and actually run searches to make sure that people aren't just handing in a paper which was written by someone else and assessed by another university.

You're also going to need samples of your buyer's writing style.  Nothing screams "not my work" louder than a well written paper being submitted by someone whose previous efforts have been poor.

The reflow oven in the pictures posted can produce 700 boards per day according to the manufacturer.  Obviously there are going to be different lead times for the components.  They probably don't have a realistic idea of their assembly capacity at the moment.  

Once they're caught up on their back orders, they may very well be able to keep pace with demand.  Trying to complete back orders in-house mightn't be the wisest choice if it means that by the time the current back orders are cleared (estimated at May-June), they'll still be running two months behind on order fulfilment but BFL doesn't seem inclined to suspend new pre-orders until they catch up so that come June they can go to a turnaround time of under week.

I feel like I'm the only BFL who has some sympathy for Josh.  He's just the messenger and people's ire should be directed at those who are actually in control of the project - but those people are largely invisible.

That's a bit of a bummer given that there's no guarantee the SEC will actually end up taking any action against pirate.

I think the goal of "other" has already been achieved.

Seriously, contact Josh.  I'm sure he'll personally expedite this for you.

This is true but it generally only works well if you're shipping in reasonable sized batches on a regular basis.  It's useless when you're dribbling stuff out the door day by day.  Here at least, you generally need to commit to a certain volume per month (usually by either weight and/or cubic metres as the agents essentially purchase the capacity in advance) and the shipment times can be less flexible than dealing with the freight companies directly.

BFL would have been up shit creek if they'd signed shipping contracts based on any of their projected shipping dates.  Even now, they don't really know their assembly capacity, when subsequent batches will really be ready for shipping or what demand will be once back orders are finally filled.

The boards are being put together in Chicago.  The final assembly of the actual units is being done in Kansas City, which is where orders will be shipped from.

Here's a link to the DHL calculator.  I can't find one for EMS.

http://dct.dhl.com/input.jsp?langId=en&originCCId=CN

I plugged a 6 pound package into DHL's calculator.  For 3 day express shipping - leaving Kansas City on a Monday and landing in Sydney on Thursday the same week, it was $149 if organised online (this doesn't take into account any customs delays - they only guarantee getting it to Sydney in that time-frame).  Once things are cleared through customs and handed off to local carriers, delivery is usually pretty quick.  You can end up having to pay for redelivery, though, because the tracking information isn't reliable with some carriers and they attempt delivery before the date shown on the tracking info.

I know there've been a lot of customs problems with EMS packages coming from China to Australia recently - don't know if packages from the US are affected.

Starting packing the same day as testing starts is a huge risk, but I suspect they wouldn't be able to get another slot with the packaging facility any time soon if they hold off until the chips are tested.

At this stage BFL would be better off saying "mid-March" and pleasantly surprising people by being ready to ship early than giving another overly optimistic "worst case scenario" and failing to meet it.  22 February was supposed to be the "worst case scenario".

I'm also curious about how much their units weigh because $88 for international shipping sounds way too low.

From what's been posted before, the phone number goes to Dave's voicemail and the response time isn't rapid.

Josh is probably the best person to get this priority and he's on BFL's forums far more frequently than he is here. 

Sorry to hear about your son.

You might get a quicker response if you post this on the BFL forums.

From what Jody's posted in her blog, they're overwhelmed with emails asking about when units are going to be delivered and it's possible that your refund request is lost among all those other emails (which they aren't planning on responding to individually).

I have no doubt whatsoever that if you post on the BFL forums, Josh will personally hand your request onto Customer service for processing.  Whatever other flaws BFL may have, I've never seen a single complaint about delays in receiving refunds where accurate order information has been given to them.

Actually, there was a public post made saying that 53 units had been shipped and that if they didn't make it out of China prior to 2 February then they wouldn't arrive at their destination until after CNY.  That post implied that they wouldn't ship any more units until they knew everything had gone OK with those units (they said they'd used a different route, but didn't elaborate).

If they've been assembling the units themselves, there's no reason why assembly couldn't have continued throughout the holiday period.  Two Chinese vendors I use are resuming shipping today - the question is whether Avalon will ship any units they've assembled during the holiday period ASAP or whether they'll wait until they know the batch of 53 already shipped have been delivered without problems (because you really don't want to use that method with larger quantities until you know there are no problems with it).

Avalon have never regarded themselves as accountable to anyone other than their customers and have tended to communicate with them directly rather than through the forums.  It's a different business model than BFL's and you can't really compare the two.  A company of 22 people which has a dedicated customer service team (as BFL claims to have) should definitely be able to provide something better than "probably by June" in response to customer questions about when they'll receive their order - and should be capable of answering 500 emails if that's what it takes to keep customers informed (what do their customer service team at BFL actually do all day if they don't have time to respond to emails).

I think any vendor who actually gets ASICs into the hands of end users deserves recognition for pulling off a complex technical project.  Unfortunately, the various delays have combined in a manner which will make the units received by the average customer far less valuable which is going to leave a sour taste for many - especially when the market corrects.

Here's your problem.  Models don't have websites with premium content.  People working in the adult services industry do. I have no problems whatsoever with the adult services industry but at least be upfront that the point of this cosmetic surgery isn't so that these women can feel better about themselves in general - their reasons for wanting the surgery are commercial.

People would be reacting differently if you were crowd-funding cosmetic surgery for women who've had mastectomies or children with cleft palates or cool looking prosthetics for amputees (and this is actually a hot sector in the mainstream modelling market these days).

While this is largely true, it doesn't explain the inability to meet a solid target date for Batch 1.  I think part of their problem is that once the date for completion of the chips slipped, any dates they had locked in for bumping and packaging couldn't be met and they then became dependent on those facilities being able to squeeze them in around other orders.  They're not AMD or Intel, and this isn't a millions of chips run, so they don't have the kind of leverage to get booked orders bumped for their urgent run.

In their shoes, I'd forget about assembling back-orders in-house.  Originally they thought they'd be able to quickly catch up on back orders if they contracted out assembly for batch 1 only.  That's clearly not going to be the case - people ordering now are looking at a delivery date 2-3 months away if everything goes well. 

It's no longer clear when BFL might be able to make the transition to an order turnaround time of less than a week.  They either need to stop taking new orders until they catch up or they need to accelerate their manufacturing process because inability to deliver quickly is going to affect the profitability of their units as everyone - including their own Batch 1 customers - brings more hashing power online. 

It will cost them a lot more to accelerate manufacturing, but that has to be weighed against sales lost due to their inability to deliver units in a known, reasonable time-frame.  A single ordered now could be worthless if delivered in June due to massive difficulty jumps over the next few months.  It's probably not even worth keeping Jalapenos in their product line after the second batch of 6,000 chips is completed and assembled. 

As 22 February was their "worst case scenario", "if everything goes wrong" shipping date, I suspect that the plan was for kano to fly home with one of the first BFL units assembled.

Hopefully BFL has learned something about the dangers of setting target dates when you're directly controlling very few steps of the overall project and when you're placing a very small order compared to the average customer in the sector.

All these months later, none of us even know who the project manager/administrator is.  It's obviously not Josh or Jody.

Really?  There are plenty of posts critical of BFL in these threads.