Basically you've been trolled, but...
Disclaimer: I am not a BFL customer, and I too have seen the office in person. It's exactly like the op described.
But I'm not as pessimistic as he is... I think they'll be shipping once they figure out how to tool their assembly line properly.
...
They've got to the point where they have managed to acquire a few cast-off experimental chips and a PCB which works for a while before flaming out. And possibly some mock software which makes things look like they are working.
Wow, this is a pretty pessimistic view. Do you just have no idea whatsoever about how printing circuitboards works?
I'm not very knowledgeable about many of the aspect to be fair, but...
Several different press outlets have not only got their hands on these things, and gotten bitcoins in their accounts from using them... But they actually have torn them down to see what makes them tick... The unanimous consensus is that they are indeed mining as advertised. This cannot really be argued anymore.
Think of it this way... This is a Jalapeno's motherboard:
<image snipped for brevity>
We know this is legit because multiple bloggers who existed long before BFL own these now, tore them apart, and even tell us what the different chips on the board do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciwfCqP8AiU...little or nothing I saw in that vid had much value. Couple of guys scratching their heads. One knew how to use a screwdriver. Yawn. None of the other analysis I've seen is much more rewarding.
I'll be interested when if finally comes out who did the ASIC fab and what logic technology was employed.
It also would not hurt to have a report from someone who actually hooked up to a pool and got paid out. I've not heard any such reports, but I barely pay attention.
See how the little embedded wires line up on the nanometer scale to get electricity around the silicon pathways in a useful manner? That can only be done by PRINTING... You don't just make a few shotty boards at a time like this, it is way too cost prohibitive.
When you make the printer to make these boards and the ASIC chips themselves, you are spending tons of money, likely millions of dollars, to make a printer that can spit out millions of units.
So since they exist at all, THERE WILL BE more. You can write this fact down, it's a basic law of economics. Even if they refused to make any more, they'd be forced to sell this expensive monster (likely through court-ordered bankruptcy) to some other company that would use it!
The only question now is how competent BFL staff are at running the printing press faster... So far they haven't done a good job, but sooner or later they have got to get their crap together if they want to still own that printing press.
The board actually seems like a conglomeration of earlier work. Maybe that is why it sucks more than my workstation's mainboard when it sits at idle? Frankly it's simply not that impressive of a feat, and if BFL paid millions of dollars for it, I think they got scammed.
One thing that hit me right away when I saw the pic was how the 2 pads with contain (purported) ASIC chips are different in size from the 6 which (it is speculated) would contain more such chips if they were not such hot (in the thermal sense) little bastards?
Seems like a dozen-ish of the 130nm ASICMINER chips like the one I just bought for a tiny USB device achieve about the same perf. The simplest explanation for BFL taking so long and making so many errors in the year it's taken them to get this far is that they simply have not tried very hard. They are way way out in front on taking people's money though. It's all about priorities I guess.
