We have internal test systems. A few of them, like the Baby Jet in our office that is part of the Eligius mining pool, are doing actual mining. This is to do a full, end to end, system test.
A much better test would involve mining the entire historical blockchain.
That is, setup a pool server that feeds jobs with
known blocks, and make sure you find them all.
This is no different than "real-world mining" except that you are doing it with historical data that miners would have gotten before each of those blocks.
Unrelated to this, I see no reason manufacturers
shouldn't be mining mainnet as they do burnin as long as they are honest with the customers.
Where are our tracking numbers?
I have my tracking number, but not from HashFast (FedEx called me to confirm some details on the shipment).
I presume this means they've begun shipping, even if they haven't given out the tracking numbers yet...