(though for the sake of transparency, don't call it a "Free resource guide". You auction off advertising space. It's like calling a YouTube channel a free community resource based on hardship and the goodness of one's soul. Traffic = money, cut the altruistim act)[/i]
Yeah that
$3 of traffic a month really makes the time and abuse worthwhile
. I especially like spending my Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights being called a liar and a fraud.
I still believe you are misleading potential customers by labelling them as taking pre-orders, your rating makes them look like they are selling pre-orders at present. If they do start selling pre-orders, I just don't see why it can't be changed to reflect their current business model in the same way Bitmain's was down-graded at the time they decided to.
Because it doesn't work that way around, you can't eat the cake before you have the cake.
Consumers are generally smart enough to know if they are buying something physical or hopes and dreams, and even the shadiest hardware companies haven't lied about whether products were in stock or not.
BFL managed to sell $15-25M of 65nm vapour-ware, so unfortunately that's not true. There would be a need for anything along these lines if that were true.
As for the future criteria you have established, who the hell are you to decide whether a company can fund its next generation of hardware with or without pre-orders, are you their accountant?
When they admit it themselves in interviews and on these forums then it becomes a lot easier.
Also, to satisfy your criteria why do they have to be able to prove that they have the capital to produce an entire line of hardware?
Not the entire line, but the initial chip run. On the latest notes thats still around $5M and is the biggest cost by far of the hardware. Its paid upfront and far ahead of generating any revenue on that money, where as its possible to bridge some of the other costs if you can be quick about it. If you don't have that $5M cash then you have to sell preorders or skip the generation like BFL seems to be.
If anything that is biased towards smaller companies with less sales.
Yes it is, exactly as it should be. The smaller the company the more likely that things can and will go wrong that leads to the crippling of the company. For example if a company of Technobit's size has 3 months of production delays or loses an entire batch - they're gone. Boop, gone, along with any change of customers with pending orders to get their money back. If a company the size of Bitfury did the same mistake they'd go "ah shucks" and open their vault of endless money and fix it.
I doubt even Bitmain has enough capital to design and produce every miner for their next generation without selling in batches, and nor should they otherwise there is money left on the table and better spent elsewhere.
You'd be surprised
You have to remember the scale that Bitmain operates at in terms of # units, S5s outnumber SP20s multiple times over, many many times.
Even if someone doesn't have the capital (which again, how you would base this judgement is beyond me) and decides to seek outside investors or loans (still not pre-orders, as the risk still falls on the company) why the hell should it matter? It doesn't affect the customer at the end of the day.
And that's something I've never disputed and I've made it very clear. If Spondoolies manages to raise the money then great, but as I said before they can't eat their cake (investment) before they get their cake (investment).
Now, as far as upgrading Bitmain's rating. I assume you have looked at their balance sheets and statements to be assured that they have the capital to fund their next full generation of miners?Because they have clearly accepted pre-orders in the same time frame as SP-Tech w/ their L1. You are basing your "future" criteria in this instance on past performance by using their 28nm line-up, which shows how flawed that logic is. It's called speculation, at least have the decency to admit it.
See above.
Lastly, if you really want to be specific and follow the word of the law (which you have shown to whole-heartedly), Bitmain sells their miners as a pre-order, even if it's only a few weeks:
Antminer S2 goes on sale March 14th Expected ship date: April 1st
Antminer S3 goes on sale: June 30th Expected ship date: July 10th-20th
Antminer S4 goes on sale: September 16th Expected ship date: End of September
That's the definition of an acceptable batch, as per the below description. When you make 1000s of units a time it would just be dishonest to say "we can ship all this in one day" and so orders ship over a 2 week period. All the chips are in hand, all the components are in hand, designs are tested and manufactured in their 1000s. Its still a batch though and so Bitmain will likely only ever receive 16/20 as they've almost outgrown the ability to ship from true hand consistently.
Batch - 'Presells' a batch being manufactured for delivery in the immediate future
You claim to be bias-free, but all of your qualifying criteria are completely subjectively based. It appears you make up whatever qualifiers you need to justify your ratings and decisions instead of the other way around. That is not neutral.
As I explained a few pages back, this is a discrete rating system. Its exponentially better than a semi-continuous system as its much clearer and useable comparisons can be drawn. At the same time it increases the ability for some to bitch and moan because there has to be a line drawn somewhere - it is discrete after all. And here we have said bitching and moaning.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, you keep telling SP-Tech that you will upgrade their rating when they release their next generation hardware and sell from stock. BMT SOLD PRE-ORDERS IN NOVEMBER, YET STRANGELY I STILL DON'T SEE THEIR 16NM LINE RELEASED? That my friend, is complete hypocrisy.
I explained this last time, but I'll also add this. S5 > 100x L1s.
What I'd like to take a minute to highlight as well is that what is going on here is nothing different than what BFL did tried to do.
BFL wasn't happy with their rating so they bitched and moaned. Didn't work.
They then moved onto trying to bully me into changing their rating. Didn't work.
They then moved onto trying to silence the ratings by paying users to leaves 100s of negatives.
Spondoolies wasn't happy with their rating so they bitched and moaned. Didn't work.
They then moved onto trying to bully me into changing their rating. Didn't work.
They then moved onto trying to silence the ratings by denouncing the rating system as biased. Even though they were very happy with the same system only months ago when it benefited them.
