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Hardware

Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships 155

Posted by CmdrTaco from the taking-a-deeper-look dept.
VL writes "Manufacturers demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks."
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Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships More

Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships

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  • One of the first cases (Score:5, Informative)

    by Joceyln Parfitt ( 756037 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:33AM (#8561635)
    One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

    But the damage was already done.
    • Huh? Voodoo faster than Riva TNT? Riva TNT cards are much faster than Voodoo 3, and support more features, actually I still see Riva TNT cards around, while I haven't seen a Voodoo for ages.

      Further more, Riva TNT cards run not so old games pretty well, Max Payne is an example, I want to see a Voodoo card do so.

      Are you sure this actually happened? Got any links? Or you are just trolling / karma whoring?
      • I ran max payne on voodoo2 with nearly highest detail, and now I run max payne 2 on voodoo5 with nearly highest detail too, with FSAA 2x and tweaked texture LOD bias.
        with a good framerate of course..

    • Re:One of the first cases (Score:5, Informative)

      by oferic ( 603861 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:01PM (#8561774)
      One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

      Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

      Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip [tomshardware.com]
      Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview [tomshardware.com]
      New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D [tomshardware.com]
      Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT [tomshardware.com]

      I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

      "NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

      Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited?
    • Wasn't Tom's Hardware also paid off by Intel for their "let's run a cpu without a headsink and see what happens" review? I know it sparked one hell of a controversy

  • They talk about journalistic integrity.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr Reducto ( 665121 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:40AM (#8561666) Journal
    They talk about journalistic integrity as in not changing reviews to get ad dollars, then go on to talk about the HardOCP deal. I am not going to get into that, because my comments get bitchslapped down whenever I support a company that is not in /.'s good graces.

    They should have picked a more relevant example, like Tom's Hardware and the Intel P3 fiasco where the 1.13's had a critical error in them. It really seems like they were just trying to get mentioned on Slashdot, and seem like a really good review site.

  • Mistakes, damned mistakes and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sammyo ( 166904 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:40AM (#8561667) Journal
    Influence will always occur, never take a single opinion as fact. But unless there is a dramatic smoking gun, memo, email, hidden video of the editor at Bill's place on the lake sipping a pina colada (yea, sure), proof will be very hard to come by. Look at a long track record of information, and if you see a lot of ads by one vendor, grain of salt time.

  • What?? Reviews are rigged? (Score:3, Funny)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:41AM (#8561673) Homepage Journal
    The manufacturers are dictating what is revealed so they don't look bad?? Who would have ever thought.. I'm shocked.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:43AM (#8561682)
    We're not too concerned about our "uniques" a day, but rather our "bookmarks" and "returns".

    That's an odd thing to say before posting to Slashdot.

  • As a former sports editor for a newspaper... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oldosadmin ( 759103 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:43AM (#8561685) Homepage
    I understand the need to hsve integrity in what is reported. Any person trying to stifle a collection of facts (which is what HardOCP had/has), should be strung up like a traitor.

    Now, if there was libel or untruth involved, I'm the first to say they need to be punished... but... don't try to hide your own faults by beating up on a website. Nobody likes a sore loser (or vaporware company).

    [cheapplug]For some journalistic goodness, go to oldos.org [oldos.org][/cheapplug]

  • This isn't news. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Awptimus Prime ( 695459 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:52AM (#8561733)
    We already read the same exact thing, but in different words and headline over a week ago. This new article brings nothing new to the table except for a slightly misleading headline.

    The [H] issue has more to do with halting what someone feels is slander, and little to do with the widespread problems with hardware review sites skewing benchmarks to keep a vendor, advertiser, or to get free stuff.

    Unique as the issue may be, it's not worthy of multiple /. headlines until something new actually surfaces in the case.

    If I wanted a 15 year old's opinion in essay format on the issue, I would have simply gone to [H]'s forum.**

    ** - Not that a 15 year old is less intelligent than anyone else, just young people tend to not have their heads glued on straight when it comes to business and law. Wisdom takes time to build.

  • Infinium a hardware vendor? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Operating Thetan ( 754308 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:57AM (#8561751) Journal
    Isn't the whole point of the lawsuit that they aren't?

    • Re:Infinium a hardware vendor? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:47PM (#8562103)
      I can't think of a more unfortunate name than the "phantom console" other than the "vaporware console"... seriously who comes up with this stuff.

      If they tried to sue me I'd call their bluff (the "phantom lawsuit") and just put quotation marks around all my stuff to humiliate them:

      The ceo of the company making the *yet to be released* "phantom" console has asked us to take down our review of their business. We suggest the best thing they could do would be to give us a "phantom" console to review, but something is really haunting their company - because the "phantom console" has yet to be released to the public. Finding their "phantom offices" is also a difficult task. But perhaps we shouldn't be so hard on the CEO, he could be a visionary - this "phantom of his imagination" could bring the gaming world to it's knees. All they need to do is set a new "phantom release date" and stick to it like the slime the ghosts leave when the pass through walls in Ghost Busters. Then we will all be able to enjoy the phantoms

      humiliation complete, lawsuit aborted, insert credit for more life.

  • Many Other Riscs for Website Owners (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wehe ( 135130 ) <wehe&tuxmobil,org> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:57AM (#8561753) Homepage Journal
    I have never got a request from a hardware manufacturer to beautify anything related to them at TuxMobil - Linux On Mobile Computers [tuxmobil.org]. Actually laptop manufacturers do not seem to care about Linux users [tuxmobil.org]. But there are other caveats. As discussed at SlashDot I had severe trademark trouble with the former project name MobiliX [tuxmobil.org]. There are other legal issues, which may occure in an instant. For example if some lawyer accuses a website owner not to obey certain legal requirements. At least in some countries (e.g. Germany) a dedicated law for internet content exists.

  • not only hardware... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ricochet81 ( 707864 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:58AM (#8561755)
    How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table [mysql.com]

    "Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client."

    • not only hardware...EULA's. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A LOT of Eula's are like that. Read Java's Eula.

    • Re:not only hardware... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by yusd ( 760249 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:37PM (#8562014)
      We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client.

      Of course they are very biased. Since it rather hard to find any real-life application of RDBMS serving "sigle client".

      /sarcasm mode on
      And we all know how good MySQL at serving multiple clients with complex queries at once.
      /sarcasm mode off

      Neat quote tho, at least when you understand who is really biased :)

      /usd

      • Absolutly nobody. It has no use.

        Do you know anything about IT? Or are you one who think IT is only the million dollar projects? A small companie orderbook or a mere webshop don't count?

        The stats on mysql showed that for simple setups mysql outperforms the big boys. Factor in price and oracly quickly becomes a terrible product. (A webmonkey can maintain mysql. Oracle needs a dbm)

        BUT only on small/medium applications. That is what the benchmark showed. But oracle doesn't like that to be known. It shows peo

        • Isn't it against advertising standards to name your competitor? Not allowed to say, we are better then those guys? Wich is why in washing powder commercial they literally have brand X.

          Actually, no it isn't against standards, it merely exposes the advetiser to claims of slander. I've seen many the commercial / print ad where the competitor is named, but I have always noticed that the fine print is usually less fine than normal and makes explicit references such as "Data obtained from 2002 annual report to

        • "Do you know anything about IT? Or are you one who think IT is only the million dollar projects? A small companie orderbook or a mere webshop don't count?"

          Ever heard of "threads"? Or of "concurrent" connections?

          Even a small web shop may have to serve more than a connection at a time. Ever heard of fluctuations and statistical flukes? Even without getting slashdotted or one day being mentioned in some major magazine, the day _will_ come when 10 users click on the search button at the same time. That's what

      • Re:not only hardware... (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's easy to find real-life applications that are serving single clients. Look at most message boards. Most varieties of PHP messages boards I've seen use MySQL as the back end. In that setup, there is only a single client. The web server is the client. The web server itself may have multiple clients, but nonetheless, the database is serving a single client.

        • It's easy to find real-life applications that are serving single clients. Look at most message boards. Most varieties of PHP messages boards I've seen use MySQL as the back end. In that setup, there is only a single client. The web server is the client. The web server itself may have multiple clients, but nonetheless, the database is serving a single client.

          That's not a single client. Unless the message board only has one user on it at a time, it has multiple clients accessing and updating the messageboa

          • That's not a single client. Unless the message board only has one user on it at a time, it has multiple clients accessing and updating the messageboard at the same time.

            From the pov of the database, that's a single client application: most low level web apps don't use pooling, so they use a single connection to the database. And most message boards only have one client at a time (not everyone does slashdot's numbers) /t

  • Nothing new. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:05PM (#8561800) Homepage
    This is nothing new. The difference is that when a company makes threats such as this, is now it is likely to backfire. Now, some of the people that they threaten on the web are as likely to publicize the threat as to give in to the threat.


    In the old days, if you advertise enough the paper would automatically tweek the review. Infoworld had done this with a compiler review. If you read the review, then looked at the score card, you would notice that they did not match.

  • Anyone know of any honest review sites? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dealsites ( 746817 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:05PM (#8561801) Homepage
    If this sort of thing is common, can anyone recommend any review sites that they trust?

    --
    Real-time deal updates [dealsites.net]

    • Re:Anyone know of any honest review sites? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Stubtify ( 610318 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:12PM (#8561828)
      While its not exactly reviewing all the latest and greatest, www.dansdata.com [dansdata.com] is my favorite "independent" web review site. He usually sticks to cameras, small computer parts, and other neat electronics, but he's a no BS kinda guy who will say something sucks when it does.
      • <AOL>Seconded. Dan rules.</AOL> He reviews everything from small computer cases [dansdata.com] and bisarre amount of heatsinks [dansdata.com], over LED flashlights [dansdata.com] and soap bubble pistols [dansdata.com], to radio controlled tanks [dansdata.com]. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

      • Re:Anyone know of any honest review sites? (Score:5, Informative)

        by gnu-generation-one ( 717590 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:40PM (#8562443) Homepage
        "Dans Data / will say something sucks when it does."

        Just had to buy some speakers for work, and there was only one site which ignored the manufacturers' claims of power rating, and talked instead about the wattage available from the power supply, the likely efficiency, and the ratings printed on the back of each driver. Most other sites seem to take specifications at face-value.

        In fact, Dans Data has been known to:
        (-) Tell you a speaker gives 20W output even when it's described as "250W total system power"
        (-) Actually test CPU heatsinks with a resistive heater
        (-) Relentlessly mock manufacturers who describe 10^9 bytes as a gigabyte
        (-) Take everything apart
        (-) Know enough about overclocking to laugh at people who do it badly
        (-) Pick-up digital camera manufacturers for lying in their "megapixel" ratings (I think some of them count each colour in a pixel as a separate pixel?)
        (-) Write reviews in valid HTML that are all on one page, and use the full width of your browser window without Flash animations
        (-) Test PC power supplies under load, and compare it with manufacturer specifications
        (-) Get out the multimeter for pretty much everything, from LED flashlights to power supplies and batteries

        And of course, the famous:
        (-) debunking a load of wacko free-energy products and "this'll make your toaster healthier" new-age power connectors.

        As Dan would say, "reccommended."
        • Unfortunately, Dan seems to review only parts meant to sell to people who know nothing about computers. These are all overpriced. None of the parts I saw would be used by computer companies to build computers. We pay $5.50 U.S. for a partly copper heatsink for Athlon processors, for example.
        • I read every article Dan writes - they're informative, seem legit, and usually pretty funny. Do yourselves a favour and check out his (rather out of date but outrageously funny) article on raid:

          http://www.dansdata.com/raidagain.htm
    • I've found that anandtech.com has been fairly accurate over the years.

    • Re:Anyone know of any honest review sites? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bishop ( 4500 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:12PM (#8562273)
      No. Here are a few tips to help when reading the reviews.

      1) Most owner reviews suck. There are many sites that will post reviews made by people who recently purchased a product. These reviews are rarely objective. For one thing the author will rarely have anything to compare the new product to. For a second thing, far too often the review is merely an editorial in which the author tries to justify to themselves the purchase of some new, and expensive kit. A classic example (and sterotype) is the audiophile "reviews" extoling the features of insanely expensive hardware. However I do find such reviews of some use. If there are any problems listed, those problems should not be taken lightly. If a product is given a 8 of 10 but has <undesirable feature>, then that feature must be pretty serious to warrant mention at all.

      2) Read several sources. Off the top of my head I can think of Tomshardware, Sharkyextreme, Anandtech, Arstechnica, and [H]ardOCP. These sites tend to do decent comparisons. The sites each have different methods, and don't always agree on the results. I prefer Tom's and Anand for reviews (despite Tom's past). Arstechnica tends to have good technical articles which serve as a basis to better understand and critically read the other review sites. Dansdata deserves mention as one of the best cpu cooler review site out there.

      3) Trust the numbers more then the comentary. It is harder to be biased with numbers. Think critically about the results. If the review states that "product A is clearly faster then product B," but the difference is only 2%, then that comment is not justified. There is caveat to this. Sometimes the review will contain critical details that can't be expressed very easily as a number. Important information about supported features, or architechture. Such as video card X supports DirectX9 completely, whereas video card Y does not. A good review will explain why these features matter.

      4) Think about what is really being tested. Read the test methodology. Look at the combination of hardware and/or software used to test the product. Again Dansdata deserves mention. Dan has built an excellent test rig to test the cpu coolers. There are flaws with the test. He acknowledges those flaws, and dicusses how the flaws, may or may not affect the validity of his tests.

      5) When reading the conclusions it is very important to understand what those conclusions were based on. A prime example is ConsumerReports' (CU) review of digital cameras versus DPreview or Stevesdigicams. CU is very independant, but rates the cameras as a whole along with the bundled software, and other touchyfeely, ooh-aah features. The other sites ditch the software, and review the cold hard technical details of the camera with heavy emphasis on the image quality.

      • Bishop, some of your comments ring true and are worth further discussion.

        There are many sites that will post reviews made by people who recently purchased a product. These reviews are rarely objective. For one thing the author will rarely have anything to compare the new product to. For a second thing, far too often the review is merely an editorial in which the author tries to justify to themselves the purchase of some new, and expensive kit.

        This is exactly the reason why we at Geartest.com [geartest.com] don't bu

        • That's exactly why anyone who does reviews should never purchase products for reviews and expect to maintain any credibility.

          Horseshit.

          You just lost all your credibility with me and with any other pro tech journalist who read the crap you just wrote. So you depend exclusively on freebies? What happens if a vendor doesn't like your review? Enough unhappy vendors and you're out of business. Or is it that you never give bad reviews for products?

          Do you always return the products you review to the vendors i

          • Where can I read your reviews?

          • Fascinating.

            I had no idea that you [50megs.com] were the voice for all professional technology journalists everywhere. I'll have to remind the technology journalists I know (and contact those that I don't, just so they know) that they should stop visiting and writing because a lone voice howling in the Internet wilderness has an axe to grind and went on a rabid rant that we lacked credibility with him. Sure thing. Gotcha.

            Thanks for completely ignoring the half-dozen paragraphs of entirely relevant context preceding

    • Funny.

      Seriously. It is like asking somebody wich series of Star Trek is the best, wich editor they like, wich news source is the most un-biased. Guess what? Everyone is going to give you a different answer and they are all WRONG.

      The reason is that it is subjective. Does the review of CPU X favor price over stability? Heat over speed? Linux drivers over optimized for windows?

      Intel fans will say that intel is more stable and has better support. AMD fans will say theirs give better performance for less mone

    • I'd have to say Ace's Hardware [aceshardware.com], since they seem to do the most thorough testing and have the best understanding of what's going on. They don't review much but the forum is at least decent.
      • Although the editorial style is a little *ahem* younger *ahem* and less formal than I usually like, I have found that the results hardocp (www.hardocp.com) reports have generally matched my own experiences when using the same hardware they reported on. By extrapolation, it leads me to put some trust in their reviews. Of course you always have to read between the lines and pick/choose what you're looking for in any hardware review, but that is merely common sense.

        For example, if I'm buying a motherboard t

    • Well you can trust my site, of course it's me telling you this, so I don't know if that invalidates the recommendation.

      I created The Jem Report [thejemreport.com] as a safe haven for people who want to learn more about computers. I was so dissatisfied with the crappy reviews I saw on other sites that I felt I could do better writing my own. I also wanted to have forums that weren't regularly trolled and flamed by people who didn't hold themselves accountable for their own words.

      I don't know if it's a "success" by any partic

    • When you say "honest review sites" the only way to truly judge if a site is honest or not is to follow its coverage over an extended period of time and see if the reviews match reality when you go out and buy a particular product.

      At the risk of being repetitive, I've made some comments before about so-called "reviews" and so-called "review sites" that are really run by fanboys who spend most of their time trading/posting links to other fanboy sites. I'll leave it to the intelligence of the Slashdot reader

  • Brilliant! One that works (Score:5, Funny)

    by Interruach ( 680347 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:05PM (#8561802) Journal
    1) Ad revenue created by page hits
    2) Post non-story to slashdot
    3) PROFIT!!!

    • Excellent (Score:2, Insightful)

      by GuyFawkes ( 729054 )
      Finally someone who not only "gets" hardware review sites, but can also sum them up in entirely in 3 very short lines.

    • Re:Brilliant! One that works (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah butif we don't click on the ads, they have just burned bandwidth.

      And as most of the people reading this far down haven't read the article yet I would like to say something:

      Don't click on any adverts.
  • unfortunately, this is nothing new [snacc.mb.ca].

    CBS

  • I am appalled. (Score:5, Funny)

    by joeszilagyi ( 635484 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:21PM (#8561884)
    You mean that there is no journalistic ingrity out there anymore? Hooray and thank you, Fox News!

  • Google not a validation of data (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mikewas ( 119762 ) <wascher@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:23PM (#8561893) Homepage
    The reviewer said all data came from the manufacturer's public information & Google. Finding it on Google doesn't validate the data. You need to look at the site that Google sends you too, validate that it is a trustworthy site which has information that you can use.

    • Re:Google not a validation of data (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @12:46PM (#8562101)
      Yes, that caught my eye too. I find most of the hardware-review sites I read on Google, for that matter. And the whole point of all of this is: how do you "validate that it is a trustworthy site"? Any site? Answer: you don't. Everything on the Web is basically taken on faith or not at all, and you have to use your own judgment as to what is reliable and what is not. But, really ... that's the way things have been since the invention of written language. I mean, how often have you heard the expression "You don't believe everything you read, do you?" That is more true now than it ever was before. When you think about it, back in the age of books (the old-fashioned non-battery-powered, non-backlit kind without a microprocessor), there was an editing and review process for virtually everything that was published. That guaranteed a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than we have on the Web. Yes, it's true ... anyone can publish their works to the whole damn planet for the price of a free Web hosting account, and that is generally a good thing. But that doesn't mean the quality or reliability of that material is any better: on average it is quite the opposite in fact.

      The problem is that some (many, I think) people look at information found via Google as somehow having been vetted or approved by that organization. How many users even grasp that once they click on a link on a Google results page they are no longer even connected to Google? Google is primarily an index, not a repository (yes, I know they cache pages but they don't create or maintain that information.) The World Wide Web is the repository, and like most public receptacles it is largely full of crap.
      • it does not validate the data, but it does validate that the information is "publicly discussed".

        If the information covered by NDA can be found using google, then it might be safer to assume that writing about it/commenting might be ok. [though IANAL... so....]
    • Finding it on Google doesn't validate the data.

      A google search for the phrase "google not a validation of data" [google.com] returns Your search - "google not a validation of data" - did not match any documents.

      Therefore:

      a) It's never been said

      which leads to:

      b) This thread doesn'

  • The other way round (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leandrod ( 17766 ) <l@@@dutras...org> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:33PM (#8562392) Homepage Journal
    On the other hand vendors couldn't care less if we demand changes. I still remember when Oracle issued a press release claiming it was the inventor of relational databases. I immediately fired back demanding a retraction. They never did, several years after you could still find the aforesaid release in their database.

    Now imagine if we asked them to stop lying about SQL being relational...
  • Just to say so up front, I write for The Inquirer (www.theinquirer.net), and do a fair amount of hardware reviews. I also go to the trade shows and the like, and talk to other journalists. You learn a lot there.

    You also go to parties afterwards and people get very drunk. You learn a lot more there :). You learn even more if you do not drink. I don't.

    The things you learn are open secrets, all the vendors know what is going on, and all the writers and reporters do also. Some employees may not know thier bosses are not quite clean, but that is another issue.

    I was talking to several DRAM vendors about benchmarking at CES, and was told, by name, and usually by several sources that certain web sites would not review a product without advertising dollars. In fact, advertising dollars could significantly skew the results of a review.

    These were not offhand comments like 'we think that they don't like us', it was direct 'If we don't cough up the cash, they won't review us'. Several different sources in the DRAM and other industries told me similar things, and for the most part, 2 or 3 names kept coming up. No, I will not name them.

    If you follow the hardware sites, you can pretty much pick up who is 'dirty'. When 5 sites review the same new video card, all with the same *yawn* benchmarks, and 4 get one result, and the 5th gets a different result, and praises the 'loser' in the commentary, what do you think is going on? I mean, it is rather obvious.

    The flip side of it is I get accused of bias just about ever day. Other than it getting rather old, it is usually not worth commenting on. I get accused of loving AMD, loving Intel, and being a liberal weenie and a republican nazi over the same article.

    The truth of the matter is I get what hardware I can from who I can, and write about it. I bitch out HP all the time for blatant management stupidity, but I can't recall ever reviewing one of their products badly. I buy a lot of them with my own money. Strangely, they won't talk to me.

    I also review a lot of AMD gear, and almost no Intel stuff. Why? AMD sends me things when I ask, without any pain or hoops to jump through. Intel won't. I know they can, friends in the industry have intel sending truckloads of chips to them on offhand remarks. I would almost say they don't like me or want me near thier products. If I ever do get one, I will write about it fairly though, I think that is what they are afraid of.

    Last but not least, I know at least 3 of The Inq writers, me included, have been offered money to do something, or not do something. All the ones that I have heard of turned them down. At CES in January, a vendor who I know and like tried to hand me a wad of bills. I (politely) turned him down, even though it was probably more money than I had seen in a month, and it would have made the difference between another day of dollar menu items and water, and the not totally cheap buffets in vegas. Others have been offered 6 digits to do things. Personally, I don't know why he turned that one down.

    What it all comes down to is ethics. Once yousell out, you are done. How can you trust them ever again? Easy you can't. That is why I turned down the money, and why the site puts reporting first. If it were any other way, I would be gone.

    Other sites make other decisions, and they quickly get the reputations that they deserve. The community knows, and if you look closely, you can pick out who is clean fairly easily, it isn't all that hard.

    -Charlie

  • ATI does the same (Score:2, Informative)

    by tintruder ( 578375 )
    ATI has been doing a similar thing.

    The issue arose when ATI failed to offer support for MS's XP-Media Center Edition (MCE) until more than 2 years after the rest of the tuner vendors did so.

    In Oct 2003, ATI announced "support" for MCE in 2 ways: a "hardware encoder" card, the eHomeWonder, and drivers for existing AIW cards, called "Encode", a software MPEG encoder.

    A public Beta was started with just 15 members, and the performance of Encode was abyssmal, if it ran at all.

    Public discussion ensued at

  • Tom's Hardware & Deathstars (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] has nothing to worry about from IBM.

    IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives [slashdot.org], as /. regulars are well [slashdot.org] aware of [slashdot.org], are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually [techreport.com]. Too bad for a large number of customers [techreport.com], it came sooner rather than later.

    When the news first broke [techreport.com] on these drives, some [techreport.com] tech sites [storagereview.com] came out [viahardware.com] with the news, and others [tomshardware.com] kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, u

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