Nvidia Apologizes

BuRzMaLy writes: "Read out the next round in Nvidia ethic story. The guy at Hypothermia does an interview with Nvidia where they in fact admit to all the charges against them, and they apologize to Hypothermia as well." This is a followup to a recent story where Nvidia was accused of trying to bully around various Web sites.

Comments

Talking so much without saying anything...

[Silverpike]

I can only shake my head after reading Hypothermia's summary. Did he have the same conversation he posted on his site? Are the Slashdot posters reading the same thing I read? This is what I saw in that conversation:

Here at NVIDIA we have over 60 people in marketing and unfortunately, someone who thought he was doing the correct thing was not. The contract that is on Hypothermia (sp?) is a document that we use for corporate to corporate promotions.
Translation: Someone here really f**cked up. (Note lack of apology).

Let's say if and OEM would like to do a banner for a show this agreement assures us that we have top billing with that promotion.
Then why is there all this text in the agreement about web sites? What does this have to do with a show?

Whatever you review is whatever you review...we've never asked anyone to pull a review for competitive reasons.
Yeah, but you guys sure have no problem pressuring reviewers into biasing for your card's strengths.

I feel really bad in your situation, because for the last 7 months you have been misled by a non-NVIDIA employee (intern, contractor, etc...). To Hypothermia, who had thought that this was an accurate PR rep, I apologize and for all of the grief/headache this has caused I apologize for that too.
What kind of company allows this to happen? Is NVIDIA such a loose operation as to allow non-NVIDIA employees to use their corporate email? Note that this does not satisfactorily explain Hypothermia's situation, because in the evolution of this whole ordeal Hypothermia clearly states that he spoke to at least two different people.

So this apology means nothing to me because none of Derek's explanations hold water. The apology I see only really applies to allowing someone to impersonate an NVIDIA employee.

All the opinions expressed above do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Re:That's just great

[KaiShin]

Heh. Now 3dfx is the saint, and nvidia is the devil? It seems a lot of people suffer from short term memory. Remeber GLide? How did that help the community? By forcing people to buy 3dfx cards? OpenGL support was slow to sppear because of 3dfx pushing GLide. Oh sure, it was great when 3dfx was alone in the high end, but then other players started to creep their way up. Do you think 3dfx sat back and said "let the best card win"? They spin reviews and press articles just as much as nvidia does, I gar-ron-tee. Let people make their own decisions based on the card, and lets all drop this good versus evil crap.

It can and should be avoided

[konstant]

An insightful poster recently remarked that the only way to ensure true independence from the companies you review is to:

1) purchase your own, off-the-shelf copy of the product - to ensure you experience what customers experience
2) politely return all unsolicited "gifts"

Consumer Reports does it, and their reputation is unimpugnable. Regrettably, in the hardware and software business, prices for off-the-shelf products often exceed the budget of enthusiasts. We're talking $100's to $1000's of dollars in most cases, especially for hardware.

The solution I would suggest is this. Establish a "blind" company that federates reviewers. This company accepts contributions from its members, pools them, purchases a sample product at the lowest price it can find, then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews. When all reviews are complete, the product can be auctioned off or resold in some other fashion. The companies bacing the reviewed products will never have contact directly with the reviewers, and the monetary issue is alleviated.

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

Re:It can and should be avoided

[god_of_the_machine]

then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews.

And there lies the problem. Who wants to read a review of the product two weeks later? Reviews take time, shipping takes time, and everybody wants to have a review on launch day. If some of the people would wait for that to happen, then they would quickly fall behind the times. "Why is site X reviewing that now? I already read that on site Y two weeks ago..." reminds me of people whining about the /. submission queue.

-rt-

Why why why

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Why oh why do so many tech sites (/. fortunately excepted) insist on using white text on a black background? Attn Webmasters: This is unreadable!

Now, to the point. It's great that NVidia apologized. It's even greater that they admitted wrongdoing. But the question is: What steps are being taken to ensure it never happens again?
--
Give us our karma back! Punish Karma Whores through meta-mod!

Re:Why why why

[The-Bus]

Personally, I'm one of those that are Tahoma-obsessed. It's just a beautiful, stylish, clean, sans serif font, easily distinguishable from the many flavors of Helvetica.

Background (which you probably know): Serifs are the little 'tabs' that stick out on text. Look at the 'T' on your keyboard and then look at this T. The small 'tabs' at the ends of the letter are serifs.

Ok, here's the reason serif'd fonts are easier to read. When we read, many times we aren't actually looking at each letter, processing it individually, then combining the letters and matching it against a word we know. Our brain, for the most part, does the following. Let's say you read the word:

Antelope

You probably understood the word long before you put each letter together. That's because your brain processed the word's shape. The high triangle at the front, the loops over the e's and o's, the long line on the high l and the low p. It does this with a great number of words, and while reading, you actually read whole words at a time, because you recognize them instantly from their overall shape. That'S one reason you can read a word like 'duplication' faster than a word like 'dplcigzte'. The second, most likely, does not have its shape stored in your brain. The difference in reading the words is very small, fractions of a second, but it adds up if you read a 1,000 page manuscript.

I am going to repeat this sentence, but in capital letters.

I AM GOING TO REPEAT THIS SENTENCE, BUT IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Again, a large part of what makes posts/sentences in all capital letters annoying is because they are harder to read. The capitals all create rectangles, and our brain doesn't like that one bit.

To sum up, the serifs aid our brain in recognizing the shapes of the letters by thickening the font at the end of each drawn line. I hope I did an adequate job of explaining this, it would be better with a chalkboard.

Stil doesn't stop there

[11223]

Is nVidia actually sorry about not being fair, or about being caught doing this? I have a feeling this is a "hand caught in the cookie jar" incident, and that they're only sorry for being caught.

nVidia was one of the worst offendors in telling review sites to downplay 16-bit color benchmarks on games... even on ones where the textures were in 16-bit color (so no benifit to 32 bit!) for the sole benifit of making 3dfx's faster card look worse. (ATI was particuarly bad, as well).

nVidia also "wants" reviewers to focus on speed instead of quality now - and encourages them to benchmark FSAA, because nVidia's approach is faster (and less good-looking) than 3dfx's.

nVidia has gotten used to playing a little bit dirty - that's how they managed to overthrow 3dfx. But now is the time that they need to step back and let fair reviews be fair reviews. If your card is fairly the best in the market, then you don't need to play Microsoft.

Re:Stil doesn't stop there

[tc]

nVidia was one of the worst offendors in telling review sites to downplay 16-bit color benchmarks on games... even on ones where the textures were in 16-bit color (so no benifit to 32 bit!) for the sole benifit of making 3dfx's faster card look worse. (ATI was particuarly bad, as well).

Actually, even when you have 16-bit source textures, the end result can look a lot better when rendered to a 32-bit framebuffer. The reason is that you don't just do a plain copy of the texture, but you typically modulate it with an interpolated lighting value and possibly apply multipass effects as well. With a 16-bit framebuffer its quite easy to start to see banding and/or dithering artefacts that wouldn't be there with a 32-bit framebuffer, regardless of the bitdepth of the source artwork.

Hrm

[Anonymous Coward]

I hadn't realized that Nvidia was responsible for hypothermia. Wow, they're more powerful than I previously thought.

Something's not quite right

[Flounder]

The whole interview feels like Clinton's non-apology speech. I'm not admitting what I did, but I'm sorry that I got caught.

Blaming outside contractors is a cheesy excuse. When you hire contractors to represent your company, then you need to verify everything that they say is in line with your company. And you need to stand behind, or directly take responsibility, for the actions of that contractor.

They at least admit that it was wrong, but they didn't exactly take responsibility. One step forward, one step back, and we're still where we started.

Compaies Should Only Offer Loaners

[LaNMaN2000]

By giving away an expensive piece of hardware in exchange for a review, companies like NVidia are using similar tactics to the record execs who paid off radio stations to play their label's songs. The fact is that those Geforce2 cards cost a few hundred dollars apiece and the banner-revenue from the reviewer's site may not even be equivalent to the value of the card.

All hardware submitted for review should be sent with pre-paid return packaging. After the company receives the hardware in return, they can ship the same unit to another reviewer. In this model, sites receive no financial incentive to review specific products, while even the smallest sites will be able to receive hardware to review. The manufacturers safe a few dollars and the sites have no ethical dillemas.

That's just great

[Moridineas]

Seriously, how nice that Derek Perez apologized. Anyone who seriously follows 3d stuff knows that Derek Perez is one of the loudest, abrasive, and derogatory. He'll be back to his usual antics within no time. He represents Nvidia's attitude, and I'm surprised that so many people at slashdot just let slide.

You don't see 3dfx pulling any crap like this. You don't see Nvidia opening their specs or giving free open source technology like FXT1 away. That's why I support 3dfx.

I honestly believe, and actions speak louder than words (well..maybe not in Derek Perez's case!), that 3dfx is a good corporation. They really care about the community.

Scott