Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships

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."

Comments

One of the first cases

[Joceyln Parfitt]

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.

Re:One of the first cases

[oferic]

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
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT

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?

Infinium a hardware vendor?

[Operating Thetan]

Isn't the whole point of the lawsuit that they aren't?

Many Other Riscs for Website Owners

[wehe]

I have never got a request from a hardware manufacturer to beautify anything related to them at TuxMobil - Linux On Mobile Computers. Actually laptop manufacturers do not seem to care about Linux users. But there are other caveats. As discussed at SlashDot I had severe trademark trouble with the former project name MobiliX. 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...

[ricochet81]

How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table

"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."

Brilliant! One that works

[Interruach]

1) Ad revenue created by page hits
2) Post non-story to slashdot
3) PROFIT!!!

Re:Google not a validation of data

[ScrewMaster]

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.