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Truth in Advertising?
PerformanceEng wonders: "I work as an engineer for a large technology company in the U.S., and have been privy to what I find a interesting practice. It's well known that marketing data sheets often paint the best picture of a product while leaving the devil in the details. I've come to expect this, and when I am evaluating technology, I always have a skeptic's eye for claims made by the sales and marketing folks.
However, I've also witnessed our product go into test labs (usually for the purposes of running a series of tests for a 'bake off' in a trade publication). Not uncommon is the attempt to 'tune' the configuration of the device under test to perform in the best light (not unlike tuning your car to pass emissions tests). I have seen it go as far as exploiting weaknesses in the test that, if the test operator discovered, would be considered bad faith. To the other engineers: Are you aware of this kind of practice at your company? To the IT professionals: How much faith do you put in these sorts of publications and their 'bake offs'? To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
It wasn't an uncommon practice for video card makers to tweak their drivers to perform better on benchmarks.
I've also witnessed our product go into test labs (usually for the purposes of running a series of tests for a 'bake off' in a trade publication). Not uncommon is the attempt to 'tune' the configuration of the device under test to perform in the best light (not unlike tuning your car to pass emissions tests). I have seen it go as far as exploiting weaknesses in the test that, if the test operator discovered, would be considered bad faith.
:-) Seriously though, this has been the whole problem with "benchmarks" like SPEC and others that ultimately results in pissing matches between manufacturers saying "my product is faster than yours" which for 99% of the users out there means nothing. In fact, even for that 1% of us where it does make a difference, specific optimizations to ones code or algorithms typically will get you more performance. So, what it really comes down to is how productive is the product + environment + task that you are assigning to the platform.
Oh, you work for Intel then.
To answer your question of false advertising, I would say keep to the standard that most of us scientists do: Specifically, peer review and ensure that your results can be duplicated by said peers. If results cannot be duplicated, then it is false advertising.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
What about all those people on Slashdot who claim First Post but fail it? Isn't that false advertising?
I work in developing web applications. When choosing server technologies I have learned to conduct my own bake off using the application that will be deployed. Each application is unique. Comparing your custom app to a published bake off is usually an apples to oranges comparison.
The product brochure may lie or hide facts, but the product's technical details book (like the manual for Kyocera VMSE47 Phone) HAS to tell details and truth.
I always make it a practice to read the technical manual of any product i buy over the web. if the company can't provide the manual, then it isn't worth buying.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Consumer Reports is a such a respected publication because they have strict standards for the products they test. They don't accept items from the product makers, they go out into the marketplace and buy their test subjects using cash whenever possible. (Up until a while ago they even bought cars with cash, until they realized that car dealers began recognizing them as the only people who paid cash for cars, and the IRS requirement of reporting large cash transactions got in their way too.) As a result, their tests are immune to any tweaking...
It'd be nice if the tech publications could afford to do this, because at times they start to resemble the video game websites set up by kids who do it only to get prerelease copies of games for free under the guise of reviewing them. Such kids always have to write glowing reviews of everything they get because as soon as they post a negative review their stream of free stuff grinds to a halt.
Bottom line is that there's a foolproof way of preventing tampering in any review, but it costs money. Any review that involves accepting free stuff compromises the integrity from the start.
As a person who worked in the advertising business side, I can say wholeheartedly that truth in advertising is a complete misnomer. The whole concept of advertising rejects the idea of truth. I don't sound bitter do I?
Stay tuned for new sig...
Similar to the game journalism post earlier today, if you want honest impressions, you're going to get them from your buddy saying the stuff rocks/sucks than from any sort of review/preview/ad.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds.
I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags!
Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..." How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?"
[We miss you, Bill.]
What were the skies like when you were young?
This isn't just a phenomenon in the IT arena. Have a look at medical journals some time... You have to be VERY careful when putting stock in the findings of studies -- the first thing to check is who *funded* the study.
I think it's just a fact of life: everybody wants their product to be seen in the best light, and to sell well (in the case of commodities or services).
That's why Amazon.com has reader reviews, sites like epinions.com exist, and Slashdot has moderator points. It's also why there are hardware review sites -- we can't just trust the manufacturer's PR now, can we?
So, people may be inherentely biased and often untruthful, but with proper monitoring (read: community involvement), the truth will out.
To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
In the consumer audio market, that's when.
From over-unity speakers (200W watts output from a 10W wall-wart), to "better-sounding" fiber optic cable, no claim seems too outrageous or fraudulent for a great many consumer audio manufacturers.
As an engineer who loves audio, it drives me nuts to see the bullshit that is constantly perpetrated in that market.
I'm sure there are tons of slashdotters who can post examples of incredibly unprofessional and possibly fraudulent specmanship in this arena.
Life is too short to proofread.
But the fancy numbers aren't for me, they're for PHBs that like to see lots of impressive numbers -- after all, the other product has them so if this one doesn't...
Looking at computer specs lately I'm beginning to think the principal point of them is to bulk out the specs -- make it look like it has lots of features, and the actual content of the specs is irrelevant.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Sun Microsystems (SUNW) shrugged off accusations today of unfairly reporting test scores for the beta version of one of its Java compilers.
Pendragon Software yesterday said that Sun, using Pendragon's CaffeineMark benchmarking tool, inaccurately inflated the test results of the Solaris 2.6 just-in-time Java compiler by optimizing the compiler specifically for that test. Solaris is Sun's version of the Unix operating system.
Sun responded by calling such optimization standard practice.
"The idea is that you want people to optimize for the benchmark," said Brian Croll, director of marketing for Sun's Solaris products. "We'll do everything in our power to do really well on all the benchmarks we get our hands on."
A benchmark is a battery of tests that gauges the speed and performance of software running in various configurations. Several developers have created Java benchmarks; CaffeineMark, which Croll called "the best benchmark we've got," is available free off the Web.
But how much optimization is fair play? Pendragon president Ivan Phillips contended Sun inflated the test results of the Solaris 2.6 just-in-time compiler by lifting code from CaffeineMark and inserting it into the compiler.
"The logic test is contained in the 'logicatom.class' file, and almost 50 percent of that file appeared in the compiler," he said. "The probability that this code made its way there accidentally is infinitesimal."
Reusing such a large chunk of specific code risks diverting too much of the compiler's resources, resulting in lower performance once the compiler is deployed in the real world, Phillips added.
Croll denied that Sun used CaffeineMark code but said the company "optimized around it." It will be difficult to determine who is correct, given that the beta compiler in question is no longer available. Croll stressed that the compiler is designed to perform well on a benchmark because that's what determines good real-world performance.
"If certain things happen frequently in a benchmark, you want to make sure you handle them well," he said. "If it turns out the benchmark doesn't truly represent true application performance, you need to evolve the benchmark."
The charges come at a time when Sun and Microsoft are entangled in tit-for-tat lawsuits over Microsoft's use of Java in its Internet Explorer 4.0 browser.
In an October 20 press release, Sun bragged that Solaris had the "world's fastest Java performance" and ran Java applications 50 percent faster than rival operating system Windows NT. After taking issue with Sun's test results, Pendragon said it asked Sun to retract its claims and remove the compiler from its Web site.
Sun removed the entire JDK 1.1.4 for Solaris on October 29 because the beta evaluation period ended, according to Croll. The company didn't take down the press release or rescind its claims, however, and Phillips responded yesterday by publishing his accusations.
Pendragon doesn't usually double-check testers' CaffeineMark scores. But when it saw Sun's results--the Solaris compiler hit a score of 1.4 million on the "logic" test, while the previous high for that test was 22,000--the software firm decided to investigate, fearing that CaffeineMark contained a bug.
If Sun indeed took deliberate steps to skew its results, Phillips was surprised at the lack of subtlety.
"If a company really wanted to conceal what they were doing, they could do a better job," he said.
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Instantly. There is no gray area between honesty and dishonesty. You either tell the truth, or you tell a lie. Your company either attempts to subvert tests [i.e., lies], or it doesn't [i.e., does not attempt to lie]. No ambiguity exists in this case.
Your question reminds me of a question posed on the cover of a national "news" magazine in the wake of revelations that the New York Times had published falsified news reports. Their question was, to paraphrase: "Does this signal a new standard in journalism?". Of course it signaled no such thing; it only signaled that some publications, or at least reporters writing for them, were willing to be dishonest and to print lies. I wonder if the author of that question was perhaps a bit hopeful that, yes, this event did signal a relaxing of ethics?
...for about 5 years in the mid to late 90's. I started doing the testing on basic network equipment and graduated over time to oversee the testing methodology for every product comparison we ran.
I can tell you that, if the testers themselves are competent, it's a moot point. For instance, when testing server hardware by using a database application, I always insisted that the databases be identical and configured as identically as possible. Normal stumbling blocks were issues with stock disk sizes, but we always ensured that RAID configurations were as similar as possible within the realm of reason.
Testing is an art form. It requires a thorough and repeatable plan as well as a good bit of knowledge about real world usage of equipment and software (would it be realistic to enable a non-battery backed write cache on a raid controller in a database application?)
I can say that many, many vendors attempted to put one over on us. And it's entirely possible that I missed some of them, and they benefitted because of it. However, in general, professional test procedures should expose and nullify any sort of vendor tweakage of equipment or software.
Key principles for good testing:
- Set any basic configuration to manufacturer's public recommendations
- Don't let vendor representatives touch anything. If they need to send someone into the lab, allow them to recommend changes, and document all of those for later review / revocation
- If third party hardware/software is involved in a test, use the third party as a sounding board. If you're testing a layer 3 switch using streaming media, talk to the streaming media provider about realistic stream rates and usage patterns.
- If at all possible, wipe and reload vendor equipment and software. You should be looking at the setup process anyway, so that helps the test as well as helping to prevent shenanigans.
In short, good test procedures prevent, or at least mitigate, the kind of abuse in question. And, as consimers of reviews and tests, it's in all of our best interests to get educated and develop opinions about the competence, thoroughness, and honesty of any souce.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Reminds me of the strips where Wally had to impersonate the demo.
When the image got fuzzy, they tried a razor.
... when I worked for a German owned plumbing fixture manufaturer's US subsidary, we had to have all faucets certified for lead contanimation (leaching from the solder and brass compounds). As it turned out, a lot of what we were already selling in the US market would not come close to passing. The Fatherland offered to send faucets that were garanteed to pass. All we had to do was tell them what levels that they needed to meet for a particular model (has a lot to do with the length of the flow chamber).
They seemed quite upset that the units had to be pulled at random from stock. Maybe they were just to use to cheating.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Developer Quote Of The Week: "What we do is, given a benchmark, we try to do as well as we can on it, and make sure that our system is the fastest benchmark -- I mean, fastest system -- in the world." -- Brian Croll, Sun Microsystems' director of marketing for Solaris
Two weeks ago, Sun Microsystems got caught with its hand in the benchmarking cookie jar. Or did it? Depending on your point of view, Sun either grossly misrepresented the performance of its Solaris Java just-in-time compiler by fooling Pendragon Software's CaffeineMark performance test, o r Sun proved the CaffeineMark is not an acceptable measure of Java compiler performance.
For those who may have missed it, here's the background: In a Nov. 4 press release, Ivan Phillips, president of Pendragon Software, in Libertyville, Ill., a developer of software for personal digital assistants, accused Sun of engineering its new Java compiler to trick the CaffeineMark into reporting higher performance results.
When Sun's compiler detected a block of 600 bytecodes unique to the CaffeineMark (a technique known as pattern matching), the compiler bypassed data processing, and instead returned a value expected by the benchmark. This fooled the test into reporting performance results 300 times faster than the compiler would deliver in real-world use. Third-party developers subsequently validated Phillips' assertion. Interestingly, when Pendragon's engineers altered the test to appear different to Sun's compiler, the compiler's branching was short-circuited, and its performance plummeted. Java compilers under Windows 95, Windows NT, and the Mac OS delivered uniform results under both the original and altered tests.
Sun officials initially admitted no wrongdoing, and were quick to point out that optimizing software to improve benchmark scores is an accepted practice among computer technology vendors. "People are optimizing against the benchmark," says Brian Croll, Sun's director of marketing for Solaris.
Further, Croll maintained that the aberrant results indicate a fundamental flaw in Pendragon's benchmark suite, and do not represent any impropriety by Sun. "I don't know how valid the [CaffeineMark] is," Croll said. Then last week, during a day-long media briefing at Sun's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Sun officials updated their explanation of events. SunSoft president Janpieter Scheerder said the company was not trying "to do anything malicious;" rather, Sun engineers simply "optimized too much."
A Sun spokesperson at the event blamed the incident on human error, and said an engineering prototype somehow found its way through Sun's rigorous (you would think) development and quality assurance processes, and onto the Web, with documentation, and overblown press release in tow.
What if Pendragon officials had not discovered Sun's alleged trickery? What if Sun engineers tweaked their compiler to only improve its score 10-fold, instead of the eye-popping 300-fold increase that flagged Pendragon officials?
Sun's PR machine had already posted a press release, in which they touted their "new Web-enhanced Solaris operating environment" as delivering "the world's fastest Java technology performance." The release also claimed Solaris' compiler was 50% faster than the best Windows NT score, and cited the CaffeineMark as proof.
If Pendragon officials had not discovered the ruse, Sun's formidable sales and marketing machine would now be steam-rolling press and IT decision-makers alike, trumpeting Solaris' performance advantage over Microsoft's Window s NT, waving Sun's illicitly obtained CaffeineMark results as evidence in hand.
"Any benchmark, no matter what its original purpose, is subject to use as 'benchmarketing,'" says Larry Gray, board member of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), in Manassas, Va., a consortium that administers many well- known benchmarks. "I'd guess may
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Absolutely none, I rely solely on product packaging.
Seriously though, I hold the belief that all sales and marketing folk are born liars and will never change. I purchase solely on word of mouth (from people I trust) and my past experience with a particular brand/manufacturer. I am the person that advertisers hate because I sit in front of the TV and explain to my wife exactly which mind fucts the advertiser is utilizing. Sales and Marketing (S&M how ironic) folk are beneath lawyers, politicians and criminals in my book.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
You must be new. I've been working for in high-tech for about 20 years now for various companies, and I would not want my products to be evaluated on a level playing field. I will put in any tweak necessary to win a comparison. This is not kindergarten...fair is nice, but I know my competitors are doing the same thing. And the old college try does not pay a very good Christmas bonus.
In the pay per click world of google adwords (those text ads you see when you search) I advertise a free service. But since this free service is bundled with other nonfree services I put the prices on the ad itself.
So although they may be looking for something free, I don't pay for the click unless they know they're going to pay *something*, the visitor is better informed, and I get a higher conversion rate from the qualified traffic.
So although this may not be on the exact topic of yours, I submit that honesty in advertising works, especially when you pay for performance.
You're comparing how products perform under a specific test that you have devised. (which ideally, is similar to your production environment).
Tuning can have a dramatic difference in performance, and unless you're familiar with all of the products involved, it's impossible to get the best performance out of each one.
The original poster is talking about where one of the systems has been modified so it is not a default install, and specifically customized before being sent to the testor, so that they will perform better. (like with ATI's Quake 'optimization').
As another example, there were some folks trying to get higher rankings in SETI@home, who would return bogus results -- as that was faster than actually performing the calculations. If someone knows that the results won't be checked for accuracy (or can't), and only for time, they can boost their rankings dramatically.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Tweaking Java test?: Sun Microsystems has been accused of manipulating Java benchmark software and using the results to state that its Solaris "runs Java applications 50 percent faster than Windows NT." Pendragon Software, maker of the benchmark software CaffeineMark, has put out a press release that claims Sun found a way to cheat on the benchmark tests, and then advertised the bogus scores. Sun has since removed the Java compiler from its download page, Pendragon says, but the original press release remains on the Sun site.
Sun admits Java testing error
Sun Microsystems (SUNW) today conceded errors in the results of recent tests involving its Java programming language.
The company erred in not admitting that it matched code from a Java benchmark tool for one of its own Java compilers, Sun Software president Janpieter Scheerder said today. A benchmark is a battery of tests that measures the speed and performance of software running in various configurations.
Kicking off the "Inside Sun Software Day," Scheerder began his remarks with a mea culpa for Sun's actions, revealed last week in a report by CNET's NEWS.COM. At that time, Pendragon Software, makers of the CaffeineMark Java benchmark test, accused Sun of taking code from the CaffeineMark software and adding it to a beta version of the Solaris 2.6 Java just-in-time compiler. CaffeineMark is one of several developers that have created Java benchmarks.
Last week, Brian Croll--director of product marketing for Solaris, Sun's flavor of the Unix operating system--denied that Sun lifted the code. Today, however, Scheerder made it clear that Sun had made a big mistake.
"Nobody was trying to do anything malicious," Scheerder said. "We just optimized [the Solaris Java compiler] too much."
A Sun public relations manager called the episode a "big-time organizational breakdown" in which an engineering prototype that was never meant to go public was posted on the Web with all attendant documentation, along with a press release that touted the software's performance. Sun has also posted an explanation on its Web site.
"Sun committed an unintentional error when we published Java performance numbers for an engineering prototype that included code that specifically looked for a piece of code in the Caffeinemark 3.0 benchmark," according to a company statement.
In a release dated October 20, Sun bragged that, according to the CaffeineMark 3.0 test, Solaris 2.6 ran Java applications 50 percent faster than Windows NT. But it neglected to say that it had set the compiler to look specifically for a chunk of code from CaffeineMark. Reusing such a large chunk of specific code risks diverting too much of the compiler's resources, resulting in lower performance once the compiler is deployed in the real world, said Ivan Phillips, president of Pendragon.
After taking issue with Sun's test results, Phillips said he asked Sun to retract its claims and remove the compiler from its Web site. As of last week, Sun had not retracted its claims, so Phillips went public with his accusations.
Scheerder stressed today that the compiler, which was part of the Solaris 2.6 Java Development Kit 1.1.4 beta, was not shipping product. The company pulled it from its Web site soon after Phillips contacted them last month.
The news comes four days before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) decides if Sun is qualified to be the official submitter of Java technology if and when Java becomes an international standard.
The official submitter has the responsibility to gather industry consensus and present it to the ISO's technical committee for consideration. There is some concern that Sun, which owns Java, might not be a neutral submitter. So far, 11 countries have voted yes on Sun's bid and one country--the United States--has voted no. A total of 27 countries are scheduled to vote by Friday.
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What are you, a Sharper Image salesman or something?
You probably shouldn't click this.
Marketing materials do not set out the faults of the product. This is not the role of marketing. Marketing aims to connect buyers to sellers. Providing information about faults does not help to make that connection. Also, many of the "tests" cited by marketers are labeled with titles such as, "Customer Success Story". This should be a clue that the material will not detail unsuccessful characteristics of the product.
Finally, marketers in most companies are not technical experts. They have to rely on the information provided by engineers and programmers. Many companies avoid ever telling the marketing department anything negative. As a result, in many cases, marketers aren't lying when they make claims -- they're explaining what they were told. Many of these marketers, especially the ones writing up collateral, are junior, new to the company, or even working on contract, so they don't have the depth of knowledge to tell that they've been given misleading information. Other people in the company sometimes lie to the marketers. It's not always black and white. (Not that all marketers tell the truth, of course.)
-- SYS 64738 --
And you know who else hates that type of benchmarking whoring? Linus Torvalds, that's who! Linus would never stoop to such a thing, because Linus is a great guy!
And you know who else would never do it? Apple Computer, the people who make the greatest computers in the world! They would never stoop to rigging benchmarks!
Or karma whoring.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Truthful Advetising is an oxymoron.
we had a bake-off on one of our products...i was called in when the results didnt meet what management were expecting. after adding cpus(!) to the product under test (without the knowledge of the tester) we finally got a result which beat our competition. this was in 2001. i was later first on the chopping block in 2002 after i noted at a meeting that we should not try to publicize the results too much since it might backfire. the VP who canned me noted that if we got results we should publicize them as much as possible and i was an "impediment to future marketing capaigns"). i got an above average severance package tho so i guess they paid me off to leave quietly. ironically HP's results got beaten by IBM which simply threw money at the problem 4 months later and won.
In my experience, the lies don't stop with the advertising. My bosses are both salesmen. The only thing they do at the small company that I work at is sell our software, and they'll tell anyone whatever it is they want to hear so that they'll buy it. But I've noticed that this is definately not the end of their dishonesty. They treat their staff, me included, just like a buyer. They promise us stuff like compensation for working weekends, etc, but then just like our software, they fail to deliver.
I have a huge problem with salespeople and advertisements specifically because of my bosses. IMHO everyone who works in sales is nothing but a glorified 419 scam artist. Politics really aren't any different either.
That is why I like open source so much. Almost everything is free, so there's no reason to lie.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
I work in the forklift truck industry and understandably the advertising there revolves around saving storage space, increasing efficiency per handling transaction which both in turn saves money.
The upshot of all of this is that when it comes to it, a prospective customer will usually say "prove it" and you well, have to. I for one took great pride in being part of the tech/development/demonstration team in that I had a say on what went into the sales literature as I'd often be the one proving it...
Needless to say, as it was MY arse on the line, I managed to complete demonstrations without any screw-ups.
More often we become aware of it when the competitor does it.
About 20 years ago there were a series of "shootouts" between Novell, Microsoft, and 3COM, to see which network OS was faster. That was when I was literated to the fact that tweaking parameters can make a HUGE difference in test results. If you have even more control, you can even tweak the tests. We used to have to supply "debunking" documents that explained how the competing companies got the results they published. Sometimes it was hard to reproduce their numbers, even tweaking our own sofware in the worst ways.
These days a lot of journalists try to maintain a neutral position. They go to great lengths to be fair, and document even tiny things that might give one product a slight edge over another. It gives them more credibility to those of us that have been through these product wars.If companies can get away with spouting total bollocks (first 64 bit desktop anyone - my Mesh Alpha (from a consumer desktop computing company) is obviously now very valuable since it never existed?) and not get fined, what incentive do they have for telling the truth?
Lies sell, since most people are stupid and believe whatever they are told.
Beep beep.
Isn't that like.....
Sexual freedom in Saudi Arabia
Fiscal accountability in corporate America
Bug-free programming in Microsoft products...
Intelligence and integrity in GWB?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Your an Engineer?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Yes, I've seen this sort of thing at other places I work. It's inherently dishonest. It's justified via a) claiming that it'll help sales (dubious), and b) claiming that everybody knows that they're bullshit anyways. Note that the two justifications are mutually exclusive. Doesn't stop them from using them though.
No, I trust none of these "bakeoffs". Or any other IT advertising for that matter. There isn't a single mainstream IT rag which is even marginally trustworthy. Go ahead and, instead of reading just the bakeoff that you're looking for, read an article about something you already know about (through hands-on experience with all the primary alternatives, including a FOSS alternative if it's software and there is a FOSS alternative). Note how much stuff they get wrong, how shallow the article is, and how it almost reads like an advertisement. The same is true for cars too, largely, at least from what I've read. I can't comment on other industries since I'm not particularly familiar with their trade press. Note, however, that I still don't trust them at all - I expect they're just as bad. It's just that I don't make enough decisions relating to those industries' products to warrant reading the trade press - instead I go to the store and carefully examine the alternatives.
This sort of thing crossed the line into fake advertising at least a decade ago. Companies routinely make absurd claims and get away with it. There's just no political interest in enforcing it. At best they'll include fine print in their ad. If it's a print ad, maybe you'll be able to read it. It's been a while since I've seen an ad with fine print whose fine print didn't take up at least 10 lines of extremely small type. Television ads are a joke, it's impossible to read the fine print at broadcast resolution, regardless of the size of your TV, and it typically takes up a whole screen.
What can we do about it? Elect governments with some spine. These sorts of advertisements will continue to be successful so long as people are poorly-educated, and people will continue to be poorly-educated unless there is a strong collective agreement in place that says "yes, everybody needs some minimum level of education, otherwise they're prone to manipulation and our society is controlled by those who control the media or the other forms of information dissemination." It's funny, isn't it, how political campaigns in the US almost exclusively take the form of commercials? (Except for the "debates", which are a joke to everybody outside the country.)
Note that when the US was founded, everybody who advocated democracy made sure to point out that the requirements for democracy included an educated public, free speech, and free press. People have totally forgotten the education bit and the press bit. (A government-controlled press is no more effective at disseminating important information than a press controlled by an aristocracy - corporate or otherwise.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I don't blame companies for acting this way, as it is a sales force's job to sell. I just ignore all of these white papers. I do however pay a great deal of attention to what companies like Gartner say about various products. They are paid by us (the consumers) as opposed to the producer and are not quite as susceptible to false analysis.
When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
...
When you get caught
When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?
It's quite a simple answer - misleading or misrepresenting anything whasoever is falsehood. There's not really any grey area, proposing the existence of such is a socially acceptable way of making the lie pallatable or discusable.
People generally have the common sense to know themselves if they're lying or not, but mainly prefer to not worry about it. The problem is that we live in a societies based on and that thrives on lies. Liars often win in a consumerist culture, because lies are usually selling people their own dumb desires right back to them.
The real issue is whether it is actually acceptable to lie. All politicians without exception lie and muddy the water, advertisers and PR people lie so much perhaps they don't even notice anymore. The alternative is too unpalatable to a mindless and uneducated society who want everyone to do their dirty work for them,
Most Americans would rather think that their army for instance is well equipped with modern and state of the art equipment. We like to think that our governments care about every soldier as we do our friends and family. Regardless of who's in power - the government is not a benevolent father who loves each and every one of us and watches down on us like a proud patriarch.
The reality is that dumb kids lives are cheaper than good equipment (regardless of who you vote for and who's in power). Another dead kid in Iraq isn't really top priority, unlike keeping the Whitehouse furniture and art restored. People don't like to admit that some dumb grunt isn't worth as much as a nice piece of Louis XIV furniture, so people pretend to care when in fact they don't terribly much.
The holy grail of technology is no different - the utopia of consumerist culture is just to tempting to refuse new technology for it's own sake. Nobody wants to know that the latest thing isn't all that good - hell most people don't really have an actual use for their computers as they're lives and work are usually fairly inconquential. We want to eat the dream of technology and time saving devices even though deep down we know that it's all make believe, and we don't really have anything to do with all our saved spare time anyway.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Another one: just look at the old Dhrystone benchmark and all of the over-the-top "optimizations" that were used to get better compiler/processor results. The SPEC organization, created in a direct attempt to deal with this very kind of problem, still must update its bendhmarks regularly in order to deal with loopholes (and changing technology in general). A good example was when a particular benchmark (matrix300; ref is 2/3 the way down) was defeated because it took no input. That made it possible in principle to collapse the entire program to a constant, and at some point, somebody did. That last link also gives a good description of why initially good benchmarks go stale.
And while those two examples are old enough to show that this has been going on a long time, there are plenty of examples far older.
Benchmarking has always been an arms race.
This goes double for overclockers. I only bought one motherboard before I realized that reviews didn't hold up as well as the collective experiences of techies (this is especially important for overclocking results). Forum posts are direct links to specific experience and knowledge gleaned from those experiences, like how you shouldn't ever expect a Tiger Direct rebate. Reviews never stress the products to my liking - you need clumsy people and morons to do that for ya. Sometimes they can also tell you the step in the (dis)assembly that was missing from the manual. I guess that black heatsink gunk on the standard Intel HS can get really stuck to the processor. Stuck enough to rip the processor out of the socket with the pins still in the socket. Yeah, don't use intel thermal gunk. If you must, apply heat to remove. See? You learned something on a forum.
there's three kinds of prevarication: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
-Tom Duff
Speaking as someone who also benchtests as part of what I do for a living, I'd like to add a few more points.
:)
Test labs are useful for customers without the clout to engage vendors directly. Buying an $80 vid card ain't going to get you any attention from vendors, distributors or even sales outlets.
When you step up the ladder a few rungs though, things can get interesting.
For example, your grant has come thorough and you're about to assemble a cluster to run your nasty embarassingly parallel app. Now you can do some interesting things!
Chances are someone, somewhere is doing something vaguely similar already. Check the Net! Bound to be a mail list on a related topic. Ask a few loaded questions
For the chance of a big sale most vendors will lend you evaluation kit. When you know what sort of kit you'd like run - don't be shy... ask! Hardware, software, the whole shabang.
The best test is your application. Science, commercial whatever. SPECflopbongotatas with HT enabled switching fabrics don't mean squat! Cmme up with a good canned scenario for your app and benchmark with that. Wall clock time often sufficies as the measurable.
Things to consider with this approach. A lot of fuss is made about compiler flavours and "standardised" optimisation switches. Forget it. Go for the *most* optimised flavour you can muster. It's your app and the only thing that matters is the clock (for the sake of this example).
A nice little benefit from this approach is that it's often OK to let the vendors into the sandpit after you've played hard. Let them go crazy! Tweak drivers, compilers switches, CPU revisions etc etc. Doesn't matter (to a large extent) what they do. Your app is the reason you're doing this!!
Word to the wise though, don't share results from other tests until all vendors are finished. Sure you can let them know there are others but don't say who. This saves them from going into FUD-mode at this point. They'll do enough of that later when they're unsuccessful =)
Remember, you're in the cumfy chair. Use the power while you're got it (alas, it fades so quickly). The fun soon stops and you'll soon be grinding your new toy into the ground.
Enjoy.
Stevo
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
My current employer does it. We have to. When we test our product to give marketing their numbers for publication, we have to make certain assumptions for the variables. Want to know how fast a Porsche goes? Straight line or curvy road? How curvy? Oh, straight then. Windy or calm? Sea-level or alpine desert?
There's no equivalence between marketing numbers and YOUR reality because the variables change. So in a bake off you have to try tuning for the customer's variables. And when you do, you find that the performance falls off because, duh, marketing published the optimized numbers. That's not deception, but a common denominator with the competition.
Think about it. When was the last time the "how fast" question was answered with worst case numbers? You get best case, always.
Then you bake off and it sucks.
Then if the vendor has a good Sales Engineer and Support team, they'll tune it for your variables and get the performance where you'll make a buy.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
This is the reason I completely ignore benchmarks and spec-tests. I go straight for the heart of the matter: reviews by users. Go to Google and type in Any Product review, and you'll get your fair share of honest reviews and feedback.
When forty nine out of fifty reviews say something is a piece of crap, then you know two things:
1) It's a piece of crap
2) The fiftieth reviewer is the same guy who faked up the benchmark posting under a pseudonym.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Consumer Reports is an interesting case. I like their reviews in the sense that they *are* unbiased by ads and the rest as you have noted. Unfortunately, CR reviews so many product categories that they are not particularly well informed about many of the technologies involved. Their car reviews, for example, weigh reliability so high that someone with a preference for performance might not get much out of their reviews. Their computer reviews are similarly shallow, coming from a middle-of-the-road user standpoint. Interesting and informative, yes, but perhaps not very meaningful for a prospective geek user. It would be great, IMHO, if there were a magazine with the neutrality and consumer-focus of CR but with a more technical bent and a more limited scope of products covered. Say, for example, only cars, only electronics, etc.
Even if someone came up with a pair of headphones that had an S/PDIF or AES/EBU interface, it would still have to have a DAC and an analog transducer, because my ears are not digital nor will they ever be.
Actually, you could theoretically make actual digital headphones if you could get a solenoid to move back and forth at a few GHz (for decent fidelity). Then you'd probably need to place some sort of acoustic low pass filter between the transducer and your ears* but it is possible.
To be fair, I didn't really think you could have "digital" headphones either, until you said it couldn't be done. Then I had to ask myself "Is that really true?"
* To some extent our senses act as "low pass filters" by virture of their response time. They sort of integrate incident power over a time period. A sort of human "time constant".
Life is too short to proofread.
It was chip supplier in question was IIT (Integrated Information Technologies), they later dropped out of the graphics (and math co-processor business) and retargeted themselves at video, becoming 8X8. Later they evolved from video oriented at videophones to move into VoIP.
The 2D ZD WinBench had a string "The quick brown fox..." it rendered in different colors and sizes using the Windows GDI, and the IIT BIOS embedded it. I believe the parts were still ISA based, so embedded the string in a ROM on the card would actually offer more bandwidth than passing it over the ISA bus did.
This post got me thinking of a movie from the early 90's (?) called Crazy People. An advertising executive decides to write advertisements truthfully. Really quite funny...The movie was so far from reality though, it was sad.
One of my many jobs is participating in vendor selection for my company ([sarcasm]it's a beautiful committee process...[/sarcasm]).
Last year we had a certain computer company (IANAL, so the name is intentionally missing) come in and give a sales presentation on why we should dump our existing vendor and go with them.
For the most part, they had our existing vendor beat from a price point. But we had been burned by previous computer vendors...made all of the mistakes...and knew exactly what we wanted (and, frankly, had made our existing vendor comply with our requirements over the period of 4 years that we dealt with them)
We image all of our PCs, we have specialized software for ensuring that everything is up to a baseline and that our environment is as predictable as possible. We needed hardware that would be easily inventoried, and *consistent, long-term, globally available configurations.* There were several other requirements we laid out and prior to the "sales pitch" meeting, we supplied this vendor with these "absolute requirements."
Of course, we received a 45 minute long power point presentation that basically regurgitated back to us everything we told them were our requirements. (lesson learned: it's better not to give the marketing guys the game plan. They tend to be more honest when they don't have time to power-point the lies and instead have to provide answers off-the-cuff).
It's a running joke on our team because if we took the entire content of their presentation and crossed out every word in each bullet point that represented some sort of "promise", we'd be left with about four words repeated over and over for 20 slides..."The" "a" "and" and "but".
I don't trust *anything* from any marketing or sales rep. After testing this vendor's products and talking to friends of mine who's companies had used this vendor in the past, we knew they weren't going to live up to their promises.
From day one, the information they gave us about getting loaner PCs for testing was sold to us as "far more flexible" than it turned out to be, and this poor customer service was going on *while* we were evaluating this company to determine if we should sign the contract!
Unfortunately, as the story goes, our opinions were appreciated, but the decision to choose this company was made anyway.
Myself and another coworker were noted as objecting to the switch in our final meeting minutes. Of course, that meant nothing except for a future "I told you so." And there was nobody left to say "I told you so" to because in the end, we were the ones left having to compensate for these broken promises.
Never forget: Caveat Emptor.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
Actually, you're not far from describing a digital amplifier (such as Bel Canto and Spectron).
These amps generate a high frequency digital signal, which is pulse width modulated. Ordinary transducers cannot reproduce individual pulses due their inertia, but they do get "nudged" a little by each pulse. In affect, the transducer will average the signal out, converting the high frequency digital signal into a low frequency analog one -- the audio.