The marketing deals with hardware manufacturers can't become their main source of revenue though. They want to sell as many retail boxes as they can along with the bundled-with-HW stuff that they probably make much less on.
Plus, just imagine if a game came out that required even a 2 GHz P4 equivalent. Think of all the parents who would be angrily returning the games when they didn't run on the PC they just bought a year ago, and junior isn't old enough to know about system requirements yet.
Sure, games have a large market with the high-end users, but selling exclusively to that market probably wouldn't be the wisest policy.
It seems that almost everyone is writing as if Intel is adopting an AMD-like system, where they replace MHz with some number. This is not the case. The numbering system will be like model numbers, and the clock speed will still be there. This doesn't replace clock speed as a measurement.
Instead, Intel's going to take something like "800 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache" and make that a number. Of course the higher numbers will be those that should perform better, but that's always how it is with model numbers.
In my opinion this can only be a good thing, because instead of having to know the difference between P4 A/B/C/E, instead there'll be a number that encapsulates the non-clock speed related statistics.
In any case, these numbers are not intended to compare Intel chips to other manufacturers, rather to allow the different P4s running at 3.2 GHz apart (for example).
Many of the comments here are wondering how exactly this happened.
From what I've read and seen on the news, it seems that people inside the DND were sending false invoices. These invoices were met with billings by HP and subsequent payments from the DND.
Basically, the government believes that HP either knew about the false invoices or should have known about them, because they were in fact billings for work that never happened. If HP is really completely innocent and nobody knew, it can still be considered as wrong, because they were sending bills for nothing.
In any case, basically their findings were that DivX and WMV are about the same quality, with the Quicktime codecs significantly worse in many tests. Encoding speed was the reverse, with Quicktime being faster. But from reading other comments, there are more flaws with this article...
Modded as funny, but this is how it works in Canada right now. Music for personal use can be freely downloaded, just as it could be freely copied from a borrowed CD before MP3s came along.
You're right, but Nintendo itself should have the same kind of response. When I see the name Nintendo, I know it has to do with a game system of some sort (in the context of recent history anyway). When I see the name Sony, it could be any number of things.
As for the handheld, that might also have a lot to do with simple lack of good competition. Look at how long the original Game Boy survived unchanged... Game Gear was ok, but larger and pretty power hungry, from what I remember. It's been dead for a number of years now, and there hasn't been anything to really step up to fill its place.
OK, I think I've misunderstood what people meant by "mushy" keyboards then. I was thinking more that mushy keyboards were just the flatter variety where the keys don't press down as far.
I guess the only thing I still don't agree with is that the audible bit has to be so loud... I have no problem hearing myself type even though it's way quieter by comparison. I don't know enough about biology to know which form of feedback gets to the brain first.
One thing I noticed when living in Europe for a while is that people generally didn't give X-box too much of a chance, and Gamecube was very much behind that. Sony must have done a really really good job with the Playstation, because their name recognition was far beyond anyone elses. If one so much as mentioned a gaming console, people would assume it's a Playstation. It's kind of surprising when one considers that Nintendo still has dominance over the handheld market there, yet is very far behind with the GC.
This really isn't that far out a prediction, given that the current console battle was won by Playstation 2 despite that fact that it was (IMHO) the weakest of the three.
Basically I see Microsoft as being the one with something to lose. Nintendo is by all accounts quite happy to sell fewer than the rest of them but turn a tidy profit doing so, while putting out the high quality first-party games they've always done. Of course, the fact that they're still killing in the handheld market probably helps the bottom line...
Why should a user have to know where a file is located on a disk? Or how to install updates? Or how to uninstall undesired programs? When software truly becomes easy to use, all of that stuff should be handled automatically by the OS. A user should be able to organize their files however they damn well please, regardless of how the OS treats the files on the backend. Updates should just silently install automatically, and not require a reboot (the most annoying thing about MS patches IMHO). And undesired programs should never get there in the first place, because the OS should properly explain things to the user whenever something is trying to install itself.
A full disk is something I would consider to be a very very basic problem. It's something that anyone can understand. The data on the computer takes space, and the space available to the computer is finite. A sufficiently advanced OS would simply inform the user of this and give them advice as to what files or programs to remove to free up more space.
Yes, right now, any user needs to know things about how a computer works, or they won't get very far. But this shouldn't be the case! There should be an OS that abstracts everything down to the simplest possible terms. A user shouldn't even have to know what a file or directory is, because the OS should handle all of that automatically.
Now, I'm also going to comment on your car analogy. I see the car as being an excellent abstraction. It is really quite simple to operate: press one pedal to go faster, a different pedal to go slower, a wheel controls which direction it goes in, and the rest is all bonus. Manual gear shifting adds some complexity, but people who get that know what they're doing. What could be seen as an unwieldly number of extra gadgets (turning signals, headlights, wipers, mirrors, climate controls, stereo, etc.) are all nicely controllable without having to search for them after a short adjustment period.
Now, let's think about users of cars. How many of them actually think about or care that their engine is running hot? That their brakes need servicing? More importantly, why should someone care about that? Anything important should be either 1) told to the user by a warning light or 2) maintained through regular maintenance so that it never becomes a problem in the first place. You are really mixing simple things with complicated things... Nobody in their right mind would call it a "long window thing the steering wheel is hooked under", but plenty wouldn't recognize if the engine is running hot.
This comes up whenever keyboards are mentioned on/., but I don't get it.
I'm not an old man, but I've used both the clicky keyboards and the mushy keyboards. To this day I can not figure out what the positive thing is to the clicky keyboards. Are most mushy keyboards poorly made or something, because I never have problems pressing keys and having them not do anything, unless I try really really hard to do it (i.e. press lightly on the corner of a wider key).
People mention tactile feedback... well, my mushy keyboard gives me enough feedback to know if I've pressed something or not. I would think that/. geeks would avoid manual labour like the plague and still have sensitive nerves in their fingers as well.
Well, as others have said, if your hardware is ok and Windows is configured correctly, you won't have a lot of OS-based crashes. Software is of course another matter...
But I'd like to point out the business end of it too. When I worked in an IT department, by far the majority of problems with documents and databases were just people deleting stuff that they shouldn't have. This is a problem that doesn't go away by switching to another OS, especially if it's something they have never used before.
As for viruses, anybody who cares about that has a virus scanner set up on automatic update, and businesses should all have a scanner on their mail too. That deals with almost every chance of infection.
Speaking personally, Windows only fails for me when some non-MS drivers or software screw over the operating system. I've had trouble especially with Logitech's Bluetooth drivers... if something goes wrong during the installation, it basically hoses it until the OS is reinstalled. Which is easily done in an hour or two back to the way I have it configured now with system state backups.
Longhorn is still a long way from the beta stages, so I don't think this really works as an analogy...
I would guess that for the beta they try to put out the system that is there best candidate for actual release... in other words, they would turn off much of the extra debugging and try to get results from people running the system as it should be run.
The other thing is, MS is packing a lot more into this release, as evidenced by the release schedule. Keep in mind that IE hasn't had a major revision since XP either, so there are probably a ton of changes there as well. And I'm sure MS is testing a bunch of features that aren't necessarily decided on just yet.
Sure, it's possible the commit charge could be that high. But it is very likely not going to be, because even MS can't get away with making something that bloated. What corporations are going to migrate to Longhorn if all of their machines that are current now can't even fit the OS into main memory?
Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but at some point problem solving comes into the picture, right?
Like, I generally don't remember formulas until I've used them many many times. So generally when I'm doing schoolwork, I have the textbook or notes there to refer to. But once I've got the formulas and given data written down, I have to figure out where to go from there. Sure, sometimes it is recognition that this matches the form of something that came before, but usually not, because we're usually learning new stuff. So at this point it's thinking of different approaches to the problem, what mathematical rules to use, etc.
Similarly, when I'm programming, I always need a reference guide handy to remember syntax. But I always have to think about how I'm going to implement an algorithm, without necessarily drawing on past occurances.
Of course someone with good memory has a head start on everyone else. But it really depends on what you think of as intelligence.
In regards to your example, I think we need to assume a certain baseline memory level to start from. But understanding the concepts of calculus is more about understanding the concept of a limit than remembering how to do the problems.
Yes, this is mainly benefiting MS right now, but I see this as only a positive thing.
Suppose the patent was upheld and MS had to make changes to IE and pay damages. What was to stop the guy from going after the other browsers once he felt his bank account was getting a bit too low? If Microsoft weren't able to stop the patent, how would some of the other browser makers put up a fight?
The other thing is that this wasn't just MS fighting this patent, the W3C was involved as well, and all of the major players met to discuss the issue last year. I look at this as a victory for sensible thinking, not as a victory for Microsoft.
Yeah, I didn't consider that though, I was actually thinking about educated users as well:)
The Windows mentality... no problem can't be solved by throwing more resources at it, and if my computer gets slower over time, it must be getting more obsolete.
From a geek "my pod's bigger than your pod", point of view, this might make some sense.
And from a non-geek point of view, the smaller and lighter model is probably the one with the highest "wow, cool" factor.
It's kind of like tablet PCs... One day one of my profs came in with one to use for presenting his slides. It was definitely the most a prof has ever been mobbed at the end of a lecture:) Just because it's got that coolness factor, it doesn't matter that it doesn't compete performance-wise with ultra light weight laptops.
I'm sure this kind of image thing influences the success of the iPod as well. That is perhaps something that doesn't parallel to tablet PCs so well though:)
I think it's just a case that RAM became so cheap that people were going to stock up on it anyway. Even without bloated programs, having more RAM is an advantage, since one can just run more things at the same time.
That said, programs certainly became more bloated with more RAM available, simply because they would not have been allowed to become bloated otherwise.
If I move into the rough neighbourhood, I'm not going to be able to stop the bullets just by being well educated. However, I can stop all of these viruses from infecting my computer by simply not opening executable mail attachments. With a very small bit of extra effort, I can keep my copy of Windows up to date as well, which should prevent against any of the attacks that don't rely on user stupidity.
The thing is, your initial argument is that it can be stupid to release a game when there are too many of another game around... Then you switch it around and say that LA would be stupid to release a game in a 'dead' market. Basically you're trying to compare a market with heavy competition to a market with lower demand.
Personally, I think that this is a mistake, because the reactions I've seen at all the gaming sites I've visited today have been disbelief, disappointment, outrage, or something in between. There were a heck of a lot of people who knew about this game and were intending to give LucasArts their money for it.
Really, I think the attitude in general is that people are ready for PC adventure games again. There are many many people who remember the really good LucasArts and Sierra games of old, and are starting to get bored with the FPS and RPG games. It'll be high time for a comeback soon, and Sam and Max certainly have good name recognition.
You are exactly right. I was working in local IT support and development last year... all of the new laptops they've bought since the IBM P4 laptops came out have been faster than all of the servers save one. And adding up the disk space on all the laptops and desktops in the building would dwarf the total size in our server room.
The one server that was more powerful was a terminal server that 20-30 users ran on while in the office. This is actually rather on-topic, because it was a very cost-effective way of doing things. All of the employees had laptops for working at home, and having a terminal server with lots of dumb terminals was a cost-effective way to give them a higher performance machine while in the office. And since they were all getting Centrino notebooks, they were happier using their laptops as laptops as well, without having the need to use it as a desktop.
Then they should not have done an memory intensive and disk intensive benchmark like a database, now should they?
I think the point that they were trying to make was that Opteron performs much better than Xeon on memory regardless of the speeds. This is the whole reason why Opteron wins the benchmark, and this is made VERY clear in the article. They have published this information on Xeon's memory bottleneck many times.
I realize that what I wrote can be seen as meaning that the memory is irrevelant... I realize that it is not. However, using different memory in such a test brings in other variables, like memory timings.
By using the same memory on both architectures, they prove without a doubt that Opteron has a better memory architecture than Xeon. Had they used faster memory on the Opteron, the Opteron would have won, but it wouldn't be as clear whether it was because of the faster memory or the faster memory architecture.
RTFA. Anandtech did not "choose" a benchmark for this test, they developed two themselves based on real applications. The average-load test ran queries on their forum system, and the high-load test ran an enterprise system in use by an anonymous company.
As for them not knowing anything about computer architecture, you should read some of the articles that have been put up on Anandtech when new CPUs and GPUs have come out. They go into very good detail about exactly how the chips are working, and as a computer engineering major I can say that very little of it is flawed information.
I know that some review sites are as you describe, but I do not believe Anandtech to be among that group. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
The marketing deals with hardware manufacturers can't become their main source of revenue though. They want to sell as many retail boxes as they can along with the bundled-with-HW stuff that they probably make much less on.
Plus, just imagine if a game came out that required even a 2 GHz P4 equivalent. Think of all the parents who would be angrily returning the games when they didn't run on the PC they just bought a year ago, and junior isn't old enough to know about system requirements yet.
Sure, games have a large market with the high-end users, but selling exclusively to that market probably wouldn't be the wisest policy.
It seems that almost everyone is writing as if Intel is adopting an AMD-like system, where they replace MHz with some number. This is not the case. The numbering system will be like model numbers, and the clock speed will still be there. This doesn't replace clock speed as a measurement.
Instead, Intel's going to take something like "800 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache" and make that a number. Of course the higher numbers will be those that should perform better, but that's always how it is with model numbers.
In my opinion this can only be a good thing, because instead of having to know the difference between P4 A/B/C/E, instead there'll be a number that encapsulates the non-clock speed related statistics.
In any case, these numbers are not intended to compare Intel chips to other manufacturers, rather to allow the different P4s running at 3.2 GHz apart (for example).
Many of the comments here are wondering how exactly this happened.
From what I've read and seen on the news, it seems that people inside the DND were sending false invoices. These invoices were met with billings by HP and subsequent payments from the DND.
Basically, the government believes that HP either knew about the false invoices or should have known about them, because they were in fact billings for work that never happened. If HP is really completely innocent and nobody knew, it can still be considered as wrong, because they were sending bills for nothing.
From the summary for Quicktime MPEG-4:
Pros: Inexpensive, fast encoding speed, decent image quality
Cons: Horrible image quality
In any case, basically their findings were that DivX and WMV are about the same quality, with the Quicktime codecs significantly worse in many tests. Encoding speed was the reverse, with Quicktime being faster. But from reading other comments, there are more flaws with this article...
Modded as funny, but this is how it works in Canada right now. Music for personal use can be freely downloaded, just as it could be freely copied from a borrowed CD before MP3s came along.
You call that sane? It looks more like a compromise that satisfies nobody to me.
It satisfies me just fine, since I can listen to just about anything I want, and I don't buy blank media either.
You're right, but Nintendo itself should have the same kind of response. When I see the name Nintendo, I know it has to do with a game system of some sort (in the context of recent history anyway). When I see the name Sony, it could be any number of things.
As for the handheld, that might also have a lot to do with simple lack of good competition. Look at how long the original Game Boy survived unchanged... Game Gear was ok, but larger and pretty power hungry, from what I remember. It's been dead for a number of years now, and there hasn't been anything to really step up to fill its place.
My post was dealing with the European market, not the worldwide market.
OK, I think I've misunderstood what people meant by "mushy" keyboards then. I was thinking more that mushy keyboards were just the flatter variety where the keys don't press down as far.
I guess the only thing I still don't agree with is that the audible bit has to be so loud... I have no problem hearing myself type even though it's way quieter by comparison. I don't know enough about biology to know which form of feedback gets to the brain first.
Anyway, the response is appreciated, thanks!
One thing I noticed when living in Europe for a while is that people generally didn't give X-box too much of a chance, and Gamecube was very much behind that. Sony must have done a really really good job with the Playstation, because their name recognition was far beyond anyone elses. If one so much as mentioned a gaming console, people would assume it's a Playstation. It's kind of surprising when one considers that Nintendo still has dominance over the handheld market there, yet is very far behind with the GC.
This really isn't that far out a prediction, given that the current console battle was won by Playstation 2 despite that fact that it was (IMHO) the weakest of the three.
Basically I see Microsoft as being the one with something to lose. Nintendo is by all accounts quite happy to sell fewer than the rest of them but turn a tidy profit doing so, while putting out the high quality first-party games they've always done. Of course, the fact that they're still killing in the handheld market probably helps the bottom line...
Why should a user have to know where a file is located on a disk? Or how to install updates? Or how to uninstall undesired programs? When software truly becomes easy to use, all of that stuff should be handled automatically by the OS. A user should be able to organize their files however they damn well please, regardless of how the OS treats the files on the backend. Updates should just silently install automatically, and not require a reboot (the most annoying thing about MS patches IMHO). And undesired programs should never get there in the first place, because the OS should properly explain things to the user whenever something is trying to install itself.
A full disk is something I would consider to be a very very basic problem. It's something that anyone can understand. The data on the computer takes space, and the space available to the computer is finite. A sufficiently advanced OS would simply inform the user of this and give them advice as to what files or programs to remove to free up more space.
Yes, right now, any user needs to know things about how a computer works, or they won't get very far. But this shouldn't be the case! There should be an OS that abstracts everything down to the simplest possible terms. A user shouldn't even have to know what a file or directory is, because the OS should handle all of that automatically.
Now, I'm also going to comment on your car analogy. I see the car as being an excellent abstraction. It is really quite simple to operate: press one pedal to go faster, a different pedal to go slower, a wheel controls which direction it goes in, and the rest is all bonus. Manual gear shifting adds some complexity, but people who get that know what they're doing. What could be seen as an unwieldly number of extra gadgets (turning signals, headlights, wipers, mirrors, climate controls, stereo, etc.) are all nicely controllable without having to search for them after a short adjustment period.
Now, let's think about users of cars. How many of them actually think about or care that their engine is running hot? That their brakes need servicing? More importantly, why should someone care about that? Anything important should be either 1) told to the user by a warning light or 2) maintained through regular maintenance so that it never becomes a problem in the first place. You are really mixing simple things with complicated things... Nobody in their right mind would call it a "long window thing the steering wheel is hooked under", but plenty wouldn't recognize if the engine is running hot.
This comes up whenever keyboards are mentioned on /., but I don't get it.
/. geeks would avoid manual labour like the plague and still have sensitive nerves in their fingers as well.
I'm not an old man, but I've used both the clicky keyboards and the mushy keyboards. To this day I can not figure out what the positive thing is to the clicky keyboards. Are most mushy keyboards poorly made or something, because I never have problems pressing keys and having them not do anything, unless I try really really hard to do it (i.e. press lightly on the corner of a wider key).
People mention tactile feedback... well, my mushy keyboard gives me enough feedback to know if I've pressed something or not. I would think that
Can anyone explain?
Well, as others have said, if your hardware is ok and Windows is configured correctly, you won't have a lot of OS-based crashes. Software is of course another matter...
But I'd like to point out the business end of it too. When I worked in an IT department, by far the majority of problems with documents and databases were just people deleting stuff that they shouldn't have. This is a problem that doesn't go away by switching to another OS, especially if it's something they have never used before.
As for viruses, anybody who cares about that has a virus scanner set up on automatic update, and businesses should all have a scanner on their mail too. That deals with almost every chance of infection.
Speaking personally, Windows only fails for me when some non-MS drivers or software screw over the operating system. I've had trouble especially with Logitech's Bluetooth drivers... if something goes wrong during the installation, it basically hoses it until the OS is reinstalled. Which is easily done in an hour or two back to the way I have it configured now with system state backups.
Wow, the International Space Station is apparently measured in Imperial units...
Longhorn is still a long way from the beta stages, so I don't think this really works as an analogy...
I would guess that for the beta they try to put out the system that is there best candidate for actual release... in other words, they would turn off much of the extra debugging and try to get results from people running the system as it should be run.
The other thing is, MS is packing a lot more into this release, as evidenced by the release schedule. Keep in mind that IE hasn't had a major revision since XP either, so there are probably a ton of changes there as well. And I'm sure MS is testing a bunch of features that aren't necessarily decided on just yet.
Sure, it's possible the commit charge could be that high. But it is very likely not going to be, because even MS can't get away with making something that bloated. What corporations are going to migrate to Longhorn if all of their machines that are current now can't even fit the OS into main memory?
Yeah, but at some point problem solving comes into the picture, right?
Like, I generally don't remember formulas until I've used them many many times. So generally when I'm doing schoolwork, I have the textbook or notes there to refer to. But once I've got the formulas and given data written down, I have to figure out where to go from there. Sure, sometimes it is recognition that this matches the form of something that came before, but usually not, because we're usually learning new stuff. So at this point it's thinking of different approaches to the problem, what mathematical rules to use, etc.
Similarly, when I'm programming, I always need a reference guide handy to remember syntax. But I always have to think about how I'm going to implement an algorithm, without necessarily drawing on past occurances.
Of course someone with good memory has a head start on everyone else. But it really depends on what you think of as intelligence.
In regards to your example, I think we need to assume a certain baseline memory level to start from. But understanding the concepts of calculus is more about understanding the concept of a limit than remembering how to do the problems.
Yes, this is mainly benefiting MS right now, but I see this as only a positive thing.
Suppose the patent was upheld and MS had to make changes to IE and pay damages. What was to stop the guy from going after the other browsers once he felt his bank account was getting a bit too low? If Microsoft weren't able to stop the patent, how would some of the other browser makers put up a fight?
The other thing is that this wasn't just MS fighting this patent, the W3C was involved as well, and all of the major players met to discuss the issue last year. I look at this as a victory for sensible thinking, not as a victory for Microsoft.
Yeah, I didn't consider that though, I was actually thinking about educated users as well :)
The Windows mentality... no problem can't be solved by throwing more resources at it, and if my computer gets slower over time, it must be getting more obsolete.
From a geek "my pod's bigger than your pod", point of view, this might make some sense.
:) Just because it's got that coolness factor, it doesn't matter that it doesn't compete performance-wise with ultra light weight laptops.
:)
And from a non-geek point of view, the smaller and lighter model is probably the one with the highest "wow, cool" factor.
It's kind of like tablet PCs... One day one of my profs came in with one to use for presenting his slides. It was definitely the most a prof has ever been mobbed at the end of a lecture
I'm sure this kind of image thing influences the success of the iPod as well. That is perhaps something that doesn't parallel to tablet PCs so well though
I think it's just a case that RAM became so cheap that people were going to stock up on it anyway. Even without bloated programs, having more RAM is an advantage, since one can just run more things at the same time.
That said, programs certainly became more bloated with more RAM available, simply because they would not have been allowed to become bloated otherwise.
If I move into the rough neighbourhood, I'm not going to be able to stop the bullets just by being well educated. However, I can stop all of these viruses from infecting my computer by simply not opening executable mail attachments. With a very small bit of extra effort, I can keep my copy of Windows up to date as well, which should prevent against any of the attacks that don't rely on user stupidity.
The thing is, your initial argument is that it can be stupid to release a game when there are too many of another game around... Then you switch it around and say that LA would be stupid to release a game in a 'dead' market. Basically you're trying to compare a market with heavy competition to a market with lower demand.
Personally, I think that this is a mistake, because the reactions I've seen at all the gaming sites I've visited today have been disbelief, disappointment, outrage, or something in between. There were a heck of a lot of people who knew about this game and were intending to give LucasArts their money for it.
Really, I think the attitude in general is that people are ready for PC adventure games again. There are many many people who remember the really good LucasArts and Sierra games of old, and are starting to get bored with the FPS and RPG games. It'll be high time for a comeback soon, and Sam and Max certainly have good name recognition.
You are exactly right. I was working in local IT support and development last year... all of the new laptops they've bought since the IBM P4 laptops came out have been faster than all of the servers save one. And adding up the disk space on all the laptops and desktops in the building would dwarf the total size in our server room.
The one server that was more powerful was a terminal server that 20-30 users ran on while in the office. This is actually rather on-topic, because it was a very cost-effective way of doing things. All of the employees had laptops for working at home, and having a terminal server with lots of dumb terminals was a cost-effective way to give them a higher performance machine while in the office. And since they were all getting Centrino notebooks, they were happier using their laptops as laptops as well, without having the need to use it as a desktop.
Then they should not have done an memory intensive and disk intensive benchmark like a database, now should they?
I think the point that they were trying to make was that Opteron performs much better than Xeon on memory regardless of the speeds. This is the whole reason why Opteron wins the benchmark, and this is made VERY clear in the article. They have published this information on Xeon's memory bottleneck many times.
I realize that what I wrote can be seen as meaning that the memory is irrevelant... I realize that it is not. However, using different memory in such a test brings in other variables, like memory timings.
By using the same memory on both architectures, they prove without a doubt that Opteron has a better memory architecture than Xeon. Had they used faster memory on the Opteron, the Opteron would have won, but it wouldn't be as clear whether it was because of the faster memory or the faster memory architecture.
RTFA. Anandtech did not "choose" a benchmark for this test, they developed two themselves based on real applications. The average-load test ran queries on their forum system, and the high-load test ran an enterprise system in use by an anonymous company.
As for them not knowing anything about computer architecture, you should read some of the articles that have been put up on Anandtech when new CPUs and GPUs have come out. They go into very good detail about exactly how the chips are working, and as a computer engineering major I can say that very little of it is flawed information.
I know that some review sites are as you describe, but I do not believe Anandtech to be among that group. YMMV.