Truth in Advertising? 393
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?"
Video drivers (Score:4, Informative)
ATI's 'Quake' optimization. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ATI's 'Quake' optimization. (Score:2)
Re:ATI's 'Quake' optimization. (Score:3, Informative)
The tone of the article almost has an edge of "I can't believe we do this in our industry I feel so dirty!" to it. The poster of the story is obviously some kind of new college hire or hasn't been in the industry for very long or something. All vendors do this, all the time. Its just the way it is.
Re:ATI's 'Quake' optimization. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ATI's 'Quake' optimization. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, cheating on benchmarks is one thing (the card is just slower than it benchmarks), but the WHQL is supposed to be a stop gap measure: sure, it's Windows, we hate Windows, whatever. But where I work, we use it. And WHQL drivers are something that you're supposed to be able to lean on; they're drivers that may not be the latest, greatest, but they will work.
I can't tell you how long it took to track down that the RAID WHQL certified drivers were the problem. It's something you're supposed to be able to put a little checkmark next to when diagnosing problems, a "it can't be that!".
Also benchmarks (Score:3, Interesting)
Another one: just look at the old Dhrystone benchmark [wikipedia.org] and all of the over-the-top "optimizations" that were used to get better compiler/processor results. The SPEC organization [spec.org], 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 [spec.org]; ref is 2/3 the way down) was defe
Re:Video drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
In the mid-1990s my company did quite a bit of graphics card testing (still does, but it was much higher profile back then.) It was pretty routine for us to get baked drivers (and there were some very impressive cheats) less routine, but still common was to get a board with a BIOS cheat, which would do anything from altering its own board timings to be out of spec (sort of "overclocked out of the box") to running code that would adjust the PC's heartbeat interrupt to slow the clock ticks to make the board appear faster if benchmarked using the PC's own clock.
In the end the best solution we came up with -- because we worked with a lot of alpha/beta silicon since we tracked chips more than boards -- was to more or less formalize the cheats and what was/wasn't permitted, and also to give the companies that submitted alpha/beta hardware to pull the results before publication, so that if one company pulled a fast one, the others that would be look bad in comparison simply wouldn't be compared; this resulted in a sort of a stalemate of cheating.
The most extreme (but permitted) cheat I ever encountered had the company involved paying over $100,000 to have a custom graphics driver written overnight that incorporated an optimized version of parts of the DirectX rendering engine (this was ~ DX5 era). When they found out their primary competitors pulled their boards from testing, you can imagine they were less than pleased.
The point of all this: a competent testing lab, particularly part of a magazine "shootout," should be well aware that cheating is taking place, and prepared to identify major cheats. Back in the heyday of PC Magazine in the mid-90s, their benchmark people were top notch and the benchmark ran a considerable number of cheating tests to clear out the more bogus attempts.
Oh, and you can be pretty assurred your competitors are doing the same things you are.
Re:Video drivers - PC Mag tests (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Peer review (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Peer review (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Even science has a problem of touting the best data and "leaving the devil in the details." Research is driven by money just as much as industry. If you're not producing good results, you won't get funding.
Re:Peer review (Score:2)
And if you are caught falsifying data then you will never get funding again. At least from traditional sources this is true and you will have major problems finding a position in academia. There have been a few cases where folks even spent time in jail for scientific fraud. On the whole, most scienti
Re:Peer review (Score:2)
If you do produce results that are consistently not reproducible by your peers, then you'll quickly no longer have a career, much less funding. It may not happen right away but it will happen in reasonable course, especially the more impressive your claimed results are and the more clear it becomes that
True (Score:2)
There's a package listed on Freshmeat for benchtesting su
False Advertising (Score:2, Funny)
You have to do your own bake off (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a different situation. (Score:4, Informative)
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' [tech-report.com]).
As another example, there were some folks trying to get higher rankings in SETI@home [zdnet.com.au], 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.
Well known truth (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:2)
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't look at the top rated model and decide that it is the best one long term. The ratings in a CR review represent how the products performed during the test. The ratings do not necessarily represent the best products.
Nearly every CR review has another section that details the reliability of the brands represented in the test over a period of time that they've b
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:2)
Just don't tell anyone else about this way of sponging off games companies, ok?
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:2)
The best part of CR is getting the magazine and finding all the tested models have already been discontinued!
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:5, Informative)
As a hypothetical, let's say that CR judges crash-worthiness of a car using a 35 mph head on collison test. Car manufacturers which know this are going to optimize the structural integrity of the car to hold up well under this test at the expense of other types of crashs (side impact crashs, say). Another car may not perform as well in the head on test, but it may be safer over a entire universe of possible crashes. However, because it is not optimized for the CR crash test, it won't get as high a rating.
Lest you think I am putting stuff out of my butt, this situation actually occurred with respect to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Up until a few years ago, cars were generally crash tested using the head on methodology. However, the IIHS decided to start using an offset crash methodology since was more likely to occur in real life. They found the results from the offset crashes did not necessarily match the results from the head on crashes. Cars that did well in the head on tests did not do as well in the offset crash tests. Obviously manufacturers had optimized crash worthiness for the test and not for overall safety.
So where does the blame lie? I would say it lies both with the testers and the manufacturers. The testers are to blame for coming up with a test that doesn't necessarily reflect real life. Meanwhile car makers are to blame for designing products to "beat the test" rather than to be safe overall.
I think the same is true in the case of the original poster. His company isn't doing anything illegal; if the tests can be beaten so easily, then what good are they? In fact, one could argue that his company is helping in the sense that they are revealing the test's shortcoming. However, I find it hard to believe that their underlying motives are altruistic. I would guess that their motivation for tweaking their system is to beat the test for their own gain, and not for some higher moral purpose. So in a sense they are violating the spirit of the competition, in my opinion, even if what they are doing isn't wrong in the legal sense.
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:4, Interesting)
Another good one. CR downgraded the Protege5 wagon, despite it having as good or better gas mileage, much better reliability, and MUCH better handling and breaking (a sport suspension). Oh, and it was cheaper too, and unquestionably better looking. Why didn't CR like it? Solely because its competition (PT Cruiser / Vibe / Matrix / Imprezza ) was higher up and had a cushier ride, like an SUV. So while the rest of the car trade ranked the P5 at the top, CR complained that it didn't feel enough like a Surburban.
Talk about losing your liberal moorings.
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:4, Insightful)
Based entirely on your comments, I would suggest that is the true strength of Consumer Reports' reviews--you have not just a ranking, but also a detailed explanation of how that ranking was arrived at.
The people who buy based only on a final arbitrary score or ranking are just as screwed as the people who choose a CPU based solely on its clock speed, or an audio amplifier based solely on its output power. Sure, such people exist, but there's useful content in CR for those who are willing to look.
One hopes that people willing to plunk down the cash for a copy of CR are also willing to spend a small amount of time reading the whole article before they buy a twenty thousand dollar vehicle....
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:3, Insightful)
I have worked for a number of years in various roles in the mainframe IT industry, and have repeatedly observed (from both sides of the customer/vendor fence) that the best-prepared consumers take the vendor's claims with a grain of salt and ALWAYS do their own independent benchmarking to see how the product works in their own application environment.
This certainly isn't constrained to big-ticket hardware produc
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:2, Interesting)
I see how poor CU's testing of bicycles and computers is (two subjects I know rather a lot about), but I've always hoped they were better about washing machines and cars.
astroturf alert (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Consumer Reports pays cash (Score:4, Informative)
Until he retired, my uncle was head of their paint testing laboratory, and this is exactly what he did. He would, for example, test a paint's opacity by applying a coat directly to an unprimed test pattern. He used to drive the paint companies nuts -- but when he said a paint will cover in a single coat that's exactly what a consumer could expect.
Truth - Advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Truth - Advertising? (Score:2)
Re:Truth - Advertising? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean Code Red isn't a sports drink for advanced athletes? That I shouldn't be on a dozen prescription drugs? That my children aren't better taught by a talking book? That school loans aren't the source of happiness for all successful students? That cross-over SUVs aren't station wagons? That my computer doesn't make the Internet go faster?
Re:Truth - Advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you sound practical. Advertising usually affects the reptilian part of brains, preying on our patriotism (truck ads), vanity (gyms, makeup), greed (everything), etc. Its shameful there aren't controls on corporate "free speech" as McDonalds and others hire child psychologists to craft effective ads for their unhealthy products.
This is the golden age for ads. They're everything. Every webpage, above the urinal, people aren't very skeptical and have disposable incomes, the art of creating a working fad/meme is getting perfected, celebrities are manufactured from scratch, etc. And this is what people want.
The problem is two-fold. People, in general, need to take a good look at their consumerism and corps need controls on what they can and can't say. I'd like to see informative ads telling me cost, MPG, etc but a typical car ad is all mom, america, and apple pie stuff.
Similiar post over at nerdfilter today. [nerdfilter.com] The video is hilarious and worth watching.
Re:Truth - Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of something I saw the other day. There was a big old truck (F350) relatively new stopped at a light in front of me. The bed was empty except for a full size american flag that was tied to a broomstick which was attached to rear corner of the truck.
It's hard to know how long that flag had been there but it was in horrible shape. It was dirty and wet and the leading edge has been torn to shre
Truth is never in advertising. (Score:3, Interesting)
Require a loaner to test... (Score:2)
Bill Hicks (RIP) said it all.. (Score:5, Funny)
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.]
Re:Bill Hicks (RIP) said it all.. (Score:2)
We miss Sam, too.
Re:Bill Hicks (RIP) said it all.. (Score:2)
Re:Bill Hicks (RIP) said it all.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Analyze, analyze, analyze (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Analyze, analyze, analyze (Score:3, Insightful)
My Sig... (Score:2)
Commendable (Score:2)
Consumer audio (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Consumer audio (Score:3, Informative)
It sounds too insane to be true. I almost dismissed the entire site as being an elaborate hoax, but searching for "magnan cable
Re:Consumer audio (Score:3, Insightful)
It may be true that there is a capacitive charge on the cable (due to the inefficiencies of the dielectric, but that's beyond the scope of my ability to explain), and the degree of the charge may affect the sound quality. I'll agree that this is possible. BUT -- and this is a big but, at least as big as Roseanne Barr's -- this charge will va
Re:Consumer audio (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I like Dans Data's various takes on Monster Cable [dansdata.com] myself. I have to admit that my ex-wife worked for one of their distributors many years ago and we got it really cheap. Those thick cables seemed to make the imported German Quadral speakers sound better.
Re:"Digital Ready" headphones -- for digital ears? (Score:3, Interesting)
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'
Reminds me of marketing... (Score:2)
When we took a closer look at the disclosure (in fine print) it states: Company M HBA tested in single threaded mode (READ: Tag Queuing Disable.)
That's when I lost all respect for marketing people...
Re:Reminds me of marketing... (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of marketing... (Score:2)
With more advertizing, I would guess.
So you see, misleading advertizing is not only good for the product (and it may even end up backfiring on the product) but it is certainly good for the advertizing business. That is what counts for advertizers, after all.
Oh, _I_ put no faith in the results (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Perhaps a better question (Score:2)
Thats what I thought. If there was, that company can't expect to last long in competition. This world is plainly insane, but so are all of us willing to buy into it, so I suppose it doesn't matter.
Scares Me (Score:2)
Unlike many popular forms of advertising, I don't trust testimonials. When a piece of equipment is reviewed, I judge the review by it's source, since perhaps as a tech I'm a bit happier with a "clumsy UI" than with sheer abilities of, say, hardware.
So I look to Toms, [H], Ars for reviews by people who seem to have similar knowledge as myself. Then, when tests are formed, I don't trust just one benchmark, nor just one test or review.
If a company is going to game the testing, I'm disappointed. This l
Sun cheated on Java benchmarks (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Red-Handed, Red-Faced, Red Alert (Score:3, Informative)
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-
Sun Called on Java Claims (Score:3, Informative)
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 o
When? Instantly. There is no gray area. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 repor
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Dilbert (Score:3, Funny)
When the image got fuzzy, they tried a razor.
Not in IT, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
... 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).
Th
Opine (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Opine (Score:2)
When I was at NMSU for a special program, it was run through the business school. I got injured and couldn't get what I needed to finish so I thought I'd just take the business degree. It was marketing, I left shcool 15 hour short of my Bachelors because I wasn't qualified to get a Marketing degree, I have a conscience!
Re:Opine (Score:2)
Sad But True (Score:2)
I've seen advertisement claiming that the product was the cheapest or only, where I clearly knew different.
It happens outside advertizing as well. Steve Ballmer has made some very untrue statements, and so have certain people in the previous administration.
The worst thing is that people often believe the lies rather than the truth. It's like in Zen and the Art of
Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Informative)
Truth in advertising works. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Read carefully (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Benchmarking Tuning: Just as bad as Karma Whoring (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Its an (Score:2, Funny)
I worked for HP.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I worked for HP.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember when a Laserjet 4 was the printer to have?
Or for that matter, remember when Diamond multimendia was the producers of graphics cards?
A company that overstates claims typically is a company that is cutting costs while sliding on their brand name. I wonder how many solid names in the industry have to go down the drain before they realize it's probably not a good idea, in the long run, to overstate the quality or performance of your products.
Heck, I can remember a time when Compaq actually made good computers.
Doesn't stop there... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a
Devil's in the details (Score:2)
Any which way you dice or slice it, it boils down to the "trial" run to overcome the buyer's skepticisms. Be that it may, a trial balloon, trial-by-fire, trial-by-jury,
In the case of Internet-based products, it takes a true network engineer to understand the fine subtleties between UDP throughput and TCP throughput (as well as any other application/presentation/session layered throughput combinations) and to
Advertising Claims (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Needl
I completely disregard benchmarks (Score:2)
It's kind of like Microsoft's BS-filled "Linux TCO vs. Windows TCO" ads here on slashdot. Sure, maybe Windows Server 2k3 is cheaper to operate than linux (What a bloody joke) in Microsoft's excessively convoluted idea of how servers/whatever might be run, but chances are extremely high that Microsoft has no damned clue about how my servers are run, what content they serve, etc. etc., not to mention the fact that there's ra
It has been going on for decades (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ho
Whats new? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lies sell, since most people are stupid and believe whatever they are told.
The thruth about advertising (Score:2)
The single most unifying caracteristic of capitalist entities is to, at any cost, give you less than what they sold you in such way that you believe you are the bad guy, the one who overevaluated the product. Try hard, when was the last time you bought something and it worked as advertised, as implied, was as s
Truth in advertising (Score:3, Funny)
Sexual freedom in Saudi Arabia
Fiscal accountability in corporate America
Bug-free programming in Microsoft products...
Intelligence and integrity in GWB?
"Yes, None, Ten years ago" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Not only is it false advertising but... (Score:2)
A great deal of the consumers time is wasted in finding out what a product can really do.
Such extreamism, if not worst than that, is counter productive for the whole industry, as the computer industry has been doing pretty good showing how well it applies double speak or its ability to manipulate abstractions, be it in producing code or producing advertising text...
A good example is teh recent stories regarding spyware removal products, how the freeware is far better...
These kinds of "white papers" (Score:2, Informative)
I
"It's not cheating... (Score:2)
The sneaky monkey wins.
Question and Answer (Score:3, Funny)
When you get caught
Lies are the basis of modern life (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Lies are the basis of modern life (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, when you evaluate information about a particular concept for absolute truth, you're bound to find that some information is just not disclosed. This could be as esoteric as not disclosing the material that your software CD is crafted from, or as important as failing to mention that the software is not compatible with
In God We Trust (Score:2)
Always Read the Forums! (Score:3, Informative)
You know, there's the truth :-( (Score:2)
Counter question: What are you selling? (Score:2)
Are you selling an emotion or some sort of strange detached feeling of satisfaction? Most companies nowadays do that.
Then just sell your IT product with a nice looking GUI and lots of nice little buttons and habe the marketing dept. take some pictures and add their phrases. They'll ask you about a noteworthy feature or two and present it in such a way you wont recognize your own product anymore. It will sell like hot cakes.
If, on the other hand, your selling really JUST
Like they say, (Score:3, Funny)
Crazy People / Vendor Selection (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:In my company (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Well... realistically.... (Score:2)
it would still be the safest car in the world as long as more people died in other cars.
Re:Simple Answer (Score:2)
Funny things, words. "false advertising" is the what gets used in a lawsuit when someone is complaining about a vendor lying about their product. The real word is "lie".
Most people are already aware that a significant proportion of advertising is a lie. It becomes false advertising when a lawyer d
Re:Business Ethics (Score:2)
Re:Truth in general...? Dishonest companies? (Score:2)
Can a NDA that forbids the disclosure of illegal practices possibly be binding?
What are they going to do, sue you becaues you exposed their illegal business practices? In a sense, it'd probably be against the law NOT to report them, since you are witness to a crime and could be considered an accomplice if you don't...
-Z