Ok, time for a little rant on the glut of bad hardware reviews I have come across lately. There are hundreds of sites reviewing PC bits and pieces all around the net. Hardware reviews are meant to provide multiple perspectives on the pros and cons of the device in question. The information provided in these perspectives would otherwise be unobtainable without purchasing the device (and where company propaganda provides insufficient information). Bad reviews don’t achieve this. Here’s a few things that I have found annoying and unhelpful with a lot of sites attempting to review hardware:
1. Regurgitated specifications. When listing a device’s features, more and more sites tend to just do a cut and paste job off the device’s product website. Look, if I want the spec sheet for hardware, I’ll just visit the company web site myself. In fact, that will normally be my first stop. I want to know what those specs mean, anything particularly noteworthy about them and how they compare to the rest of the market. Look at this review comparing two i845D motherboards. The specification listings are dumped straight from website. The worst thing is, the review is meant to be a comparison, and because the spec lists are mismatched, you can’t compare the two motherboards! (You can’t tell if Abit board has USB 2 ports from that list, for instance.)
2. Regurgitating company propaganda. A lot of reviews kick off with a couple pages paraphrasing company propaganda: “This card has a HyperTurbo Z-Buffer Engine and Quadlinear Inversion which kicks ass because it is good and makes the card go Really Fast.” Again, rehashing what is written on the official product web site is a waste of time if you don’t expand on it. Think I exaggerate? Look at this. You’d think the guy was Seagate’s incarnation of Goebbles.
3. Benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks. Straight after the “it goes really fast” bit, many reviews launch into pages and pages of benchmarks. We won’t get onto the validity of testing methods. Nor the fact that a lot of reviewers list all test system specs regardless of the fact that their T3 connection to the net has nothing to do with the performance of their sound card because they want to show off how l337 their test systems are. The benchmarks in many cases means nought, because they conflict with other sites’ benchmarks, yet there are pages and pages of them scrutinising those minute 2-3% performance differences over competitor products. You see, benchmarking requires little creativity. Sure it’s hard boring work, but it’s a testing formula and you follow it.
4. Misdirected reviews. Partially to do with the benchmarking preoccupation, very little information is provided on related topics or aspects of the product that can’t be benchmarked. Look at this ATI Radeon 8500DV review. I wanted to find out information about the All-In-Wonder aspect of the card – how good it was for capturing from analog and digital sources, for instance. Even small details about whether the 1384 port had a power load limit. Instead it breezes over those things and skips straight to pages of graphs and numbers (they might as well have just reviewed the vanilla version of the 8500).
5. Inexperienced reviewers. When the reviewer doesn’t have enough knowledge and experience with that type of product such that the review produced is woefully inaccurate or just lacking in depth. Many multimedia speaker reviews are guilty of this. (Hi-fi speaker reviewers on the other hand tend to be audiophiles.)
Easy way to tell if a review is bad: When you could write a review that says just as much (minus the benchmarks) by just reading the official web site and not actually using the product.
Still, there are many good review sites out there. Eg: DPReview is incredibly thorough and consistent in its reviews. Dan’s Data is also exceptional because he chats a lot about using a product and goes through all the possibilities. He also sidetracks a fair bit, but those sidetracks are interesting. You’ll also notice that he only uses benchmarks to illustrate a point. Anyway, with experience you get to learn which sites are good for doing reviews of what devices.
Went to the Open Air cinema last night at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. Beautiful atmosphere with the opera house, coathanger, and lights of North Sydney forming a picturesque backdrop amidst a temperate Summer evening. The rain held off, luckily, and it was an enjoyable movie. The screen was huge, suspended over the water, and the sound system sounded pretty damn good for a non-enclosed space. At $17.60, it wasn’t priced too badly. The movie was better than I expected. (Hey, with Drew Barrymore could you blame me for going in with reservations?)
Personally, I think this is the best Enterprise episode that has so far screened. Doc Phlox finally gets a proper role in 13 episodes. The thing that has impressed me about Enterprise is the astuteness of the writers in noting small but important details, this episode especially (eg: A few lines between T’Pol and Archer gives meaning and complexity behind the Vulcan-Human relation which up until now, seemed to merely imply the Vulcans were being tight-asses.)
Apart from T’Pol, Phlox is the only alien on board, and to see how he culturally fits in is refreshing. His character is finally fleshed out, and he actually gets to act like a real doctor this time: with all the stress and baggage that comes along with being a medical practitioner. His job is unique in that everyone on the ship eventually comes to see him – he has contact with everyone from Captain down to Ensign, and of course, Porthos (that dog is really cute. Just a bit more personable than Picard’s fish Livingstone :).
Phlox makes some particularly keen observations about human compassion – especially the double standards Cutler shows when judging cultures. Ultimately this episode is about the Prime Directive, or how such a rule was developed. Ah yes, the Prime Directive, one of the most contentious attributes of the Trek universe. Yes, it was abused by Kirk when he saw fit, and yes its always bent, but after an episode like this, you can really understand the reasoning behind it. There needs to be some direction on interference with alien cultures. In the end, Archer overcomes his human compassion and effectively hands a death sentence down – this is no small decision. The only flaw I can really point out about this episode is making it painfully clear Archer is talking about the development of the Prime Directive (especially when he specifically says “directive”). It would have been interesting to let the viewer ruminate over the episode and see what conclusions they drew from it themselves – more so for those who haven’t watched Trek before.
10:19am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow from Work, Chiswick
