This was written as a response to a post I made on the Phoronix forum relating to an article which consists entirely of Michael complaining about a lack of a review sample. I post there only because I keep hoping if I say it enough Michael will eventually get his act together. Its a stupid thought sure but I figure its worth a shot. I plan to update this at a future date to add links to examples but I can’t be bothered currently. This is all my opinion so if you don’t like it so be it.
If Michael wants a review sample he should start acting like a responsible journalist and news site. Did he ever think the reason AMD doesn’t send him review samples could be related to his reputation and how he manages his site? Perhaps they realize associating with his site actually makes them look worse due to how little he bothers with his reviews and articles.
Sure AMD gets publicity from his reviews posts, but they would get a lot more if he actually bothered to even scratch the surface of why or how things preform the way they do in comparison to other cards. Instead he only posts graphs and single sentence blurbs because its quick and easy. If four out of five articles posted here weren’t just link bate or link spam to past articles Michael may actually gain him some credibility. Articles that do nothing but link to other articles or sites controlled by Michael, which of course are filled to the brim with ads, do nothing to make him look good.
What’s even more sad is he takes the time to write these articles complaining rather than one articles with actual content that is useful to Linux users. Saying AMD doesn’t care about you because they didn’t send me free stuff, isn’t how you gain readers and people who will pay for your content, writing well thought out and researched posts and articles will. We all know how much he loves automation, how about he adds a feature to PTS to fill out bug reports for him. If every article about a regression or bug included a link to the bug report for it, where possible, he’d actually be doing something good for the community rather than just leaching off of them for ad revenue. There is only so many people who do the whole Linux news thing so if AMD or Nvidia were to send out review units there isn’t large selection of site, but when it comes to enthusiast computing Linux users are in the single digits percentage wise, there is no surprise then don’t bother there.
The Linux market AMD and Nvidia Care about is enterprise, people who buy Quadro, Tesla, and FireGL/FirePro cards. Consumer desktop Linux support is just a nice side effect of supporting Compute workloads and software like Siemens NX, Real3d, Maya and others. Gaming and fancy Compiz effects are nice side effects but they aren’t where the money is to be made on linux. That said, SteamOS may change that but until then I don’t expect AMD to spend a cent to support Linux desktop users, I’m glad they do and will continue to buy their hardware because they do, but I know its a drop in the bucket when it comes to their revenue.
Now I’m glad there is at least somewhere that takes the time to post these benchmarks and test the hardware but I would be an idiot to not demand more. Michael does nothing but half ass his articles and then complain when he isn’t taken seriously. If he wants to be taken seriously by the Linux community and companies like AMD and Nvidia he needs actually put some effort into his articles and take pride in them, not just post 5 links to past articles and his anzwix crap. The ratio of links to sentences approaches one in far to many of the articles here and it makes it damn clear all Michael cares about is page rank and ad revenue, not the content of the post itself. Compare his posts to articles posted on LWN or TomsHardware and see how many you can find that have more 7 out of 8 sentences linking to other articles on the site.
NOTE: This was written mostly as a rant and may be updated, deleted or modified if I feel like it.