There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.
To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.
To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.
Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
After Many weeks of talking to Microsoft what they said was that because my copy of Windows 8 is an "upgrade" key the only way I can re-activate my copy of windows is if I downgrade to win 7 and then upgrade to 8 AGAIN.
Overlooking the fact that my computer should not have lost it's activation in the first place the last few weeks has made me regret ever giving Microsoft any of my money.
EDIT: Items will not be shipped until after September 1st or when all winners reply to Slick - whichever comes first!
Announcing our HUGE Computex giveaway powered by WD. This is a bit of a special giveaway. The more you watch our Computex videos from the Western Digital booth in Computex the more stuff we're going to give away. You can see the latest updates from WD at Computex here: http://www.wdc.com/computex/
EDIT: BONUS for readers/viewers from the USA/EU - Get 15% off internal hard drives until June 16th, 2013 (US & EU only) with promocode "COMPUTEX2013" - http://wdstore.com & http://bit.ly/12qcLsk
This thread will be updated daily from June 4th to June 8th to give you the links to the videos. In order to enter, all you have to do is post in this thread, but make sure you check back daily and watch all of the videos so that we can hit our targets and give away ALL the coolest stuff!
If you want to play through all of the videos you can see them here:
This video thumbnail announcing the contest should give you some idea how crazy this is:
The contest closes June 30th and it's open to residents of the planet Earth.
TLDW:
25,000 views average per video - 5x My Passport Ultra, 2x My Book Studio external hard drives
50,000 views average per video - 2x 1TB Velociraptor, 2x 4TB Black, 2x 3TB Red hard drives
75,000 views average per video - 2x Puget Systems Core i5 GTX 660 gaming systems
100,000 views average per video - 1x Steiger Dynamics LEET gaming grade HTPC worth over $2000
Here are the full specs of the Steiger machine. Please be sure to follow them on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/STEIGERDYNAMICS
Subscribe to this thread so you'll see the updates!!
1 entry for posting in this thread
1 bonus entry for sharing this post on your Facebook. Post a link to your Facebook page showing the share.
1 bonus entry for sharing this post on your Twitter. Post your twitter handle and a link to the tweet showing your share
5 entries if you do all three things!!
Also please like Steiger Dynamics on Facebook. These guys are building very cool systems, and they're working towards getting gaming and performance computing into our living rooms. Would you rather have one of these or an Xbox One... https://www.facebook.com/STEIGERDYNAMICS
JRaymond reacted to LinusTech in Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity
JRaymond got a reaction from ANIMAL_ORIGIN in HELP error 0xC004F012
