It’s an incredible feeling to know I made a difference in someone’s life. Thanks for sharing this story, Sean. And if you come up with a copy of that story I wrote back in 1992, let me know. I’d like to read it again, too!

Flashback to March 23, 2005: Should bloggers accept free equipment?

Over at Slashdot, they have a humorous tradition: If you want to submit an item without using your real name, you get to use the official alias, Anonymous Coward. It’s a good-humored way to acknowledge that you’ve chosen to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet, so that no one can challenge your facts or your motives. You’re gutless, but at least you’re honest about it.

Too bad that tradition doesn’t apply elsewhere. Case in point: the comments section right here at this site. This afternoon, someone using the alias BobH posted this comment in response to my post about the Microsoft/AMD Vista marketing program:

Once you accept a gift like this (and if you don’t have to return it then it is most certainly a gift) you have officially defined yourself as a whore. Just like the bloggers who took money from politicians, or the ones who accepted free trips to Amsterdam. You’ve hung out a sign that says, “I’m for sale.”

That’s your choice. But pretty soon nobody can be sure if you’re espousing a point of view because you truly believe it or because somebody paid you to believe it. And if you think you can accept payola without it affecting your independence, you’re extremely naive.

Oh, and you forfeit all rights to speak credibly about the biases of the mainstream media. [emphasis added]

That’s the complete text of the comment. Now, call me old-fashioned, but I really hate being called a whore. Especially by someone posting from the internal network at the Seattle Times. So I called BobH on his bad manners and casual disregard for the facts. Here’s BobH’s hilarious reply:

Forgive me for not making it clear I was using the generic “you” when referring to bloggers who keep this booty. If you’re not keeping it, my post wasn’t aimed at you specifically.

Well, Bob, %!@# you. And of course, by “you” I mean the generic “you.” Which is to say, you.

Seriously, I cannot believe the number of people who are getting exercised about this completely trivial issue. Almost makes me forget that Steve Jobs and Apple’s management are being investigated for falsifying stock option grants worth about 61,300 Acer Ferrari 5000 notebooks. Hmmm.

My longtime computer book authoring colleague Roger Jennings piles onto the Free Acer Ferrari controversy with a post entitled Microsoft Gives Bloggers Sub-Aero (2.8) Laptops, in which he reprints the Windows Experience Rating screenshot from Scott Beale and then writes this commentary:

I was surprised to see a 2.8 Windows Experience Index for a laptop that’s intended to show off Windows Vista Premium’s virtues, especially a premium (Ferrari), 64-bit laptop with 1-GB of DDR2 DRAM and a 160GB SATA fixed disk. The way I read the tea leaves, 3.0 is the minimum index rating to run Windows Vista Premium Edition and qualify as Windows Vista Premium Ready.

Two things are wrong with this:

1. The experience index appears to be incorrect for the hardware. On the Ferrari 5000 notebook I received, I saw the exact same score, which made no sense at all. When I re-ran the Windows System Assessment Test, the numbers jumped dramatically. I have a pretty good idea of how this happened, which I’ll expand on in a later post. But the actual rating for this machine is now a 4.8 (on a scale of 1 to 5.9).

2. It’s impossible to make any judgments from the screen shown on Scott’s blog. You need to click the Windows Experience Index link to go to a different page that shows the scores for each subsystem. When I did that, I saw an indication that I needed to re-run the System Assessment Test because the hardware had changed.

Update: Roger Jennings adds a comment below saying that the 2.8 base score based on the Aero score graphics subsystem score seems to be accurate. Indeed, that may be true, but I don’t think that number means the system is “sub-Aero,” as the headline on his post contends. Roger quotes Microsoft documentation which says about systems with a base score of 2.0:

This level of PC may run Windows Aero but users may see noticeable performance issues from time to time, especially on PCs with scores less than 2.5 and/or 64MB of graphics memory.

I don’t understand why this sentence supports the contention that a system with a graphics score of 2.8 is “sub-Aero.” Even a 2.0 is Aero-capable, and Microsoft’s documentation here suggests that anything over a 2.5 should be sufficient.

Update: I’ve reformatted a few key sentences in this item, making them bright red and boldface, since some people seem incapable of reading anything longer than 15 words. If you only skim this post, just read the stuff in red and boldface. I haven’t changed any text from what I originally wrote

Earlier today, my friendly DHL delivery person dropped off a small package from Microsoft and AMD. It contained an Acer Ferrari 5000 with Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 preinstalled on it. I’m not the only person to receive a similar package. Microsoft and AMD have delivered a truckload of these units and some lightweight Ferrari 1000 notebooks and even some kick-ass Media Center machines to a long list of people. (Scott Beale and Mitch Denny, Mauricio Freitas, Brandon LeBlanc, Long Zheng, Barb Bowman, and no doubt others. But not Dana Epp or Thomas Hawk.)

As a rule, I don’t solicit review units and I never accept gifts from companies that I cover. The biggest reason? It’s a major pain in the ass to unbox hardware, get it set up, work with it for a while, wipe the disks and put everything back in its original condition when I’m done, box the pieces back up, and send everything back. I don’t have a lab crew or a shipping department, so I have to do all that scut work myself, and usually it isn’t worth it. If you’re not in this business, you probably think it’s cool to get new stuff all the time. But it’s more of a burden than a blessing, which is why, when I look around this office, I see four desktop PCs, three notebooks, a server, and a slew of gadgets and spare parts, all paid for out of my own pocket. I pay for software, too.

So why did I make an exception in this case? Simple. Because I can’t buy a new PC with Windows Vista preloaded yet, and Aaron Coldiron from Microsoft offered to send this review unit. The note I got last week made the offer perfectly clear:

This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS.  Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to.  Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can keep it.  My recommendation is that you give it away on your site, but it’s your call.  Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes.

I want the chance to see how a 64-bit version of Vista runs on new, high-end hardware so I can compare it to the half-dozen or so machines I have already tested it on. I’ll be doing a lot of testing of Windows Vista between now and its launch on January 30 so I can write good solid reviews from as many perspectives as possible. Here’s my current hardware lineup:

• I just took delivery on a brand-new Dell Inspiron 6400 last week with a Core 2 Duo processor, paid for out of my own pocket (it cost about a third of what the Ferrari 5000 costs). It took half a day to wipe the pre-loaded crap software off it so I could install Windows Vista Business.
• I purchased a top-of-the-line Acer Tablet PC nine months ago; it’s on its way back to Acer for a new keyboard, and when it comes back it will get Vista Business (32-bit) installed on it.
• I’ve got a two-year-old Dell Latitude 505 running Windows Vista Home Basic.
• I’ve got a four-year-old homemade desktop box running Vista Ultimate in its primary role as a Media Center machine. (You’ll be shocked when you hear how well it works.)
• And I’ll be replacing my main desktop machine in about six weeks – as soon as I can buy a system with Windows Vista pre-loaded. I’ll share the specs for that one in January.

None of the systems I currently own can run 64-bit Vista acceptably, so this review unit will be a nice addition to that hardware lineup.

When I’m done testing this notebook, what happens to it? I haven’t decided yet. I’m not keeping it, of course. Update 31-Dec-2006: I’m sending it back to Microsoft after my review is complete. It could go back to Microsoft, I suppose. But I’m more likely to auction it off for charity, along with a copy of Windows Vista Inside Out and some free consulting time. Last I looked, there were still a lot of homeless people in Indonesia, two years after the tsunami and six months after the earthquake that most Americans never heard about. There are a whole bunch of people that are still leading miserable lives in New Orleans or in temporary housing hundreds of miles from their home in the Crescent City that could use some help. With an assist from readers of this site, I raised more than $400 on New Years Eve 2004 and a couple hundred bucks earlier this year for Indonesian relief. I raised $350 to help people whose lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I’d feel pretty good if I could parlay a review unit into that kind of goodness. It might even make me smile while I’m boxing up this machine to send it away.

But that’s my personal decision, and it’s based on my personal code of ethics, which says I don’t accept gifts. So, do I think everyone who received one of these boxes should send it back? Don’t be ridiculous. The people who are whining about Microsoft “bribing” bloggers are misinformed.

Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes with all sorts of motivations. I’m a journalist by training and by profession, and that dictates my decision. But what if I were a starving student or an MVP who started a blog because I was passionate about technology and wanted to share that passion with a community? Everyone in the community wins when that person gets the chance to play with new technology. In that case, Microsoft is just doing some smart marketing, seeding the market and increasing mind share. They could spend the same amount of money hiring people to write white papers or running ads in the Wall Street Journal. But the world will get a lot more valuable feedback if that information comes from real people actually using this technology.

Ultimately, it all comes down to this: Who do you trust? Last Friday was the fourth anniversary of this site, and during that time I’ve written nearly 1500 posts. I think I had about four readers back on December 22, 2002. Last time I checked, more than 2,700 people were subscribed to this site’s RSS feed and roughly 100,000 visit the site every month. I feel an enormous sense of responsibility to those people – to you. I plan to do this for a long time, and my independence isn’t for sale.

And if you think that a free laptop is going to change Long Zheng or Brandon LeBlanc, well, you haven’t spent much time actually reading their sites. Both of these guys are in the Essentials folder in my RSS reader because they’re smart and funny and they don’t pull punches. I’m looking forward to meeting both Brandon and Long at CES in two weeks, and I’m looking forward to reading about their experiences with Windows Vista in coming months. I’m also looking forward to telling you all about my experiences with this hardware.

Oh, one more thing… If you’re thinking of convening a blogger ethics conference, count me out.

My sleek and shiny Small Form Factor Shuttle PC is now a stainless steel doorstop. If you’re thinking of buying anything with the Shuttle brand name on it, take my advice: don’t do it. The company has the worst support I’ve ever experienced. Read the full details over at ZDNet.

… Dave Beuvais adds his Shuttle story.

And here’s the proof:

In Word, enter =rand() and press Enter. This fills your document with random text.

The American version of Word 2007 uses text from the Help file (boring). The French version repeats this sentence:

“Servez à ce monsieur une bière et des kiwis.”

Which translates to:

“Serve this gentleman a beer and some kiwis.”

Honorable mention to the Spanish, for “The quick Hindu bat ate happy golden thistle and kiwi.”

(Thanks to Doug Klippert.)

The cats, for some reason, refused to sit still for their photos. Go figure.

Anyway, everyone have a wonderful holiday.

OK, my CES folder started with roughly 598 invitations to meetings, press conferences, and other events. I have room for about 30 meetings. As ratios go, that kinda sucks.

 Here’s who I’m scheduled to meet with so far:

• Toshiba – tablet PCs, notebooks, and maybe some HD-DVD
• NextGen Home – “a comprehensive digital lifestyle for one family”
• Ricavision – a Bluetooth remote for Media Center PCs
• GuardID
• Data Drive Thru Tornado – I am only sorry I have to miss the press conference where a monkey and an eight-year-old girl will battle some IT guy to see who can set up a network faster
• DirecTV – please, please, please make CableCARD irrelevant
• Yahoo! Mobile
• Z-Wave Alliance – home networking rules this year
• Nero – I’ll try not to use the whole half-hour for tech support questions
• Microsoft (Windows Vista) – obligatory
• Microsoft Home Solutions – surprises?
• Microsoft SPOT- I have resisted lo these many years
• Digeo – Emmy winners for best use of On Demand technology; if only I could get Stephen Colbert to tag along
• Dell – they don’t suck as much as they used to, and I plan to tell Michael Dell that
• TiVo – this should be fun
• NVidia – if ATI calls, I’ll visit them too
• AverMedia – my favorite supplier of video capture hardware
• Niveus – I’ll need an inheritance to actually buy this stuff
• Sonic Solutions – not Nero, not Roxio, not bad

And two mini tradeshows: ShowStoppers and Digital Experience.

So, who am I missing?

(Oh, and I expect I’ll have some cool swag to give away after the show. Stay tuned.)

I’m sure Scoble has the best of intentions, but this is going to turn into a mess. Besides, isn’t that what Slashdot comments are for?

Guess I need to make a Sherman statement: No, I’m not interested in participating.