Forbes – Biased?

I am just making an observation here…. is it just me, or do Forbes stories always have an anti-Microsoft slant to them? Tech stories from everywhere are on my feed, and I take the time to read things that matter to me. I try to read opposing viewpoints this way, but man, it just seems that whomever is covering tech over there seems to have it in for Microsoft, whether it be Surface, Office, Windows, or XBox related. I don’t expect everything to hit it out of the park for Microsoft, or anyone for that matter. But it just seems to be ALWAYS negative from them.

Conversation 15 comments

  • sentinel6671

    Premium Member
    29 January, 2020 - 4:33 pm

    <p>Forbes is garbage, plain and simple. Don't waste your time reading their stuff. They'll spin any story on anyone in the shadiest possible way. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">They're out for page clicks, nothing else. </span></p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    29 January, 2020 - 5:20 pm

    <p>As a very long-term spreadsheet user (dare I say developer?), there's a lot of bad things to say about the current version of Excel which would be fully deserved. Just one peculiarity: =MOD(2^42,3) returns #NUM! despite this being well within IEEE 754's domain of computability, which implies Excel is STILL using the same $#!~~Y non-NDP code it's been using for DECADES.</p><p>Just one thing, a small thing, but an indicator that in some places MSFT doesn't give a flying @#$% about quality. If some tech writers generalize too much from irritants like this, don't read them.</p>

    • illuminated

      29 January, 2020 - 6:16 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516687">In reply to hrlngrv:</a></em></blockquote><p>If it is an error then why not report it to MSFT? </p><p><br></p><p>Are you just quietly angry or did you do something about it?</p><p><br></p>

      • hrlngrv

        Premium Member
        29 January, 2020 - 6:37 pm

        <p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/microsoft/thread/forbes-biased#516700&quot; target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><em>In reply to illuminated:</em></a></p><p>The MOD problem has been reported to MSFT thousands of times. I even have a video clip of an Excel MVP asking the then-head of Excel development back in Excel 2007 days whether this would be fixed in Excel 2010 since by then (mid 2000s) the problem had ALREADY been around for 2 DECADES. The MSFT head's response was utterly predictable: <em>our customers have come to rely on that functionality</em>.</p><p>MSFT knows about this, or should unless it's company policy to ignore it and immediately forget any mention of it from outsiders. My anger springs from my certainty that MSFT really &amp; truly doesn't give a $#!~ about this.</p>

        • illuminated

          29 January, 2020 - 8:56 pm

          <blockquote><em><a href="#516705">In reply to hrlngrv:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>It could be backward compatibility or risk of breaking something bigger. </p><p>By the way MOD(2^41,3) works fine but 2^42 or higher does not. What is the upper limit you are looking for? This does not look like a bug to me but rather a low limit for this function.</p>

          • hrlngrv

            Premium Member
            30 January, 2020 - 1:01 am

            <p><a href="https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/microsoft/thread/forbes-biased#516713&quot; target="_blank"><em>In reply to illuminated:</em></a></p><p>This is getting to be a regular Excel forum.</p><p>Excel <strong><em>claims</em></strong> to handle all integers with 15 or fewer decimal digits. 2^42 = 4,398,046,511,104 has 13 decimal digits. Per <a href="http://calc.penjee.com/&quot; target="_blank">this IEEE 754 online calculator</a>, enter the HEX value 40000000000 (2^42), press MOD, then press 3, then =. Result is 1 (even powers of 2 all have MOD 3 = 1, odd power of 2 all have MOD 3 = 2). IOW, MOD(2^42,3) is well within Intel/AMD FPU capabilities. Excel doesn't use FPU calls to calculate MOD.</p><p>Frustratingly, Google Sheets does the same damn thing in order to achieve better Excel compatibility. Fortunately, Zoho's spreadsheet does calculate this correctly. FWLIW, IMO Zoho is the best online office suite.</p><p>Anyway, 64-bit floating point should be able to handle up to 51 mantissa bits, so 2^51 = 2,251,799,813,685,248 as dividend, 3 as divisor, and produce 2 as remainder. Actually further, as the MatLab expression <strong>mod(power(2,41:54),3)</strong> produces a 0 only for the last item, 54.</p><p>Finally, conspiracy theory: Bill Gates was so damn proud of his Cassette BASIC code for modulus that he insisted it be used in Multiplan and then Excel. When he retired from MSFT, he made MSFT promise not to replace his modulus code with FPU calls during his life time.</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        30 January, 2020 - 12:56 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#516700">In reply to illuminated:</a></em></blockquote><p>I reported a bug in the first Microsoft Visual J++ / JRE release in 1996. The bug was still there in 2004, when the product was retired. Reporting bugs to Microsoft doesn't mean they will be looked at or fixed.</p><p>The bug? A simple thing, not important, just that with basic Math it gives the wrong answer.</p><p>a=1;</p><p>b=-1;</p><p>a+=b;</p><p>According to basic principles, that should give 0 as the answer, Microsoft's JRE gives out 2.</p><p>(plus and plus = plus, minus and minus = plus, plus and minus = minus, minus and plus = minus)</p><p>Another time, I reported a bug in localization. There is a Win32 function in Windows 95 to return the month names in the locale language. January = Januar in German, Februar, März etc. It worked fine on my UK machine and the test DE and FR machines I had. We rolled out to over 50 countries. Many started asking why every month was called January?</p><p>It turned out, if you are using International English, the Win32 function got confused and just returned January for every month! In the end, the company took a decision to hard code the English month names, as the employees in each country had to be able to speak English anyway. I never heard back from MS on that one either.</p><p><em>Illuminated wrote: It could be backward compatibility or risk of breaking something bigger.</em></p><p>But you can't redefine math. The current range of Intel processors don't still have the infamous "Pentium Bug" because of backwards compatibility, they fixed the problem, because it was wrong…</p>

    • sajohnson53402

      Premium Member
      27 February, 2020 - 11:06 am

      <blockquote><a href="#516687"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a><em> This has WHAT to do with my comment. I have not said that Microsoft is not without fault in things… my post was about a slant in tech journalism. Report your issue to Microsoft, start your own thread, or whatever.</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

  • Pierre Masse

    29 January, 2020 - 9:31 pm

    <p>If it wasn't of Ewan Spence, I would never go on their site. That's how I follow tech; by going to see what some chosen individuals are saying. Paul, Brad and Mary Jo being a few of them of course. In the case of Forbes, their titles always seem like clickbait. It's annoying.</p>

    • Chris_Kez

      Premium Member
      30 January, 2020 - 1:13 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516717">In reply to Pierre Masse:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yep, it is generally more helpful to pay attention to specific writers rather than the sites themselves. That said, Forbes does seem to do an especially bad job in general. Twitter has been helpful in this regard, as it is relatively easy now to follow the best writers.</p>

  • Tiny

    Premium Member
    01 February, 2020 - 5:41 pm

    <p><a href="https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/forbes/&quot; target="_blank">Media Bias/Fact Check</a></p>

  • qaelith2112

    13 February, 2020 - 12:27 am

    <p>Yeah, I've been close to just filtering the whole site out of my news feed for a while and don't know why I haven't. It seems to be the same several writers who keep generating the most click-baity garbage. Gordon Kelly is the worst. He always has these awful headlines which use the word "warning" a lot, describe how many hundreds of millions are at risk, etc. The stories are so snarky — "Well, Microsoft has really blown it yet again, as everyone expects, what a crappy company". I don't see a whole lot of positive stories about Microsoft (or Google for that matter) — just negative ones. This guy is horrible.</p><p><br></p><p>And he also writes a lot of stories about Apple. Care to guess the proportion of positive to negative? Yeah. What you'd think. They're almost all fawning stories about how awesome Apple is. Then there is some guy — Evangelio? — who is REALLY in love with Linux. Maybe that's what his column is meant to be about, so I could be overly critical here. But one day Peppermint Linux is the be-all end-all best-distribution-ever that is perfect for everybody, and tomorrow suddenly there is some other distribution that's the most awesome thing ever. It's as if the previous day's flavor never happened. </p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    14 February, 2020 - 12:10 am

    <p>Do you mean Forbes magazine or the Forbes contributor network and elite empty water bottle collectors' team?</p>

    • sajohnson53402

      Premium Member
      27 February, 2020 - 11:01 am

      <blockquote><a href="#520483"><em>In reply to jimchamplin:</em></a><em> Sorry I didn't respond back sooner… I meant the Forbes "contributor" network</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

      • jimchamplin

        Premium Member
        28 February, 2020 - 11:48 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#523693">In reply to SAJohnson53402:</a></em></blockquote><p>All good. My post was just a jest anyway ?</p><p><br></p><p>But I think Forbes’ days as a publication you can trust are behind it. </p>

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