| How one reviewer approaches the art of reviewing |
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Jan. 6, 2006)
I've been receiving a fair amount of e-mail from people who are sure that I don't know Linux, but their notes are really showing me that they don't know reviewing. I don't hold that against them. Few people know how reviews really work.
First, a review is not just an opinion.
My opinions, for example, are that vi is better than EMACS; KDE is better than GNOME, and so on. Now, I can back up those opinions, but when we get right down to issues like that, it's really what feels right for you.
In writing, those examples really should be in a column, not a review.
That doesn't stop people from judging something by an unfair criterion in a review, but they shouldn't do it. For instance, you shouldn't judge an operating system's speed by just measuring how fast it boots up.
In a review, you also need to give context and facts for your opinion.
For example, several folks have told me how you can set up a superuser, root, account in Ubuntu. To date, I've received three methods on how to do it, and I can think of at least one more that no one's told me about yet.
Ha! Just as I was writing this story, someone sent me a note about the fourth method.
Well done!
Linux being Linux, I'm sure there are still other ways. But none of that is really the point. I wasn't reviewing Ubuntu on how it might be set up; I reviewed it on how its developers want it to be set up.
I mean, come on, this is Linux. With some work, I can make Ubuntu look and act just like Red Hat with Bluecurve as the interface. Heck, with some work, many of us can make any Linux distribution look and act like any other Linux distribution.
The point is, of course, that Ubuntu's developers very deliberately decided to use sudo, instead of a root account. So, I reviewed the "fact" of their design decision and gave the "context" of why this approach doesn't work for me.
Another person wrote to me complaining that Ubuntu is a fine server package. No, it's not.
Of course, you can add anything to any Linux distribution, but Ubuntu is clearly meant to be an easy-to-use desktop, not a server.
For me, if I can't turn a Linux system into a full out LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) server with a generous helping of JBoss, JOnAS, or Apache Geronimo and Apache Derby on the side without much trouble at all, it's not a server distribution.
Of course I can turn Ubuntu into a server. Again, this is Linux we're talking about, but it's once more getting away from what the distribution developers had in mind with their design.
No one has brought this one up about my Ubuntu review, but another point I often make about reviews is that you review the standard deployment. You don't go in and tweak its performance.
This is a long-time favorite trick of those people who show that Windows is better than Linux at "fill-in-the-blank" benchmark. Once you start tweaking things, you're no longer measuring base performance; you're measuring how good you are tweaking.
I can take Server 2003 and make it run rings around any Linux and Samba at CIFS (Common Internet File System) file serving. I can also take any 2.6 Linux you'd care to name and any recent version of Apache and have it leave a base installation of Server 2003 eating its dust.
All that really shows, though, is that I happen to know a lot about getting the most out of one kind of network file sharing on two different platforms. It says zippo about how fast either one is natively.
On that note, I'll bid adieu for today with the hope that the next time you read one of my reviews you'll know more about where I'm coming from.
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
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