Stardock involvement with Neowin FAQ

[articuno1au 1,264]

I found Neowin through Stardock. Shortly afterwards I stopped following "TweakTown" due to pathetic journalism and a few other complaints. I haven't looked back and visit Neowin 5-10 times a day (depending on boredom).

I think that this thread is a good thing. You are simply offering to clear the air. Transparency is a good thing especially when involving journalistic integrity.

The only thing I would add is it seems a little harsh to suggest that MS did something "wrong" here (not @Neobond, just in general). It sounds like a **** up that was magnified by a bigger **** up by your providers. Losing a month's worth of content seriously hurts though :\

In all, I enjoy this forum. I find one or two of your news posters to be bottom feeding retards who need to be slapped upside the head; for the most part however, this site is great and I'll continue to link it to my friends and colleagues when appropriate :)

Kudos to Stardock for helping you guys get out and on your own. Keep up the good work :)

[deadonthefloor 1,746]

I can recall vaguely, a post from the early days when the Stardock involvement was announced.

Something like "Yay! we're a real company now!"

I signed up much later, but since I found you guys, Windows has been a pleasure.

I've learned a lot and I respect everyone in the community, even if my posts don't reflect that.

Cheers!

[The Teej 203]

Personally I think you exposed yourself to criticism when you jumped in and attacked rfirth's perfectly reasonable comment. You've got to admit it doesn't look great when the owner of a site with such strong links to Stardock jumps in to defend them so quickly.

It also seems strange that Stardock's opinion warrants a news article given the fact that they are a fairly irrelevant company.

To be fair, I've seen plenty of "Company X has Y opinion on Company Z and it's <insert recent action here>" posts before - usually Samsung vs. Apple, Microsoft Vs. Google, etc. Granted, normally the big wigs fighting it out, but I've also seen "smaller" companies have their opinion posted on the front page before - as I have on another unbiased news sources on other websites. Quite frankly, I'm shocked people have gone this far. My only solace is the hope that people are only doing this because they love Neowin and don't want to see it get "degraded" by possible outside influences like Stardock and it's oodles of noodles - if that isn't the case and they're just causing a ruckus for the sake of causing a ruckus, then that's extremely bad and at the very least should read the rules and play within them.

Either way, I'm glad to see Neobond come in and clear up any confusion - it's always nice to see proactive measures taken to clear up these sorts of issues. Keep up the good work guys :)

[The_Observer 293]

;thanks for the info.

[episode 626]

Why did this come up again? I miss something?

[Grinch 188]

Huh, interesting read Neobond.

Kind of a harsh thing that server wipe, but that was 8 years ago at least. Truthfully I've never felt that Neowin in any way has been influenced to write about anything other than what the editor's want to write about. The best articles are usually the ones written by people who want to write it.

[SoCalRox 246]

Neobond, I've enjoyed the site almost from the start- long before I had a user profile here- and see no problem with this. And back in the day when Stardock was doing OS/2 Object Desktop and such, I passively knew Brad, in the sense that we were frequenters on a CompuServe forum run by Will Zachmann. Brad is first class.

Keep up the good work here..

Oh- and I still have links from the sites you used to update people when the site was down.

[Steven P. 14,234]

The part about "Why did Stardock get involved"... You have noted that they did this as a result of Microsoft's harassment (?) of Neowin. But what was their motivation? Why do they care?

To put it simply Brad Wardell is a fan of the site, he has been registered here since 2002 and he was in a position to take Neowin from a hobby site into a proper LLC. We had loads of offers (between 2002 and 2005) for the same thing but they all amounted to losing control of the ownership of the site. We still get offers for buyouts :p

 

Wow, had no idea. What was the exact date that Neowin had official monetary involvement with Stardock? I mean, you had to have an official date when you when "pub" to "pro".

It became effective from 1 March 2005, but we started 'talking' in November 2004.

 

PS: Sorry to bump this, but I had to have another read after this was posted (with the disclaimer at the bottom) :P 

[James7 659]

For me, Start8 made my Windows 7 upgrade to 8 (in a virtual machine, of course, as I have been using Linux since 2007) enjoyable.

 

Frankly, I'm delighted Stardock is associated with Neowin.

[+therealDamien 589]

i dont know if it was a memory from a alternate universe or what.

 

But I remember reading that neowin servers got water damage from the building they was in . and that stardock came to the rescue and let neowin keep the servers in stardocks building.

 

pics of fans drying out computer parts.....

but i cant find this information anywhere.

[Brandon H 3,148]

oh dear, I remember that fiasco. those poor servers, it was the AC unit leaking on them if I remember correctly.

[DaveLegg 1,012]

23 hours ago, therealDamien said:

i dont know if it was a memory from a alternate universe or what.

 

But I remember reading that neowin servers got water damage from the building they was in . and that stardock came to the rescue and let neowin keep the servers in stardocks building.

 

pics of fans drying out computer parts.....

but i cant find this information anywhere.

Actually that was the datacenter Stardock were in too (which is why we were there). After that incident, they moved elsewhere (and we went with them - until we moved to AWS a few years ago).

 

Somehow despite water having to be poured out of the servers, we managed somehow to only lose one of them, the other three or four came back to life after being left to dry out at Stardock's offices for a week.

[Haggis 1,008]

@DaveLegg is Neowin completely in AWS now?

 

I am certified in AWS lol

 

[+fusi0n 2,071]

23 minutes ago, Haggis said:

@DaveLegg is Neowin completely in AWS now?

 

I am certified in AWS lol

 

I would like to also know this. 

[DaveLegg 1,012]

We have been for the past 3/4 years

[Brandon H 3,148]

yep the servers in use now are listed on the About Us page

[DevTech 1,518]

I just clicked on this disclaimer link for the first time.

 

I don't own any Stardock products but both their Desktop Customization products and games look innovative and well designed.

 

So, my minor concern is the exact opposite to the purpose of the disclaimer. It is almost like you have worked TOO hard over the years to maintain a distance and I would like to see INCREASED coverage of Stardock in terms of in depth technology etc.

 

Particularly the technical insight that Stardock must have about the Windows UI. Like the rest of us they must have endured the gulag of "The Sinofsky Years" and must be aware of the resurgence of "windows eye candy" in the Composition APIs, the reforming of the WPF Team, the hard embedding of XAML from C# into C++ Windows API level code etc.

 

Would be fantastic if Neowin could exert some influence on Brad to suck some tech info out of Stardock for an article or two (or many...)

 

Also would be nice if Stardock had a GitHub account and contributed a tiny bit back to the community, but that's another story... (Although there is a "Junior Developer" listed there as Xander Wardell - any relation to Brad or just a fan name? https://github.com/Prestophobia?tab=repositories) 

 

Ah, brain neurons, et tu Neowin? https://github.com/Neowin

 

<Please delete this post or  move to another thread if my extended musings from my original single sentence idea are inappropriate for this thread>

 

[Barney T. 2,335]

^ Thanks for your thoughts, DevTech!