Hi. Do you have any more info on that? A screenshot maybe? And ideally the URL that's being called. Will help us find the bad ad (if there is indeed one).
Yeah, I don't think we have such a public statement at the moment - and maybe that's something we should rectify. All I can tell you is that native content/advertorial would be very, very clearly labelled. We would never try to sneak anything through.
In general, Ars is _very_ above board. Our reputation and authority are everything. That's why we're one of the very few publications that doesn't do native advertising - we're just not sure how you can do that, and still somehow expect the reader to trust what you write.
But yeah, I appreciate that just saying "trust us!" is a bit difficult on the Internet today :)
Heya. I'm the editor of Ars Technica UK, where this story was originally published.
It's not native advertising. The author just really likes the 911. Ars doesn't do native advertising/advertorial. We do some sponsored stuff, but those posts are clearly marked.
I'm an equal-opportunities OS user. I have two Linux boxes (Slackware!), two Windows boxes, and an OS X laptop within arm's reach of my desk. I was just poking fun at the Year of Desktop Linux thing -- it's a bit of a meme/running joke in tech blogger circles.
Yea, I actually played with that sentence a few times. I thought about making it clear that Firefox and Thunderbird weren't called Firefox and Thunderbird when they were part of Mozilla Suite... but the codebases are the same, I think. Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line, to keep things clear :)
re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).
I agree, there is a lot more that tech blogs could do to help the reader. The problem is, that kind of extra detail isn't really possible without specializing -- and if you specialize, you limit the size of your audience.
The other problem is writing the stories: it would be awesome to have a writer for every kind of topic, so that every story can be tackled with complete background knowledge... but that's just not feasible. Instead, most tech blogs have writers with 'beats' that they cover -- but even then, if the 'green technologies' writer is out for the day, someone else has to tackle it.
So for the most part, we tech bloggers just try to get a good grasp of the technology, and then boil it down into a form that's easy to read and understand. The resultant story quality is variable and depends a lot on how much time and effort you put into it, and your background knowledge -- but I like to think I do a fairly good job :)
re: your first point -- I looked into the MBP tear-down on iFixit when I wrote this post. They identify a chip that is 'probably the Thunderbolt controller' -- but yes, I don't think they identified if there was a separate DisplayPort controller, or whether it's built into the Thunderbolt controller.