Have you thought about recruiting some new writers to fill in the gaps? There's got to be some out there.
There are, but that's a very difficult thing to organise and get started. I spoke to one guy recently but it didn't work out. There's kind of a reason that the best guys in this industry writing content are the ones that have been around the block since pretty much day zero, plying their trade, still at pretty much the same sites they were at in 2002. 5+ years is a long time doing this stuff, and it buys us something extra. So we're still all around doing it for a reason, and finding guys that know what they're doing to help us and eventually step into the shoes is difficult (but not impossible, some great 'new' guys are around doing their thing, plugging away).
That said (and here's where I start talking to everyone, including F'n Big P), if anyone thinks they can write something good enough to go up here (and hey, if I can do it....), they've always been free to drop me a line. Read the following and do so.
Our biggest challenge has always been to do something different, but putting things in place to do that well is really
really difficult. Nobody really gets it. Why compete on grounds that sites with more resources and great writers stomp all over already, anyway? For example, we partner with The Tech Report precisely because Scott is already arguably king of that particular castle, and I've no desire to tread on his toes when he does it better than I would anyway for that particular audience. I wrote for that kind of audience (and lots of you are at B3D, which rocks) for years before I hit B3D, and he beat me down back then too, like he does today. That's A Good Thing(tm), too, because it focused me to do this instead.
But again, with that desire to add something different to the pages you read comes a reluctance from the people who usually help tech sites prosper (with sponsorship and ads and the like) to maybe do something different with us and advertise to a different set of guys and gals and what have you, because we're not like your regular established sites. There's not really anyone willing to help us do our thing, because we don't show our pages to millions of graphics card customers a month (and maybe never will) or pump out 20 reviews a week. Quantity gets the ad dollars, not quality. Heck, ask Scott how hard it is to write your ass off and take your time pushing out real quality, but still make a living out of it and do something non-generic. He'll use blue language and gesticulate wildly, which coming from a quiet, softly spoken guy shows how hard him and I and the others try.
So that's all a real struggle, with knock-on effects.
I didn't finish the performance analysis of R600 beyond what I touched in the arch piece precisely because at the time it would have been TR-style, and TR got there on day zero and did it better and deserves those reads.
B3D plays in a different space and looks at a GPU from a different angle, with different tools and a different mindset. We do very different things with industry and financials, and the forums too (that much is obvious if you've spent any time around here). We need to complement TR with extra goodies, not compete with the same old. WaltC is right about that, sort of, Ghu help us all.
Holding my hands up, I'm definitely remiss in not doing our arch analysis properly for RV670 and G92, but that's arguably all that I've missed providing that you can't get elsewhere, in the last 6 months, other than 3870 X2 where we'll dissect multi-GPU. It's not
too much to catch up on, and it's what I'm doing now. The rest of Team B3D continues to assist when it's able (Arun's kicked some ass with his brand of news and analysis recently, and he's championed the forum reorg), but remember we're still man down now that Tim's off to NVIDIA soon.
Believe me when I say that behind the scenes when it looks like nothing's happening around here, things
are, just slowly (sadly), and somewhat because of all that stuff above.
We soldier on
Read that WaltC-length missive, complete with his trademark
and still want to help? Give me or G a nudge in private.
