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One Month Site Update

By Van Smith

Date: August 16, 2001

Note:  To reduce bandwidth, this story has been moved from the front page.

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We have been up for exactly a month today.  Our site statistics look fantastic, although several days worth of log files were lost.  Even so, we had about 60,000 unique visitors to VHJ and about 700,000 page requests -- even though we don't break our articles up into multiple pages and we don't attempt to subvert page caching.  If we had done such things I suspect that our hit count would be about ten times higher.

We have also gotten wonderful personal endorsements, both from readers and industry insiders (some of them are big, big names).  Thank you.  Your kind comments are appreciated.

I have effectively invested around $25,000 of my own money into starting VHJ, even though I knew that current economic conditions are about as bad as they can get for such endeavors.  But this site is a heartfelt enterprise.

I did not expect the donation model to be sustainable and it hasn't been.  Those people who have given have been generous, and I want to thank them here again, but the numbers of those giving have been very few, and that's fine.  The economy is tight for everyone.  Even so, the money we received for donations is only enough for us to cover web hosting for a few months.

We have stimulated a lot of controversy already and I don't much care for the continued personal attacks that have carried on for years.  I understand that some of my work has directly impacted the earnings of a few people such as Rambus investors.  I am sorry for that, but I have always taken my job seriously and have invested a great deal of time and effort to be honest and rigorous while never shying away from telling the truth, as I see it, bluntly. 

I think time has borne out that my strongly worded pronouncements have not been made frivolously -- for instance, Fortune magazine retrospectively skewered Rambus recently using essentially the same information I broke more than I year before.

But it's time to look after my family.  I will probably not be posting much, if anything, over the next few days as it appears we are going to be moving and we need to scope out the town we are moving to.  I hate to be saying goodbye to my home and my home state, but times are tough.

There are so many things that I need to cover, but I have only finite time.  I am testing the VIA P4X266 chip and it looks impressive.  Intel should be encouraging VIA because this product will help them achieve P4 market penetration, but I suspect Intel fears VIA for reasons I'll outline later in an article.

I think AMD's position is still strong, though I think they should focus their aggression more on product introductions and a little less on price cuts.  The SiS735 is looking good and I have a slew of motherboard, video card and other reviews that I need to tackle.  Also, the Archos Jukebox 6000 is looking a little better with the latest firmware update.

I need help maintaining this site.  If you have any articles or ideas, etc. I am open to them.  I want this site to be where people can fight the system, even if we don't earn a dime in doing this.

Oh, and I will get around to introducing COSBI.  It's just a monster project that means a lot to me.

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Pssst!  Our Donation Page is up.

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