Posts from — June 2008

My old ATI Radeon 9600XT (Ugh, I need a new video card) really looks like a snail now. NVIDIA has just reclaimed the title of fastest graphics chip producer with its release of the GeForce GTX 280. These boogers tip the scales with 240 cores running at just under 1.3GHz. Pair this with 1GB of RAM and you have one smokin’ video card. If you plan on getting your grubby hands on one of these, NVIDIA will be giving them away in “limited quantities” at $649 a pop.

Our boys at Gizmo tested it out on Company of Heroes, Assassin’s Creed, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and Cysis using dual ATI Radeon X1900 XTXs connected as a Crossfire pair as a baseline.

Here’s the juicy parts:

“Company of Heroes and Assassin’s Creed really didn’t look or work any better on the GTX 280 than on the Radeon cards, which is what I expected. Any game that fits within the limits of an older graphics card simply doesn’t have room to improve on a newer model.

With the GTX 280, Age of Conan could be played with maximum quality and anti-aliasing enabled, producing significant improvements in visual quality during gameplay. Still, I don’t think I’d have replaced the graphics card just for this game, even if I spent most of my life in it– as I expect some people will do.

The real payoff for the new card was in Crysis, where the GTX 280 made the “high” quality settings practical. As good as the GTX 280 is, however, Crysis can still demand more than the card can deliver. The full display resolution was only achievable with antialiasing turned off, and even then, I was only getting about 40 frames per second in the game. At 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution, I could enable four-sample antialiasing. This produced a more pleasing visual appearance but less fine detail.

True Crysis addicts will likely want to use multiple GTX 280 cards using NVIDIA’s SLI technology, which (like ATI’s Crossfire) lets multiple cars work together to drive a single monitor. Up to three cards per system are supported, but that would require a heck of a system to provide enough PCI Express bandwidth and power, and a lot of money as well. That’s about $2,000 worth of graphics cards alone.

Like Age of Conan, Crysis looks great on the GTX 280. The graphics still aren’t lifelike, but it’s getting easier and easier to ignore the shortcuts taken to produce real-time 3D and focus on the gameplay. Interestingly, neither of these games really seemed to stress the GTX 280 even though they were running near the card’s limits in some respects. The fan on the card never seemed to be very loud. That could just be a tribute to the fan, I suppose, but I’ve used plenty of dual-slot graphics cards over the years and some of them have been loud enough to drown out the sound effects from the games.”

Courtesy of Cnet News

Bottom line: Sweet video card, but a bit pricey for all but the most hard-core gamers and trust fund babies. Neither of which I am (unless one of you trust fund babies wanna send one of these my way…)

Dear John,

I’ve been saving my Entrecard credits for some time now and have finally horded enough to place my humble card on your (pricy) Entrecard widget for a day. Since you’re probably new to my blog, I’d like to first say welcome, and second, show you around a bit. So kick off your sneakers and come on in!

My name is Jeremy Waller. I’ve been blogging now for about a year and a half. I’m a bit of a finance nerd, tech junkie and entrepreneur. After you subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll get approximately 3 posts per week on these topics (or whatever else I decide to blog about. It’s my blog. I make the rules) freshly picked from the ripe fields of my mind. I’m a part-time blogger and just don’t have the time to be a posting machine like you are, but the posts I do put out are mighty tasty (Dot Com Dump anyone?)

Go check out some of my ramblings and, before heading out, why don’t you join MyBlogLog Community and become one of my followers on twitter (Just in case you were wondering, I’m one of your followers.) I’m giving some link love to anyone who follows me.

Thanks again for stopping by!

Sincerely,
Jeremy Waller

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton

There are millions of blogs in the blogosphere and, unless your blogging about teaching your parrot advanced calculus, thousands in your niche. Right now, the market is flooded with other blogs just like yours. What is it that makes your different? Why should I follow your blog on making money/SEO/funny videos/whatever over the next guy (or gal)? Like the wise Cecil Beaton says above (actually I’m not really sure if he was wise, but that’s a darn good quote up there) you don’t want to be a play-it-safer. Make your blog different.

Take a controversial position – 2+2 = 7?

It’s easy to follow the crowd. It’s easy to find some popular topic and blog about it just like everyone else. You love twitter? So does everyone else…including me >blush<. Try standing out. Write about the 10 things you hate about twitter or tell people how they can get rich by dropping out of high school to flip burgers.

People don’t want to hear the same thing from you that they’ve heard from everyone else. (Let me throw a marginally off-topic nugget of wisdom in here also – if you are regurgitating news you’ve read somewhere else, spice it up – add your thoughts, add a video on or find a complementing post from a fellow blogger. That’s what I did in my post a few weeks ago on how expensive text messaging is.)

Make your design unique

To the first time visitor to your blog, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. I don’t care if you’re Agatha Christie (world’s best selling fiction author, BTW), if your site is ugly, people won’t stick around to read your potential award winning post on the sleep patterns of sheep.

Upon starting a blog, most people set-up WordPress and begin blogging with the default theme (very boring mind you.) Some get a little more adventurous and Google “WordPress Themes” and grab the coolest looking one from the first site they come to. So now you and 6 million people are using the same template (look at you, you’re so unique now!)

This leaves you with two viable options – purchase one or customize one that someone else has done most of the hard work on. Purchasing a template is a great idea, but not always an option for the low-income, part-time blogger. I prefer to customize a pre-made template. I find a template that I like and modify some of the images and formatting to fit what I’m looking for (that’s a whole other topic, more on this in a future post.)

The point is, most first time visitors will only glance at your page for a few seconds before moving on. Be sure to grab their attention with a unique blog design.

Make your blog you

When it comes down to it, your blog has to be your blog. Why is blogging so popular? Because people are interested in getting information from real people, not a faceless news site. Whatever your topic is, your blog is really all about you – your interests, your writing style (voice) and your personality. You is what will make your blog stand out from the crowd – even if you have the dullest blog in the world. This is a huge reason that the biggest bloggers are the biggest bloggers. People like them – their interests, their writing style and their personality. I hope my personality shines though on WallerBlog dot Com (I feel like it does anyways.) I like to be a little snarky, a little nerdy and a little outside-of-the-proverbial-box in my ramblings.

If your goal is to have a blog where you’re the only reader (family doesn’t count) then be the same as every other blogger out there. Otherwise, you have to be different. These ideas above are by no means a complete list on how to make your blog stand out from the millions of others out there, but it’s a starting point. Go, be different!