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Origami...
does that mean it will be paper thin, and can be folded up into a crane or peacock when not being used?
Inquiring minds want to know...
So with all the Origami stuff going on, I get a friend calling me up about a "1-2 week" last minute trouble-shooting gig on a product "about to ship". Requirements?
PCI-X, GigE, PowerPC, Xilinx and...Embedded WindowsXP.
Actually, I was waiting for Filet Mignons.........
Pit-traded cattle and hogs now available through IB. Anybody else just dreaming of this day? ;)
Overnights looking moderately perky...11,200 tomorrow? :)
Aren't insane IPOs supposed to be the hallmark of a sector topping? Time to start shorting crude? Oil services?
SURGUT, Russia (Reuters) - Rosneft President Sergei Bogdanchikov is courting investors to build the Russian state oil company's $20 billion initial public stock offering into the main event on the world's emerging markets this year.
Speaking to reporters in a luxury jet high over the oil fields of Siberia, Bogdanchikov said Rosneft was considering placing shares on up to seven exchanges, including London, Tokyo, New York and Frankfurt.
VIX options launched on Friday. So far, looks like they're attracting considerably more trading volume than the VIX futures products. And, predictably, so far they're causing a headache for anyone looking to analyze them with traditional pricing techniques.
VIX is ~12 - yet the VIX of VIX is ~90.
http://www.ivolatility.com/options.j?ticker=vix&R=0&top_lookup__is__sent=1
The basic difficulties in trading VIX like this persist: volatility is incredibly well-modelled, and there is no easy arb between VIX futures and spot VIX.
IB does not have them available through the screen yet, but that should change by Wednesday. Will have more comments then.
Added 2-bit March butterfly on AAPL: 62.5/65/67.5. A little tighter than usual but...
Also added April 50/55/60 fly.
Take the example where the insider information is negative. The only way that can be valuable to Cohen is if the company has not been forthright with shareholders. IE, its been "inappropriately positive".
Like GM: all the negative poop in the world couldn't give him an edge since everyone knows the company is a POS. But if he had some on, say, AAPL...
I don't see where you get that.
Are you saying the not releasing non-public insider information to shareholders is lying?
Thanks for the link - you know you who you are - will be an interesting train wreck to watch. One of those posters - not going to say which - already made a complete ass of him/herself on another site doing something similar.
Gotta love the geniac who suggested throwing out 4 YEARS worth of data as "outliers".
That's very curious. Basically, Biovail is saying it lies to shareholders. Otherwise...Cohen could gain no advantage.
from Paul Kedrosky
Biovail and Material Nonpublic Information
A key quote from the multi-billion-dollar Biovail lawsuit against SAC, et al., for alleged stock manipulation:
"[SAC founder Steven] Cohen uses his enormous
financial leverage to support SAC's trading
strategies by demanding access to material
nonpublic information from the financial
institutions with whom SAC does business,
including nonpublic inside information
concerning public companies and other clients
to whom those institutions owe fiduciary and
other duties of nondisclosure."
>>> A nation goes into mourning. Canada goes a third straight game without scoring a goal and falls from hockey medal contention. <<<
They will go over it. In time.
But it's all their fault. If they had just supported the iraq war, the soccer gods would have favored them.
Isn't that kinda useless without being grounded and completely surrounding the person wearing it within the copper strand mesh?
This is pretty funny - my GMail filter kicked mail from Google's own Picasa service into the spam box. I guess it's comforting knowing that's at least possible! :)
This is kinda strange, following on the heels of the "No WiFi For You!" story out of that small Canadian college...
According to our tailor, he can now get a number of his premium fabrics with copper strands embedded in the material. Ultra-fine stuff, you can't see it or feel it, but apparently enough people have expressed concern over the sea of radiation we're swimming in to request such a thing!
Well this was inevitable...
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classic breakout signal on $BKX
XLF - Jun - 35C - is the currently preferred play on this one.
Thanks to Shack for this one - classic breakout signal on $BKX, the financial index. Will be looking for an ETF sector play on that one...
And to top it off, Chelsea gets whooped at home by Barcelona. Ok, if I had to pick a side to lose to, it would be Barca, but still, why today?
Ugh.
A nation goes into mourning. Canada goes a third straight game without scoring a goal and falls from hockey medal contention.
Unbelievable.
Quite a little collection of Mar expiry here: QQQQ from 43 all the way out to 46. Within one Jumping Jelly Bean day of cashing some in, now.
Another couple of hours like this and the DIA 113C go ATM. Here's hoping!
From the land of hypothetical...if I was Jobs, and I wanted to retire from the hardware biz altogether, I'd move the platform to Intel.
VAX and the economics of microprocessors
John Mashey is known in computing circles for a whole raft of things, among them are his work on the design of the original MIPS architecture, his work at SGI, and a long history of in-depth posts in the newsgroup comp.arch. (Some Googling will net you this "greatest hits" list, for instance.) David Kanter of Realworldtech has taken one of Mashey's posts and, with the author's permission, fleshed it out with more data and graphs for posting as a multipart series. Part I of the series is now available, with Part II on the way.
One of the things that really struck me in reading the retrospective was just how prominent a role completely non-architectural factors play in the stories of the successes and failures of various processors. It's not that I wasn't aware of the impact of these factors, but the article really brings them out in a way that's extremely useful for those of us outside the industry itself who live in a world of stats, benchmark numbers, and the kinds of architectural comparisons that Ars and other sites periodically produce.
Not to disinter a dead horse and beat it a bit more, but one of my goals in covering the Apple Switch was to bring out how these kinds of economic and political considerations can and usually do trump purely technological ones. I'm willing to concede that I may have tried to swing the pendulum a bit too forcefully back in the "it's the economies of scale, stupid, and not performance/watt" direction, but it's certainly the case that these things can and often do turn out to be the main factors in major decisions about technology—especially when they're combined with inter-company conflicts that are tied to specific personalities and management styles.
Moving on, the other striking feature of Mashey's history was the absence of a non-technological factor that, as of the past decade, is now playing an ever larger role in determining the fate of all types of technologies: the law. Specifically, intellectual property law and anti-trust law are two looming mountains on the current technological landscape, whereas in the period that Mashey covers they're more like hills. If, at some far distant point in my life, I sit down to write some kind of historical look at the computing industry in the 90's and the early decades of the 21st century, an enormous part of that story will be taken up with lawsuits and legislation. No doubt this is one reason why it will be the story of the permanent loss of American leadership in high technology. Know this fact, and get used to it: the world is now chock full of people who are the next John Mashey, and 90 percent of them are Asian.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060218-6215.htm
A small nation celebrates a tremendous Olympic achievement...
http://www.index.hr/clanak.aspx?id=307637
Executive Translation: by winning a gold today, Croatia's Janica Kostelic has set a record for the most gold medals won by an alpine skier in Winter Olympic history. And still only 24...
The Feb DIA calls closed. The Feb QQQQs obviously expiring DOA.
Dow building on yesterday's post-recovery high and it all seems so...peaceful out there. Like nobody is watching and nobody cares. The DIA and QQQQ Feb positions remain live, looks like the DIA will win out the ITM battle.
Photos of the First Few Microseconds of an Atomic Blast
Wow!
Porn for the nuke buffs.
Reminds me of a Hunter Thompson article where he describes hanging out with his pyro friends who like to blow up old cars with multiple sticks of dynamite. Thompson wrote of how time would stop from the moment they lit the fuse until the explosion.
Naturally, today's red couldn't happen before yesterday's green...argh.
Patience.
OT: 0Ooo getting cold... now if you had moisture with that you could be on the slopes doing powder rather than ice.
Weather animation west coast & Canada
There's a reason they call it the bleeding edge. :) EOM.
The truth behind HDCP and video card support
The sad, pathetic tale of how the content industry is trying to make the PC as unfriendly as possible to high definition content has another chapter. In August I told you about the unfortunate decisions by the HD DVD and Blu-ray groups that would ultimately spell disaster for owners of existing LCD displays; without support for HDCP, you probably will not be able to view HD content from the studios on your PC (or TV, for that matter). The take-away was simple: don't buy a new display unless it supports HDCP.
Users worried about "future-proof" purchasing options also started to think about other components in their PC arsenal. Video cards, for example, would also need to support HDCP, and so many conscientious buyers thought that buying cards with support for HDCP would mean that their cards could carry them into the future. Unfortunately, they were wrong. For while many video cards—including offerings powered by ATI and NIVIDIA GPUs—advertise themselves as having support for HDCP, they don't actually support HDCP. How can this be?
FiringSquad caused quite a ruckus when earlier this week they reported that existing retail cards do not and will not support HDCP. The good news is that this report is only half true. With regards to shipping cards, they are correct: no matter what a box's feature list may say, no video card supports HDCP fully at this time. The reason is simple: there's nothing to support. Until the specifications for HDCP are completely finished, implementing HDCP in the video card is impossible. For those of you who have been following the technological follies of the content owners that want to usher in this new era of HD content, then you know this is nothing new: AACS, the next-gen access control scheme that will be used by both HD DVD and Blu-ray, is still not finalized. That's right: with players and products being hyped as "just around the corner," the cornerstone of the roll-out still isn't finished. Still.
Video cards that support HDCP will have to be programmed with HDCP keys while they are still in manufacturing. ATI confirmed to me that it will not be possible to patch or otherwise update cards without keys through software. Thus, any card already in the marketplace will never support HDCP, no matter what it says on the box.
The future will not be so bleak, however. ATI's PR manager, John Swinimer, told me that that retail cards will eventually be available once the technological specifications are finalized. Thus, reports that HDCP per se will kill the DIY market are exaggerations: within a year it should be possible to buy HDCP cards at the retailer of your choice.
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of ire reserved for the like of ATI and NVIDIA, both of which have done little to inform consumers that "HDCP support" means something other than, well, HDCP support at this time. Talking to anonymous sources close to the scene, the fiasco has resulted primarily from communications problems between the licensing authority, the access control spec people, and everyone else. In short, it sounds as though the next-gen security spec is a moving target. I must say that I find my source credible, if only because we've seen the exact same ambiguity from the Blu-ray camp when talking about mandatory managed copy.
A future so bright, you'll have to wear HDCP-complaint shades
We're in the midst of a a top-down, all-points-covered attempt to lock down every part of the HD viewing experience. In a nutshell, the content industry wants to see video encrypted end-to-end and passed only among approved devices that obey content access rules defined by the industry. This is not limited to the PC. Our in-depth primer on CableCARD revealed that the lock-down will also come to include the video streams from cable providers, too. In both cases, we see a disturbing trend: not only is the technology all about locking down the content, but the implementation is becoming locked down as well. For example, while CableCARD has been heralded as the great breakthrough that will allow for Home Theatre PC nirvana, the fact that CableLabs has to certify entire machine designs means that the do-it-yourself market is likely out of luck.
I suspect that the content industry may be in for a big, nasty surprise when all of this truly hits the public in the face. Never before has the rollout of the "next big thing" been so encumbered with built-in obsolescence, user-unfriendliness, and hypocrisy. Groans the world over will be heard when early adopters learn that their TVs won't play Blu-ray movies. Folks who bought computers recently will be disappointed when they learn that their hard-earned money couldn't buy them end-to-end support for HD content playback.
When you tell so many people that their electronics won't do what they should do—what they paid for them to do—many of them are not going to like it. The content industry is going to walk away from this with a certain amount of egg on their face and a fat stamp of "greed" burned into their foreheads. And a few will will realize the ultimate inanity of it all: that while the studio's HD content won't play on their TV or their computers, the HD content put out by the pirates will.
And that, my good friends, will be a fine example of irony.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060214-6177.htm
In a way, it's kinda beautiful...
http://www.rapidnewswire.com/atom.htm
Trend-long signal live on the Dow. Hunting...
DIA Feb 110C
DIA Mar 113C
EDIT: Mar 113C filled.
EDIT: Feb 110C filled.
Big if. :) NDX lagging Dow, badly, guessing Dow is being impacted by 1 or 2 issues.
Trivia: PS3 was not supposed to have a graphics engine at all. It was *all* supposed to be Cell.
Intel to go four-core in early 2007
News reports are hitting the wires that Intel plans to release a four-core processor for two-socket systems in late 2006 or early 2007. The quad-core chip, codenamed Clovertown, will bring lower end systems into the eight-core realm. A later quad-core chip, codenamed Tigerton, is planned for higher-end four-socket systems.
The accelerated introduction of a quad-core design will put Intel on track to match AMD in the all-important "number of cores per chip" metric that is replacing GHz as a single, consumer- and press-friendly number that can be easily used for meaningless horserace-style comparisons. You can get a taste of that in the coverage at SFGate and Reuters. The Register, on the other hand, calls it correctly in pointing out that Intel's much delayed next-generation frontside bus, called CSI, is MIA for 2007.
As I pointed out in a post on Intel's major 2006-2007 weak spot, these four-core processors will be crammed into a socket that's fed by an out-of-date front-side bus. This bandwidth problem will be exacerbated by the fact that Intel still won't have an on-die memory controller, which means that memory traffic will be flowing to all four cores over that single, dated FSB. It's not pretty, and it won't be fixed until sometime in 2008. This will give AMD plenty of time to leverage HyperTransport and the Athlon64's on-die memory controller to maximum advantage in the server market.
When both AMD's and Intel's quad-core chips first come out and are benchmarked against each other in real-world systems, I think it's a safe bet to say that the AMD machines will outperform the Intel boxes on bandwidth- and memory-intensive server tasks. This is a shame, because Intel's core architecture is by all accounts fantastic. (We'll know for sure when Merom comes out.) To have it hobbled by these kinds of system-level design missteps is unfortunate.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060211-6160.html
More details leak about Playstation 3
Last month, Sony shipped Playstation 3 development kits to a select group of third party game companies. Despite a tight veil of secrecy courtesy of signed non-disclosure agreements, some tidbits have leaked out from various anonymous sources.
The first, not-so-surprising revelation is that the development kits do not look anything like the proposed PS3 hardware. Rather, they are contained in largish towers, similar in size to typical desktop PCs. This was the same for the early PS2 dev kits, and the first Xbox 360 development kits were actually re-branded Apple G5 towers, so this is not a huge surprise. More interesting is the fact that the sleek, curved PS3 models that have been demonstrated at various trade shows are actually empty shells, and it is not clear how Sony will manage to squeeze all the required components into the advertised case. Some developers have concluded that the existing case does not even have room for a 2.5 inch hard drive, suggesting that Sony will be forced to bump the dimensions of the box somewhat before release.
The controller on the dev kits is apparently a standard USB gamepad, and developers are writing games with the assumption that the control scheme will remain unchanged from the PS2's DualShock configuration. The word is that Sony is changing the look of the controller after receiving massive negative feedback over their original "boomerang" concept design.
As far as the hardware itself, developers are suggesting that it is on par or slightly more powerful than the Xbox 360. This does not come as a huge surprise to those of us who have studied the released hardware specifications of both consoles, but it does put a slight damper on the enthusiasm generated by Sony PR. One thing that has been lost, perhaps not forever but at least from the first generation of PS3 games, is the boast that developers would be able to generate killer visuals at higher resolutions than the Xbox 360 was able to handle:
"Sony wanted 1080p, but we're working at 720p
and 1080i, same as on the Xbox 360. Even with
[final hardware] in mind, reaching good frame
rates at 1080p with next-gen graphics is almost
impossible. Instead many developers, ourselves
included, are reworking so they run at 720p.
PS3's output takes care of upscaling it - so no
native 1080p, but it still looks killer."
"Unlike Xbox and PS2, where Xbox had a host of
built-in effects that were a generation ahead
of PS2, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are
same-generation machines. One doesn't have
additional effects over the other - 360 can do
the same effects, just not as many of them
simultaneously and with less geometry [because
of the speed difference], but memory
bottlenecks can kill part of the PS3 speed
advantage anyway... the overall visual
difference it makes will depend a lot on the
developer's skill, and how much time and money
the publisher spends on a game."
>>> Limit orders on the table: buy QQQQ @ 38.32 and 37.45. <<<
That's a big downdraft... if they fill.
Limit orders on the table: buy QQQQ @ 38.32 and 37.45. Close Feb 41P @ 2.05.
Let's see what happens...
Have you seen the Huffington photochop where it turns out Harry is actually Scooter? Reminds me of back-home, where "hunting accident" was a time-honored way of getting away with murder.
NOTE: Not accusing Cheney of any such thing. I'm sure it was an accident, he has much more discrete options at his disposal.
Come on....a little waterfall here would be great. Nothing major, just down to $39 or so.
Good point.
The question now is whether Cheney will be able to find anyone who will go hunting with him. Rich or otherwise.
WLD Have you ever done any quail hunting? Were they hunting for Dan?
Does Cheney go hunting with anyone who doesn't already have a fortune?
Yeah, probably, lol. It's certainly a contrarian play, maybe one of the most contrarian plays available right now.
Imagine the positive story that could be spun about GM if they IPOed or otherwise sold a profitable part of the company AND convinced Congress to (essentially) nationalize some of their other liabilities...
Long term GM is almost certainly toast. But at some point over the next year I have no trouble at all seeing shorts get seriously jobbed.
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