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"The reason why I haven't bought one yet it was because the speed advantage was there but not anywhere near the "several hundred times faster" that now Intel is talking about."
of course there is! current SSDs can give you performance that is several hundred times faster. but note, this involves ONLY things that require access to a disk drive. if you have several GB of memory, then you're not really talking about the speed of your applications. basically it affects startup. unless you're a video editor, e.g.
note, ANY SSD is replacing a *mechanical" read head in your hard disk with electronic switching. ANY SSD is hundreds of times faster, or more, for applications that seek all over a disk (like booting up your machine.)
i'm not saying Intel's stuff isn't good or great. i'm saying that its not the productivity leap you think it is: any SSD provides that. the gains in productivity - i can't imagine what those would be, unless you do massive database work on small databases. the main impediment to adoption has been supply/cost. the fact that this is all very novel to you shows that there's really nobody out there that would rather have the benefits of a 64GB SSD over, say, a 180GB hard drive if the cost of those benefits is an additional $1000.
"The next time you do anything with your computer think the time you spend waiting after you click or do something or load a big file. Every day things. Not just loading the OS that you might do once a day or even once a week."
only happens for me with Photoshop, and that's not work, its play. nevertheless, there are lots of things that you can do to speed up disk access with traditional disks. you can buy a RAID. you can buy a faster disk. you can reorganize your disks. (Some OSs will do that, to improve startup time.)
not knocking SSD. you seem to think i am. i'm saying Intel's work is just incremental improvement, not a revolution.
"But what Intel is claiming here is a gargantuan leap in performance. Several hundred times faster can not just be dismissed as merely "yes, it's faster"."
um, yeah i can. intel is claiming 50x faster, not hundreds. the hundreds come from the other guy who is comparing SSD to harddrive.
look, you access data on a hard drive, and it takes milliseconds. if its big and stored sequentially, it loads pretty quickly, but if your disk is disorganizes, that's lots of little millisecond seeks, and those add up. you replace a harddrive with an SSD and you get seomthing that hundreds of times faster than that, cool. now your disk accesses are lots faster. no mechanical arm to move. so what took 30 seconds before now takes a fraction of a second.
now intel makes that process 50x faster. hmm. so what took a fraction of a second now takes an even smaller fraction of a second. that's cool. but at that point, your enthusiasm is getting pretty geeky. and once the response gets below 50ms, it probably doesn't even matter, since humans will invariably percieve the response as instantaneous at that point.
"That kind of performance is a paradigm shift."
no, it is not. even SSD is not a paradigm shift. the main benefits of SSD are light weight and low power. good for laptops. speed is nice but for most, it won't be noticed and will have almost no impact on productivity. if it does for you, perhaps you need to change your OS.
"50x better and several hundred times faster are mind boggling numbers. If those numbers are true, the productivity throughput you will get by just replacing a HDD with a SSD will more than justify any cost. Current limiting factor in PCs is the hard drive. "Several hundred times faster" is exactly what everyone has been waiting for."
well the first part is true, but shouldn't lead to your conclusion.
yeah 50x better is fantastic, and hundreds of times faster is fantastic. but these are comparing Intel SSD to other SSD. On the other hand, comparing other SSDs to magnetic disks - the relevant comparision for the market - SSDs are already thousands of times faster than magnetic disks. Heck, even that is an understatement. If you're doing something, like booting up your machine, and the OS is seeking all over the disk, then a SSD is likely to be tens of thousands of times faster.
now in practical terms, what is this saying? its saying that if you replace the magnetic disk drive in your laptop with any old SDD, you're going to see a huge improvement in performance. booting up the machine, for example, will go from minutes to seconds. if you go from a current SSD to one of Intel's new ones, it will take fewer seconds. cool. but cool in a geeky way, as i said. the big performance boost comes from going to SSD, not to Intel SSD specifically.
longer life is also good. but its also likely overkill. most of what people put on their hard drives almost never changes. put a document somewhere and then edit it: its hardly likely that you're going to edit it more than 10,000 times during the lifetime of the machine, which current SSDs handle fine. ipods and digital cameras and so forth use this stuff all the time. to fail because you've written it too many times is rare. i've never seen it happen.
The talk from the IDF was that apps were loading instantly and productivity was a leap forward. When you add the amount of time you wait for your computer to do its operations due to its hard drive, and how much that time costs, you can easily see (especially now that NAND prices are down 70% yoy) that SSD costs becomes insignificant. All I can say is.... GIVE ME ONE NOW!!!!
you can buy it now. you could have bought it any time over the last two years. sony has laptops with SDD. apple's air can be bought with SDD. all of this is true of the CURRENT generation of SDD.
Intel's stuff looks cool. but its not a difference between slow and instantaneous. its a difference between instantaneous and "more instantaneous".
and the reason nobody buys this, and why nobody is pushing it hard, is because of the price.
"Endurance is a key factor that's been impeding the take-up of solid-state drives since flash memory wears out if it's written too many times."
this is all cool stuff, but cool in a geeky way and not significant for the market, i think, except in an "incremental improvement" sense. yeah, flash wears out if you write the same bits more than 10,000 times. but that hasn't stopped its adoption (the drives generally move things around enough so that the same bits are not rewritten frequently and 10k writes is a whole lot over the lifetime of a device). greater speed is cool, but hasn't impeded adoption because we're looking at replacing magnetic disks with solid state disks: the difference in speed is already several orders of magnitude. same for power.
the real issue is cost. buy one of the new macs with SSD and you pay $3k (versus $2k for one with magnetic drive), and you get only 64GB storage (versus 80GB for magnetic drive). comparing apples and apples, SSDs give you better speed, power utilization, weight, but for the cost of one of these drives you can get several terabytes of magnetic storage.
"The bad news is that Intel is flatly refusing to give details on pricing or a release date for actual devices."
cost is *the* essential issue that will drive the market for SSDs.
been playing this game since the last bear market, dood. hey, never meant to suggest that there are no bears. at least two that i know of. (me, soros.) but we're looking for higher prices as an entry point. heck, i've been waiting for this since february.
there's a beautiful huge h&s top forming on aapl. lets see how it resolves itself.
"Sorry Bears, dats just da-Way it is sometimes, OUCH!?"
what bears u talkin about? every single blog i read is bullish and expecting the market to go up before it goes down.
aapl chart sure looks like a very clean and obvious head and shoulders to me. can someone explain why i'm wrong? (i probably am, i suck at TA.)
but note that the boston area is anomalous: topped much earlier than the rest of the country ...
wsj moneyflow indicator showing huge negatives for big cap techs.
http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-mflppg-moneyflow.html?mod=mdc_leader
"that's only the start, wait for the fed and more importantly their wording. first of all will they meet Wall St.'s demand for 100? probably."
that's clear. they'll meet or exceed expectations.
"but any staement they are done will be met with a huge rally, dollar might begin to reverse too. but let's see if they do it right or screw it up again."
so the fed will say "this is the last time we'll acceed to street expectations". i have a hard time believing that. this fed has shown itself to be a follower, not a leader. and, unless the crunch really is all over, the next crisis will expose them as entirely clueless.
granted, depends on what one means by soon. you have to keep this in context: hussman has been bearish since at least 2005.
according to fox news, the fed just approved a rate cut.
weekend fed cut!
(note that this is what as just announced on fox news. i haven't seen it anywhere else.)
jpm buys bsc for $2!
for what its worth, even hussman thinks a bottom could be coming soon ...
Farewell, Ze'ev. You changed my life. TJ
"my feeling is DA BOYZ are going to pump the futures till they are close to even and then dump at right after opening"
so if you were da boyz and u saw that everyone else wanted to sell stocks tomorrow, you'd really BUY so that all the unwashed panicking masses could get better prices, at your expense?
now that's thinking like a criminal! the criminally insane ...
This precisely the kind of activity that the "Wrong-Way Joe-Public" engages in at or near important lows and then are falling allover themselves to get in the market at or near important highs.
oh i have no doubt that this happens at significant bottoms at all. in fact, i'm counting on it.
nevertheless, abduction is a logical fallacy: if A implies B then you can't conclude that B implies A. i.e. if there is significant mutual fund redemption at bottoms, that doesn't suggest that redemptions imply that we're at a bottom.
in fact, i'd say that all this bottom calling is a sign that the bottom is far far off. january of clinton's last year was also pretty messy in the market. and this mess is far greater than anything during the clinton years.
here ya go:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/18/redemptions-biderman-trimtabs-pf-etf-in_tt_0117trimtabs_inl.html?partner=yahootix
Fear was rampant among investors in the first days of this year. Based on the retail funds we track daily, we estimate that U.S. equity funds lost $12.1 billion on the first seven trading days of 2008. Meanwhile, U.S. equity ETFs redeemed $10.2 billion on those seven days. The outflow of $22.3 billion from U.S. equity funds and ETFs on the first seven trading days of the year more than reversed the $21.2 billion inflow in all of 2007.
rubbish? everyone here has (incorrectly) been looking for a bounce/countertrend rally for the last week. but there's a good reason that this hasn't occurred: as forbes noted yesterday, mutual fund + etf outflows during the first week of january alone exceeded total net inflows for all of last year. the market isn't going to bounce in the face of mutual fund redemptions.
Indeed, sounds like the perfect recipe for a Democratic landslide in '08.
re $RUT: yes but the etfs have been in the top 3 "selling on strength" stocks for the last three trading days. (i.e. big negative money flow.)
season's greetings, all.
and may all your xmases be xxx.
begged me to help her buy an apple laptop -- of course that's what daddy's do -- but I told her to wait until mac world around 1/17/08 when apple will probably introduce the new flash model of laptop and then she can consider whether she wants the new model at going price or the old model at probably a slightly reduced price.
apple reduce prices! ha ha! dat's funny.
sony's had laptops with solid state disks since last summer. its cool, like 2.5 lbs and 6.5 hrs battery life. if u wanna pay $3000 for a laptop.
heck, you can get a solid state 64GB drive to stick in yr dell laptop for $950 from dell. not hotcakes.
sell. apple products are expensive relative to peers, even in relatively strong currencies.
run your RHCOMPQ chart back another 5 years. there's plenty of room to the downside for a significant bottom.
"and there's NOTHING da-Boyz like more than crowds of SHORTS and CASH players sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to BUY with reckless abandon"
not true! they also like dip buyers who will during distribution.
although the huge volume came on declines ...
well he isn't the only one selling the banks:
WSJ Selling on Strength
http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-mflppg-moneyflow.html
This part seems kinda scary:
The agreement reached Friday makes several changes that simplify earlier proposals. SIVs will no longer have to get the approval of at least 75 percent of their investors if they want to participate in the backup fund. And the backup fund will not distinguish between the assets it buys from each SIV; instead, it will assign the same risk level to all their troubled securities.
"TJ, a tautologous predicate adds nothing to the thing defined."
yes, i know. that's why i used the word.
> "Dips of the 20wma of NASI below -400 (X) tend to mark
> significant bullish reversals (Y)."
>
> Here, Y adds information not found in X by itself. Subject and
> predicate are not the same. Hence the equation here adds
> knowledge.
it only adds knowledge if you've shown a correlation that isn't already implied by "significant reversal". i would think that "significant declines precede significant reversals" is true by definition. then its just up to everyone to decide how to quantify "significant decline" and "significant reversal". to do that, you certainly have to look back more than 4 years.
isn't this observation merely tautologous? a signficant decline must preceed a significant reversal, by definition of "reversal".
"While I respect Ron Paul and subscribe to his views, he is not a socialist and is therefore unelectable."
at this point, it is more important that he be heard and taken seriously. this race needs people who will speak to issues that folks are interested in, rather than fringe crises manufactured to rouse the support of narrow constituencies.
"Another gap up?Wow.Shorts lost BIG yesterday."
this surprises you?? i can not remember a day in the last months without a gap open.
think percentages. $1 on quid right now is almost 3%.
"it truly is where dollars go to die."
i thought dollars are where dollars go to die.
hey ajtj, wasn't 36000 your china top target? at this rate, they'll get there by thursday.
"Seems like the market has decided to ignore what is going on. Is CFC becoming a better short?"
This I don't know. B of A just announced that they're getting out of the mortgage business. And they have that investment in CFC. So its not clear that they can't get by ...
MBIA maybe?
i was just thinking the same thing. everyone is leaning the same way now. everyone speculating on oil exploding over 100, dollar diving, gold rising. it just feels like too much of a sure thing. but then of course, he's "easy ben", he'll do what he's told ...
hmm. well this is exactly what john mauldin has written about this week, as well. this is funny/scary:
http://www.safehaven.com/article-8706.htm
skono4:
well i'm no expert (or even amateur in trading credit default swaps, so i've attached a description from the urbandigs nyc real estate blog. i've actually seen a better description in another blog (i'll probably find the reference to it later on), where it was argued that when these things are trading below about 50, there's an agreement that the underlying bonds are ultimately worthless, and the value is just a bet on time until default.
what you're looking at in that chart is the index corresponding to the BBB tranche of some residential mortgages that were securitized in the first half of 07. defaults cascade up from the BBB- tranche through AAA.
"The ABX Index is a series of credit-default swaps based on 20 bonds that consist of subprime mortgages. ABX contracts are commonly used by investors to speculate on or to hedge against the risk that the underling mortgage securities are not repaid as expected. The ABX swaps offer protection if the securities are not repaid as expected, in return for regular insurance-like premiums. A decline in the ABX Index signifies investor sentiment that subprime mortgage holders will suffer increased financial losses from those investments.
"This index is in total FREEFALL; look at the chart on the right showing you the steep selloff in the past week or so! It all started around Oct. 11th, the same time that the mortgage insurance stocks (I'll get to this in a moment) started their freefall as well! Coincidence? No way! It is a clear sign that something is brewing in the credit world as investors remove bids for anything associated with subprime investments. In my opinion, the overall stock market reacted at a delay to this brewing uncertain situation.
"CNBC's David Faber even started to acknowledge the plunge in the ABX markets mid-day Friday as the markets were in the process of a steep selloff. A bit too late if you ask me, as this situation could have been discussed earlier in the week, to raise concerns that a credit storm may be brewing again!"