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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: niceguy767 who wrote (14311)	12/2/2008 7:05:19 AM
From: NightOwl	Respond to of 14464

Uh... Well Mr. Niceguy767... Once you slap that hot towel on Washington's face and get the first cup of hot coffee down its collective throat... what exactly is it that you want done? Sounds as though you are about to force us to bite The Hoover Bullet all over again... Surely you can't be serious?! But... just in case you are... can you tell us what the relative level of debt was "At the end of WWII" compared to the end of 2008? 0\|0

To: niceguy767 who wrote (14311)	12/2/2008 7:28:40 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14464

SanDisk says it has a "Extreme Flash File System" and... *Secret Sauce* for its planned SSD: SanDisk thinks it can solve all three problems. By adding bits to a NAND cell it can increase capacity with 2-bit multi-level cell (2x MLC) technology here and higher-capacity 3- and 4-bit MLC coming. It has also come up with its Extreme Flash File System (ExtremeFFS) to accelerate random write speed by up to 100 times and so be much closer to sequential write speed. But it is not enough. SanDisk's Senior Director of Marketing, Don Barnetson, revealed this at a Tokyo press conference on 27th November, saying: "We need one more step of improvement besides ExtremeFFS." He didn't say what that was but he did say: "Please wait a little while for our announcement ... We are preparing a technology to solve these issues." That sounds pretty confident and senior directors of marketing don't tease us so unless something is real and pretty close. Why is it needed? An exacerbating factor is that NAND chip size is shrinking at the same time as cell bit count is rising; a hard trick to pull off. SanDisk 2-bit MLC flash is being made now with a 43nm process while 3-bit MLC chips have been made with a 56nm one. SanDisk is introducing its 3-bit and 4-bit MLC 43nm chip technology now, at the end of 2008, with an even smaller sub-40nm process coming into play towards the end of 2009. The 3x MLC 34nm chips have 32 Gbit capacities with the 4x ones having 64Gbit capacities. Increase the cell bit count and capacity per chip shoots up. Shrink the die size and capacity per wafer goes up. Costs goes down in both cases. That's what SanDisk wants, what it needs, but customers aren't going to buy the SSDs unless performance is overall way better than hard drives. The word is that 3x MLC NAND has lower rewrite performance than 2x MLC. Presumably 4x would be worse again. That's what the new technology is needed for, to make 3- and 4-bit MLC flash acceptable in the performance stakes. theregister.co.uk I do love "needy" people so... Although... it would be nice if they weren't so dang slow. But then... I guess that's why they need another "technology" to juice those write speeds so much. 0\|0

To: niceguy767 who wrote (14311)	12/3/2008 6:13:27 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14464

Well Mr. Niceguy... Mayhaps I misunderstood your meaning? Could it be that your railing was less against the fact of spending... and more against the "objects" of the spending? If so I couldn't agree more. Paulson has used the same methodology in dealing with this crisis as was employed to generate the crisis in the first place. Others have seen the folly of that methodology: “Right now we do not have the courage to invest in financial institutions because we do not know what problems they may have,” Mr. Lou said as part of a panel discussion on the second and final day of the Clinton Global Initiative conference here. Asked whether China might pursue economic policies aimed at saving the world, Mr. Lou said that the country’s leaders had a narrower focus. “China can only save herself because the scale of China is still rather small,” he said, adding that while China has more people than any other country, economic output is still low enough that the Chinese economy is not yet big enough to have a big effect on the global economy. “If China can do a good job domestically, that is the best thing it can do for the world,” he said. Mr. Lou’s comments represent the clearest statement yet that as global financial markets have plunged this year and economies have slowed, the attention of China’s leaders is turning inward. For several months, there has been a noticeable difference between East and West in expectations of China. Financiers in the United States and Europe have frequently talked of ways to use China’s $1.9 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to rescue Western banks, most recently with speculation that the China Investment Corporation might invest more money in Morgan Stanley, which ended up turning to Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group of Japan instead. But financial leaders in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, with closer links to decision makers in Beijing, have consistently maintained that having been burned on their initial financial sector investments, the Chinese are very leery of buying more. Mr. Lou confirmed this. *** Mr. Lou said that the sheer pace of new initiatives and new rules issued by Western regulatory agencies was disconcerting and made it even harder for him to choose worthwhile investments. “If it is changing every week, how can you expect me to have confidence?” he asked. nytimes.com The US hasn't even "owned up" to either the practical or theoretical deficits in the US financial sector, nor have we made any headway in creating a Post-Bushwarus framework for the regulation of financial institutions. Anybody "buying" into the US financial sector at the present time is part of the problem... not the solution. 0\|0