I admit I get overly excited about new solid state drive technology. But I think this OCZ Vertex 2 is the future of high speed storage for gamers. Getting 550 MB/s reads and 480MB/s writes is quite a feat. It’s essentially 4 SSDs in a RAID 0 with an onboard raid controller. SSDs are great candidates for RAID because they get a nearly linear speed increase when you add them to a RAID 0. A regular spinning disk RAID will only be able to approach the average seek time of the drives for random access.

What’s interesting to me about the article is that they have to show their performance as a simulation. The reason is that the SSD RAID outruns the SATA 2 interface that all current motherboards use. To get the performance they show in their simulation, you’ll have to have to buy a new SATA 3 motherboard which can run at the required 600MB/s. Probably the better alternative is for them to to just build their drive onto a PCI-e card and bypass the limitations of all the SATA interfaces.

This article brought up some interesting ideas to me in how we bailout consumers from the ongoing financial crisis.

When I think about it, having the government continually lower borrowing costs to push mortgage rates down and having Fannie and Freddie continue to buy up mortgages at these low rates seems like one of the best solutions to the overall problems. Surely it is better than bailing out the Big 3 automakers. By encouraging affordable refinancing, it will help spur home buying and refinancing. It rewards people who are continuing to pay their mortgages because it lets them refinance. It helps people who may be facing a large ARM reset. Those two things will help keep people in their homes without rewarding people who over-leveraged themselves during the housing bubble. And fewer foreclosures will slow the down spiral of home values. Maybe it even keeps a few more real estate people employed. Refinancing also helps resolve problems where mortgages are tied up in sliced and diced into derivatives and can’t be modified.

Lenders have already learned their lesson and are much more selective about making loans, and the collateralized debt market has already imploded and won’t recover for quite a while. So the largest systemic dangers have already been scared away.

If the government is actively pushing down mortgage rates at least it seems like the right way to go about re-inflating the markets. Plus, I want to save some money.

I’ve been playing Eve online for a month and I am impressed. I’ve signed up for a few more months. It is the most complex game I’ve ever played. I haven’t played much WoW, so it’s possible that in total WoW is more complex. But I’m sure that from the perspective of any one individual character, Eve is more complex. Wow skill trees are confined to specific classes, while Eve doesn’t have that restriction, though it does make certain things easier for certain classes and races.

I have just been flying around and blowing things up. I haven’t done much of the mining, manufacturing, corporation management types of things. The economy is supposedly one of the most interesting in an MMO, and I look forward to investigating it some more.