You know whats worse than todays pilots flying ancient airplanes, a brand new extravegantly expensive F-35 that cant match an F-16 or F-15E built in the 80s, planes built for a fraction of the price.

The F-35 might be an OK successor to the F-117 as a mostly stealth small bomber, but all indications are its completely worthless in a close in dogfight, you just have to read the leaked report from a recent test against an ancient F-16.

The F-35 simply doesnt have enough power, cant turn fast enough and bleeds off to much energy. The pilot found one manuever he could use to shake the F-16 but it consumed so much energy he had to run away and try to get the energy back.

The F-35 will also be horrible in the close air support role at which the A-10 excels, again at an even smaller fraction of the price tag.

F-35 is a classic jack of all trades and master of none.

There might have been a place for a few hundred of them but for the U.S. and every allied air force to think they are going to use one horrible design to replace every fighter they have is complete insanity. If it ever reaches full deployment, one accident or problem and the entire western world will have no air force. At least the Navy has the sense to keep the F-18 alive.

The F-35 is a tribute to the extent Lockheed has seized total control of Congress and the Pentagon, they could literally sell the Air Force actual turkeys for a hundred million a pop and get away with it.

Those B-52â(TM)s still flying today is because Northrop, has also seized control of the Air Forces generals made the B-2 so expensive and so few in number the Air Force canâ(TM)t afford to risk it in combat.

Besides the U.S. has been fighting people living in mud huts who have no air force and air defenses for over a decade, B-52â(TM)s and A-10â(TM)s work incredibly well in that role.

For renters it is pushing out people with lower incomes. Not everyone (due to rent control in areas), but still quite a lot of people are getting pushed out I think.

For existing lower-income homeowners it creates an opportunity to get a really good price for their home and then move to cheaper environs. (aka Gentrification).

The remaining pre-existing homeowners are not necessarily going anywhere. Prop 13 means that their property taxes are not changing radically and living costs are otherwise on a less steep ramp.

Gentrification is a two-edged sword, for sure, but I'm not sure that anything can really be done about it. The people protesting the changing nature of their neighborhoods are in the same economic class as many of the people selling and moving away. A person from group A can't really force a person from group B to not sell their home.

-Matt

Blame posix for making all the goddamn pthread *_timedlock() calls take an absolute real time instead of a monotonic clock.

In anycase, I'm not even going to bother doing anything fancy. I'll let the system suddenly be one second off and then correct itself over the next hour. I'm certainly not going to do something stupid like letting the seconds field increment to 60. Having the ntp base time even go through these corrections is already dumb enough. Base time should be some absolute measure and leap seconds should just be adjusted after the fact in a manner similar to timezones.

-Matt

The only TRIM use I recommend is running on it on an entire partition, e.g. like the swap partition, at boot, or before initializing a new filesystem. And that's it. It's an EXTREMELY dangerous command which results in non-deterministic operation. Not only do SSDs have bugs in handling TRIM, but filesystem implementations almost certainly also have ordering and concurrency bugs in handling TRIM. It's the least well-tested part of the firmware and the least well-tested part of the filesystem implementation. And due to cache effects, it's almost impossible to test it in a deterministic manner.

You can get close to the same performance and life out of your SSD without using TRIM by doing two simple things. First, use a filesystem with at least a 4KB block size so the SSD doesn't have to write-combine stuff on 512-byte boundaries. Second, simply leave a part of the SSD unused. 5% is plenty. In fact, if you have swap space configured on your SSD, that's usually enough on its own (since swap is not usually filled up during normal operation), as long as you TRIM it on boot.

-Matt

I mean, come on... just when the graphics performance starts to get good, people all want bigger displays which halves the performance and then want to go even BIGGER and halve it again.

My perfectly good Sandybridge i7 can't drive this shit. Time to rotate in another workstation. Again.

Grumble.

-Matt

I'm going to guess that he didn't file a gift tax return with the IRS for the millions he gave to person X. In which case he's up for tax evasion.

There's a certain degree of paranoia involved here as well. But this law isn't even the most onerous in the U.S. The worst one is the police confiscation laws that were originally intended to be anti-trafficking tools but now tend to be abused rather badly.

http://www.npr.org/sections/th...

-Matt

I think currently demonstrated ship-mountable railguns can emit a 7+ pound projectile at Mach 7. More to the point, these can be kinetic projectiles, meaning no explosives required, and there's more room for other things like, oh guidance systems.

Good luck evading that.

-Matt

Laser guns, meh. Limited to line-of-sight. Railguns on the other-hand are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Designs for Navy vessels now have to focus more and more on supplying power (as in electricity).

-Matt

"Heartbeat monitor with a deadman's switch which blows away all my encryption keys."

ok... Maybe not.

"Car keys, house key, lead-line isotope container for when I need a distraction."

Hmm. Let me redact that.

"Car keys, house key, LED flash light, tag with 2D barcode with a virus URL in case someone is too curious."

There. That sounds reasonably sane.

-Matt

If you want to run applications completely controlled and filtered by Apple, yea go with that. Apple doesnâ(TM)t like something about some app you want to run then you do without that functionality. Apple wants you to use their crappy version of some app so they kill the competing apps, which one are you gonna be using?

I am fine with the prospect of using mobile devices to do everything assuming they have peripherals and expansion, but the prospect of Apple and Google controlling all software, not so much.

No, its a stupid recommendation. Spinning rust doesn't last very long on a shelf. It will rapidly go bad mechanically if you keep switching between shelf and active. SSDs are far superior and data retention is going to remain very high until they really dig into their durability. If you still care, there's no reason why you can't just leave them disconnected from a computer but still powered... they eat no real current compared to a hard drive. SSD-based data retention should be 30+ years if left powered... impossible to test as yet :-)... but no reason why not.

However, for backup purposes there is still an issue of cost. Using SSDs for bulk backup storage can be expensive... it wouldn't matter for a big business so much but cost can be a big issue for individual users.

SSDs don't go bad the way HDDs do. With a HDD maximum reasonably-safe life is 3 years whether powered or not (and swapping between powered and shelf will radically reduce its durability). With a SSD only durability really matters. A business can easily justify buying the required SSD storage in bulk with a marginal cost calculation, but it might be too big a hunk of change for an individual.

Personally speaking I still use HDDs for my backups, for reasons of cost, but I expect in the next few years that will change as SSD prices continue to drop. I just bumped up from 2TB x 3 (active, on-site backup, off-site backup) to 4TB x 3. My storage needs are going up more slowly than the technology is dropping in price. The two will meet in a few years and I'll be 100% SSDs. I'm already 100% SSDs for everything else. No point even contemplating a HDD any more except for bulk backup storage or software test rigs.

-Matt

Actually, more and more SSDs today *DO* have power loss protection. Take it apart... if you see a bunch of capacitors on the mainboard all bunched together with no obvious purpose it's probably to keep power good long enough to finish writing out meta-data. Cheaper to use a lot of normal caps than to use thin-film high capacity caps.

-Matt

This is not related to the SSD. If your cpus are pegged then it's something outside the disk driver. If it's system time it could be two things: (1) Either the compilers are getting into a system call loop of some sort or (2) The filesystem is doing something that is causing lock contention or other problems.

Well, it could be more than two things, but it is highly unlikely to be the SSD.

One thing I've noticed with fast storage devices is that sometimes housekeeping operations by filesystems can stall out the whole system because the housekeeping operations assume the disk I/O will block when, in many cases, the disk I/O completes instantly and essentially does not block, causing the kernel thread to eat more cpu than intended.

-Matt

These tests explicitly state that the SSD is rewritten until it reaches its endurance rating before the retention test is done. At that point the flash in a consumer would not be expected to retain data unpowered for more than 1 year.

If you write your data to a fresh SSD once, multiply the number by at least 10.

-Matt

The ignorance in that comment is staggering. Which is perfectly normal for the average canadian post about Québec. The notwitstanding clause allows a law to bypass SOME elements of the Charter of Rights. That clause was put in the constitution AT THE INSISTENCE of western provinces in order to allow them to DISCRIMINATE AGAINST their french minorities. The first time it was used in Québec was 25 years ago, by the extremely FEDERALIST liberal party. And that ended 20 years ago because such laws cannot last more than 5 years. So, no, Granby outlawing online insults has nothing to do with the notwithstanding clause, nor is not specific to Québec alone; it can happen anywhere else in Canada.