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Submission + - Japan Economy Growth Rate Jumps To 1.7% (ft.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: In a refreshing turn, Japan's economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.7% in the first quarter of 2016, easily beating expectations of a 0.3% rise. Rising Gross Domestic Product reverses a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2015 and means Japan has avoided another technical recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. The faster than expected pace of growth suggests the Japanese economy is managing to shake off the effects of a slowdown in China and a stronger yen — at least for now — with domestic demand having more momentum than previously thought. Robust growth data are likely to mean a smaller fiscal stimulus by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which was poised to act if the data had been bad.

Submission + - Backblaze Unveils Fresh HDD Failure Statistics (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The storage services provider Backblaze has released its reliability report for Q1/2016 covering cumulative failure rates of mechanical hard disk drives by specific model numbers and by manufacturer. The company noted that as of this quarter, its 60,000 drives have cumulatively spun for over one billion hours (100,000 years). Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is the clear leader here, with an annual failure rate of just 1% for three years running. The second position is also taken by a Japanese company: Toshiba. Third place goes to Western Digital (WD), with the company's ratings having improved in the past year. Seagate comes out the worst, though it is suspected that much of that rating was warped by the company's crash-happy 3TB drive (WD30EFRX). Backblaze notes that 4 TB drives continue to be the sweet spot for building out its storage pods, but that it might move to 6, 8, or 10 TB drives as the price on the hardware comes down.

Submission + - US Fighter Jets Make Their Debut on Finnish Soil

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The United States military is bringing a number of F-15C fighter jets to Finland for joint exercises with the country's armed forces, which kick off as we speak. This is the first time that US military aircraft have engaged in such large scale maneuvers in Finland, even though the exercise would considered trivial by US standards. Between six to eight McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle aircraft and up to 100 servicemen from the US Oregon Air National Guard will take part in the joint air exercises, which include education and training operations. The exercises are organized by Karelian Air Command in Rissala, in eastern Finland. "Cooperation with the US is close and our cooperation on a practical level has been and will continue to remain tight," Mika Varvikko of Finland's Ministry of Defense told the national broadcaster YLE. In Finland, the arrival of the US military has stirred mixed reactions, with a number of advocates of the time-tested non-alignment policy threatening to organize protests.

Submission + - Linux Background Buffered Writeback Architecture Improved (lkml.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: In the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Jens Axboe has issued a patchset to address a long-time problem of the kernel not handling background buffered writeback smoothly. Instead of working in the background, the current architecture can actually hamper other tasks and interactivity greatly. Axboe gives an example of running the command dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=10k and trying to start Chrome at the same time. The web browser basically won't start before the buffered writeback is done. On server oriented workloads, an installation of a big software package can adversely impact database reads or sync writes. The new patchset adds some simple blk-wb code that keeps limits how much buffered writeback we keep in flight on the device end. Jens Axboe welcomes testing of the improvements. If you are sick of Linux bogging down when buffered writes are happening, then this is for you, laptop or server.

Submission + - Skylake Power Management Not Fully Implemented in Linux (dreamwidth.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: One of the reasons why someone might have a laptop to be able to do things like use it on battery, and power consumption is an important part of that. Intel Skylake CPU architecture continues the trend from Haswell of moving to an System on Chip -type model where clock and power domains are shared between components that were previously entirely independent. This means that the system cannot enter deep power saving states unless multiple components all have the correct power management configuration. Well, on Linux they do not, finds out Matthew Garrett. The deepest power saving state he can get into is PC3, despite Skylake supporting PC8. Because of this, he estimates using about 40% more power than should be necessary. Nobody seems to know what needs to be done to fix this, and public documentation on the power management dependencies on Skylake is missing.

Submission + - Japanese Can Soon Choose Their Electric Provider for First Time (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Japanese consumers will be able to choose their power providers for the first time Friday as part of a decades-long opening of the county's electricity market aimed at weakening the grip of regional power utilities. The opening is being promoted as a way to lower prices and create opportunities for foreign investors in the nation's low-voltage electric market, giving greater choice to roughly 85 million households and small businesses, which account for about 38% of domestic consumption. The liberalization follows earlier reforms for high-voltage consumers. The changes may spell the end of the dominance of Japan's power market by 10 regional utilities (including the well-known Tokyo Electric Power Co.) and open up the field for 250 operators.

Submission + - Microsoft Breaks System File Checker Utility

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Another lemon hits Windows quality assurance team. The operating system comes with a useful tool called System File Checker (sfc.exe) that can be used to verify the integrity of system files, and if any corrupted files are found, they can be replaced with original copies from a hive. Microsoft has recently acknowledged a bug with SFC in Windows 10 version 1511 (November Update), explaining that the company is already working on a fix that should be released very soon. Currently the error message "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them." can be a false alarm. When you install Windows, it drops in a certain version of opencl.dll. However hardware drivers may also install their own replacement version of opencl.dll. SFC does not take this into account.

Submission + - Finnish Passenger Train Traffic Opens for Competition (yle.fi)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Finland's railway network operator VR (Valtion Rautatiet) may see its traditional monopoly on domestic passenger train traffic weakened next year when new legislation will introduce limited competition to the railway sector. Chief Minna Kivimäki from the Ministry of Transport and Communications says that preparations are in their final stages, and that widespread interest among railroad tycoons has already been generated. More than ten different parties have indicated that they would be interested in joining in, many from abroad. The ministry says that the measures to introduce direct competition would concern the country's entire rail network, with the exception of the local Helsinki region transport area. One domestic company that has expressed interest is the Scottish discount bus firm Onnibus, which already runs a successful bus operation in Finland. The terrain of Finland's railway network is unique and a solution has to be created that suits the country's traffic volumes and distribution best. Kivimäki promises that quieter railway routes with fewer passengers won't be forgotten in the partial-privatization process, either.

Submission + - Chromium Being Ported to VC++, Compiler Bugs Fixed

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than the Chromium web browser. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of WebKit, there are over a hundred other open-source projects which Chromium incorporates by reference, totaling more than 48,000 C/C++ files and 40,000 header files. As of March 11th, Chromium has switched to Visual C++ 2015, and it doesn't look like it's looking back. The tracking bug for this effort currently has over 330 comments on it, with contributions from dozens of developers. Bruce Dawson has written an interesting showcase of some VC++ compiler bugs that the process has uncovered. His job was to investigate them, come up with a minimal reproduce case, and report them to Microsoft. The Google and Microsoft teams get praise for an excellent symbiotic relationship, and the compiler bugs have been fixed quickly by the Visual Studio team.

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