Month: January 2017

(credit: US Air Force)

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis ordered reviews of both Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and Boeing’s development contract for the Air Force One replacement program. But apparently the DOD and Lockheed were able to fix any problems with the program over the weekend, as President Donald Trump declared the F-35 program was now in “good shape” at a Monday meeting with small business leaders, which was broadcast by CNN.

Speaking of Lockheed, Trump said, “We’re cutting the price of their planes by a lot.”

Trump said that he had been working on the F-35 program since after the election, and “I was able to get $600 million off” the next block of F-35s being built.

Jim Resnick

It was a day I dreaded at the last minute, but not for any expected reason. Driving BAC's single-seat track-day weapon, the Mono, on a course I'd never seen before was child's play compared to the filter through which I'd have to do it. I threw my back out 36 hours prior, with the long muscles in my back clenching up stiff and unyielding like mandolin strings. Merely walking upright required an unsightly posture for which I was both embarrassed and pissed off. There wasn't enough ibuprofen in the world.

But the Mono didn't care, and that's what mattered. Much more race car than road car, the BAC Mono comes from that specialized region of the automotive fringe that seeks the closest thing to an actual thoroughbred professional race car, but for mere enthusiasts who missed the professional racing driver boat and have normal careers as bankers, lawyers, software engineers, or journalists. The demographic for track-day specials like the Mono is nonsensical until you realize that the entire family of car diseases—and the track-day strain of it in particular—cares not for demographics. Cater to the passionate and the passionate will come.

(credit: Alpha six)

Backblaze, the low cost cloud backup and storage provider, has published its drive reliability numbers for the final quarter, and full year, of 2016.

The company uses self-built pods of 45 or 60 disks for its storage. Each pod is initially assembled with identical disks, but different pods use different sizes and models of disk, depending on age and availability. The standout finding: three 45-disk pods using 4TB Toshiba disks, and one 45-disk pod using 8TB HGST disks, went a full year without a single spindle failing. These are, respectively, more than 145 and 45 years of aggregate usage without a fault.

The Toshiba result makes for a nice comparison against the drive's spec sheet. Toshiba rates that model as having a 1-million-hour mean time to failure (MTTF). Mean time to failure (or mean time between failures, MTBF—the two measures are functionally identical for disks, with vendors using both) is an aggregate property: given a large number of disks, Toshiba says that you can expect to see one disk failure for every million hours of aggregated usage. Over 2016, those disks accumulated 1.2 million hours of usage without failing, healthily surpassing their specification.

Enlarge / Preliminary version of AT&T's Project AirGig antennas. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T says it is "in advanced discussions" with power companies to start trials of a new broadband technology in at least two locations by this fall.

This is an update on the Project AirGig that AT&T announced in September 2016. AirGig is a wireless technology even though it depends on the presence of power lines. Antennas that are placed on utility poles send wireless signals to each other; AT&T says the power lines "serve as a guide for the signals," ensuring they reach their destination. AT&T says the wireless signals could be used to deliver multi-gigabit Internet speeds for either smartphone data or home Internet service.

Trial locations have not yet been announced, but today's announcement says, "One location will be in the United States with others to be determined in the coming months." There's also no word on when commercial deployment might begin, but AT&T seems to be excited about the project.