If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux? The best thing I did for my parent's computer (they are 6000 miles away) is to replace their WinXP computer with one that runs Linux that's configured to open a web browser immediately upon startup - no login required.
The computer also ssh'es to my public server and opens a tunnel back to their computer so I can connect via VNC if needed.
When they got a new camera, I was able to remotely set up a script so If they plug in a memory card from their camera, it copies the images from the card automatically and uploads to an online photo album.
This covers 100% of what they use a computer for, and completely eliminated their recurring virus infections.
100Gbit is super expensive as soon as you are not "local". If you need higher bandwidth, you might consider building you data center accross the street of the other one.
I didn't say it's cheap, but when 10Gbit interfaces are common in the datacenter, 100Gbit doesn't sound like much of an interconnect between datacenters. A mid-scale datacenter probably hosts thousands servers (25 racks is around 1000U of space) and petabytes of data, so it wouldn't take many customers replicating data to the other datacenter to saturate the 100Gbit link.
How does an opt-out even work for apartment buildings? At my apartment, they just drop off a big stack of phone books at the front entrance. There are no names or addresses on them or any other way to tell which one is for which person. Usually they just sit there for a couple weeks (with maybe one or two taken by residents) until the building manager gets tired of seeing them and he tosses them in the recycle bin. Since they seem to drop off more phone books than there are apartments in the building, I can't believe they take one out of the stack to account for an opt-out.
It seems 90% of the time I can't use the IVR since for that kind of thing I would have used the web page, which means I am now stuck trying to get a human which is getting harder and harder. I suspect that this is intentional, the longer you have to play around with the IVR the shorter the queue wait times are in the call center.
If you want a human in the IVR, just hit 0 repeatedly as soon as it picks up. They will transfer you directly to a CSR - every.. single.. time..
IVR programmers know that everyone knows that trick, so now "0" will often take you to the main menu.
utter nonsense, the gensets at a nuke plant are huge and anchored to structural concrete, they aren't going to shake loose and fall off. are you imagining some pull-start unit on a cart for your house?
No, I'm picturing a 30 ton genset sitting on top of a structure designed to withstand a magnitude 7.9 quake getting hit with more ground movement than it was designed for when a 9.0 quake hits offshore, resulting in support structure failure.
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
Sometimes what is best for the Nation is not what is popular.
A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. Paraphrased, Elmer T. Perterson, The Daily Oklahoman
"In a democracy, people get the government they deserve"
It's the "right thing" that helps his handlers and Washington lobby groups and other special interests, but by and large it's the American people who are getting screwed over in this economy. If he appears to be doing the "right thing" it's only to get more votes or brownie points.
Isn't getting more votes the "right" reason for a president to do something? Would you be happier if he consistently did something that would get him less votes?
This class of devices screams for an ambient light, back solar celled, display technology. Until they've got that, they should stop. To keep from embarrassing themselves.
My guess is that it will use some form of high-resolution eInk display. LCD is too pedestrian for Apple and not groundbreaking enough.
"Apple would like the device to last "at least 4-5 days" between charges, the current prototypes give somewhat less."
One of the big selling points for watches is that they virtually never need a battery replacement. And those that do require frequent recharge (think old wind-up watches) can be charged up in virtually no time and without plugging in. For the average user, the watch is on the wrist for virtually all waking hours. No-one is going to want to buy a watch that is rendered useless because they forgot to plug it in before going to bed, and they don't have the time to charge it the next morning.
I'm certain it will have wireless charging, so as long as you take it off at night and put it on your bedside stand, it will be charged for the next day.
Some people still buy mechanical wind-up watches, so a watch that needs to be placed on a charging mat doesn't sound that bad.
I try to avoid using external kbd for a laptop, cause I want to get used to the kbd on the laptop for those occasions when I have no choice. Also, if I use an external kbd, the screen of the laptop (which is a beautiful 13" FHD screen) ends up further away, and why not use good screen real estate when it's available?
I have my monitor on a stack of printer paper to get it high enough to clear the laptop screen, so I have only a few cm between the top of the laptop screen to the bottom of the external screen. I can also regulate the top of the laptop screen by tilting it backwards/forwards and align it pretty perfect with the external screen.
Maybe you should also forgo using a second monitor so you can get used to using the laptop monitor only for those occasions when you have no choice.
I have a laptop and desktop both at home and at work and regularly switch between them without any problems with the keyboard after a few minutes of typing - one of the laptops is netbook with a smaller than normal keyboard.
The only keyboard I have trouble getting used to is the rack mounted KVM keyboard in the server room because that one has a non-standard layout for some of the keys.
Even if it wasn't the case, it seems to be it would be a hellva lot more efficient to use the rockets to just push the damn asteroid, rather than rely on gravity. A couple of tonnes of probe isn't going to exert much influence on a couple of hundred (thosand?) tonnes of space rock.
You don't need much deflection if you have enough time.
Maybe I'm having a hard time understanding what he's talking about, but this sounds like a violation of Newtons III at a glance. Suppose you have an asteroid in space, and a rocket beside it. The asteroid attracts the rocket, and likewise the rocket the asteroid. For the rocket to "tug" the asteroid away, it will have to use some sort of propulsion, and all we really have are momentum-exchange drives - rockets, ion-thrusters, ect. To move, it must thrust with a larger force than the force of gravity, in exactly the opposite direction of the gravitiational force vector. The problem is, those particles used for thrusting the rocket, will impact the asteroid as well, assuming the asteroid is large enough to worry about moving. Even worse, some of them may even recoil! Wouldn't this absorbtion of momentum of the ions, gas, ect, undo the "tug" of the rocket in the first place?
Don't aim your rockets at the asteroid, or stay far enough away that the gas plume from the rockets expands to a diameter much larger than the asteroid.
The "pull" between a spaceship and an asteroid would be equal to the apparent weight of the spaceship on its surface, decreased by the square of the distance between the two objects. This would reduce the traction to a very limited amount.
You'd get better results with a cable from the ship attached to the surface, but the problem would be the rotation of both objects.
To do a decent job, the spaceship would need to collect a large quantity of mass before attempting to drag the asteroid.
I think the point is that you don't know how fragile the asteroid is (it could just be a big pile of rubble held together by its own gravity), so anything you do to it through physically touching it, like attaching a cable, landing on it, etc, may break it up into smaller pieces with the result that instead of one large asteroid, you now have a dozen or maybe hundreds of smaller asteroids that you have to deflect. And the set of smaller asteroids will have the same effect on earth as the one large asteroid.
The blast from the little retro rockets hitting the much larger asteroid, will cancel the whole thing out - every action having an equal and opposite reaction and all that pesky old Newtonian conservation of momentum stuff...
Just aim the rockets at an angle from the anchor ship so the mass from the retrorocket exhaust avoids the asteroid.
It's not clear how close the ship needs to be, if it's hundreds or thousands of miles from the asteroid, the gas plume from the rockets may have expanded to many times the diameter of the asteroid, so only a tiny fraction of the energy is transferred to the asteroid.
I agree, he's great for explaining stupid shit to proles, but as far as a professional scientist goes he has very little credibility in my book.
It's scientists like him that are personable and able to "explain stupid shit to proles" that help keep people interested in science and help make sure the scientists in your "credibility book" get enough funding from the proles to do their work.
But when a few dollars can sway a purchase decision, and it's hard to convince consumers through a few sentences on the side of an SSD box that power protection circuitry is important to have, it's hard to justify putting it in
This isn't buying a car. $3 or even $20 isn't going to be detrimental to the purchase oppritunity when the consumer can TELL it is of quality above the competitors. Blaming the consumer in this case sounds like you are on the other side
How can the consumer TELL if its quality is above the competitors? The presence of capacitors doesn't mean that it's a better drive than a drive without capacitors. It just means that you have more protection from one rare set of circumstances -- potentially with less reliability overall, since big electrolytic capacitors are known to fail, especially cheap ones.
I suspect that most SSD's are bought as OEM drives buried inside laptops and desktops where the end user may not ever know what brand and/or model the drive is, so how will a higher cost for a feature that may offer no real benefit for mother users help sell more drives?
Don't believe me? Here's proof: Manufacturers aren't promoting it as a feature in big letters on the side of the box. If they thought they could add $5 of circuitry and sell the drive for $10 more, they would.
If you're reading Slashdot, then you're not a typical consumer, and maybe you really are enough of an SSD expert to compare features to know what makes one SSD better than another, but for the other 99% of consumers, they will either buy an SSD with their next computer, or they'll buy the one at Best Buy that has the lowest price and the highest transfer rate since that's a number he can understand. How would you even quantify "Power protection capacitors" to know if it's worth $5, $50 or $100 to you? If it's really important to you, you can always buy an enterprise class SLC drive that includes the capacitors
Blaming the consumer in this case sounds like you are on the other side
Is this one of those George Bush "If you're not with us, you're against us" false dichotomys? Believe it or not, it's possible for people to have different opinions without being enemies.
Some SSDs already have capacitors that do just this, so yes, they did think of it. Did you really think that SSD manufacturers aren't aware of this issue?
But when a few dollars can sway a purchase decision, and it's hard to convince consumers through a few sentences on the side of an SSD box that power protection circuitry is important to have, it's hard to justify putting it in. And since most SSD's are probably sold as OEM equipment where a few pennies can make the difference between getting the sale or not, then it's even harder to justify.
It's not something I'd be willing to pay extra for - my computer hasn't lost power in years (thanks to a UPS that automatically shuts down my computer), but my computer writes to disk so rarely that there's probably a 100 to 1 chance that it will be in the middle of a write if I just walk up and pull the plug. If I do lose data, there's always backups to fall back on.
Laser CNC should be plausible with a lot of the parts from the VCRs / DVDs, assuming you can get or already have the controller boards (or are "electronic" enough to build them from reclaimed bits).
He said DVD *players*, not DVD burners, I don't think he can even melt wax with a 5mw DVD player laser.
A 150mw laser diode from a DVD burner laser might be able to melt plastic, but it sounds like a lot of work for little gain. Blu-ray burners are said to be closer to 1W.
But if you value your eyes, where appropriate laser goggles since an errant reflection from a powerful laser can quickly cause eye damage.
The F35 would probably have more support if it was called a Super-Duper-Marine Spitfire for sure... nostalgia sells. Alternatively you can build your own Spitfire for about $395,000 today Link
For that price our military could purchase 1,500 of them for the same price as the lifetime cost of ONE F35 ($600 Million)
Imagine if you were the lone pilot of an F35 and 1,500 Spitfires came down on you.... haha!
Pilots aren't free -- a military pilot costs around $1M to train, so you could economically pit around 100 Spitfires against one $130M F35. I think the superior speed and climbing ability of the F-35 would still win the day, but it might run out of ammo from strafing the spitfires from above before it gets them all. Though maybe a close pass at supersonic speeds would be enough to shake the spitfire out of the sky?
Pilot 1: Hey Bob, where did the drones go? Pilot 2: Word from ground is some kind of virus. Pilot 1: Uh oh, they're sending in newer planes. Pilot 2: Good thing I've been bribing the mechanic to maintain my eject.
ALTERNATE SCENARIO:
Pilot 1: Hey Bob, shouldn't our drones be headed toward the enem--*STATIC*
Right, because computer controlled piloted planes are immune from computer viruses, while computer controlled unpiloted drones have no protection to prevent Jeff Goldblum from uploading a virus.
Sure the FA-18 has been a proven aircraft for some time, and IMHO should continue to be produced after the F-35 is flying, but it doesn't fit all the roles the F-35 is supposed to (I question that capability too). The F-18 has no vertical takeoff capability and upgrading to the same level of avionics I'm sure they are putting in the F-35 would be very costly.
Why is installing new avionics into an existing airframe more costly than installing new avionics into a brand new airframe? Are the space/power needs of the avionics so great that the plane is designed around them?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux? The best thing I did for my parent's computer (they are 6000 miles away) is to replace their WinXP computer with one that runs Linux that's configured to open a web browser immediately upon startup - no login required.
The computer also ssh'es to my public server and opens a tunnel back to their computer so I can connect via VNC if needed.
When they got a new camera, I was able to remotely set up a script so If they plug in a memory card from their camera, it copies the images from the card automatically and uploads to an online photo album.
This covers 100% of what they use a computer for, and completely eliminated their recurring virus infections.
100Gbit is super expensive as soon as you are not "local". If you need higher bandwidth, you might consider building you data center accross the street of the other one.
I didn't say it's cheap, but when 10Gbit interfaces are common in the datacenter, 100Gbit doesn't sound like much of an interconnect between datacenters. A mid-scale datacenter probably hosts thousands servers (25 racks is around 1000U of space) and petabytes of data, so it wouldn't take many customers replicating data to the other datacenter to saturate the 100Gbit link.
Even Google Fiber offers 1Gbit links to the home.
How does an opt-out even work for apartment buildings? At my apartment, they just drop off a big stack of phone books at the front entrance. There are no names or addresses on them or any other way to tell which one is for which person. Usually they just sit there for a couple weeks (with maybe one or two taken by residents) until the building manager gets tired of seeing them and he tosses them in the recycle bin. Since they seem to drop off more phone books than there are apartments in the building, I can't believe they take one out of the stack to account for an opt-out.
100Gbit doesn't sound that fast for a datacenter interconnect.
It seems 90% of the time I can't use the IVR since for that kind of thing I would have used the web page, which means I am now stuck trying to get a human which is getting harder and harder. I suspect that this is intentional, the longer you have to play around with the IVR the shorter the queue wait times are in the call center.
If you want a human in the IVR, just hit 0 repeatedly as soon as it picks up. They will transfer you directly to a CSR - every.. single.. time..
IVR programmers know that everyone knows that trick, so now "0" will often take you to the main menu.
utter nonsense, the gensets at a nuke plant are huge and anchored to structural concrete, they aren't going to shake loose and fall off. are you imagining some pull-start unit on a cart for your house?
No, I'm picturing a 30 ton genset sitting on top of a structure designed to withstand a magnitude 7.9 quake getting hit with more ground movement than it was designed for when a 9.0 quake hits offshore, resulting in support structure failure.
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
Nixie tube display, or maybe a little CRT. With a 10 ga power cord that runs up your wrist to a backpack battery (lead-acid).
Already been done. By Woz himself (well, I don't know if he made the watch, but he has one).
In other words
If it feels good, do it.
If ya got it, spend it!
etc.
Sometimes what is best for the Nation is not what is popular.
A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
Paraphrased, Elmer T. Perterson, The Daily Oklahoman
"In a democracy, people get the government they deserve"
It's the "right thing" that helps his handlers and Washington lobby groups and other special interests, but by and large it's the American people who are getting screwed over in this economy. If he appears to be doing the "right thing" it's only to get more votes or brownie points.
Isn't getting more votes the "right" reason for a president to do something? Would you be happier if he consistently did something that would get him less votes?
This class of devices screams for an ambient light, back solar celled, display technology. Until they've got that, they should stop. To keep from embarrassing themselves.
My guess is that it will use some form of high-resolution eInk display. LCD is too pedestrian for Apple and not groundbreaking enough.
"Apple would like the device to last "at least 4-5 days" between charges, the current prototypes give somewhat less."
One of the big selling points for watches is that they virtually never need a battery replacement. And those that do require frequent recharge (think old wind-up watches) can be charged up in virtually no time and without plugging in. For the average user, the watch is on the wrist for virtually all waking hours. No-one is going to want to buy a watch that is rendered useless because they forgot to plug it in before going to bed, and they don't have the time to charge it the next morning.
I'm certain it will have wireless charging, so as long as you take it off at night and put it on your bedside stand, it will be charged for the next day.
Some people still buy mechanical wind-up watches, so a watch that needs to be placed on a charging mat doesn't sound that bad.
I try to avoid using external kbd for a laptop, cause I want to get used to the kbd on the laptop for those occasions when I have no choice. Also, if I use an external kbd, the screen of the laptop (which is a beautiful 13" FHD screen) ends up further away, and why not use good screen real estate when it's available?
I have my monitor on a stack of printer paper to get it high enough to clear the laptop screen, so I have only a few cm between the top of the laptop screen to the bottom of the external screen. I can also regulate the top of the laptop screen by tilting it backwards/forwards and align it pretty perfect with the external screen.
Maybe you should also forgo using a second monitor so you can get used to using the laptop monitor only for those occasions when you have no choice.
I have a laptop and desktop both at home and at work and regularly switch between them without any problems with the keyboard after a few minutes of typing - one of the laptops is netbook with a smaller than normal keyboard.
The only keyboard I have trouble getting used to is the rack mounted KVM keyboard in the server room because that one has a non-standard layout for some of the keys.
Even if it wasn't the case, it seems to be it would be a hellva lot more efficient to use the rockets to just push the damn asteroid, rather than rely on gravity. A couple of tonnes of probe isn't going to exert much influence on a couple of hundred (thosand?) tonnes of space rock.
You don't need much deflection if you have enough time.
Maybe I'm having a hard time understanding what he's talking about, but this sounds like a violation of Newtons III at a glance. Suppose you have an asteroid in space, and a rocket beside it. The asteroid attracts the rocket, and likewise the rocket the asteroid. For the rocket to "tug" the asteroid away, it will have to use some sort of propulsion, and all we really have are momentum-exchange drives - rockets, ion-thrusters, ect. To move, it must thrust with a larger force than the force of gravity, in exactly the opposite direction of the gravitiational force vector. The problem is, those particles used for thrusting the rocket, will impact the asteroid as well, assuming the asteroid is large enough to worry about moving. Even worse, some of them may even recoil! Wouldn't this absorbtion of momentum of the ions, gas, ect, undo the "tug" of the rocket in the first place?
Don't aim your rockets at the asteroid, or stay far enough away that the gas plume from the rockets expands to a diameter much larger than the asteroid.
The "pull" between a spaceship and an asteroid would be equal to the apparent weight of the spaceship on its surface, decreased by the square of the distance between the two objects. This would reduce the traction to a very limited amount.
You'd get better results with a cable from the ship attached to the surface, but the problem would be the rotation of both objects.
To do a decent job, the spaceship would need to collect a large quantity of mass before attempting to drag the asteroid.
I think the point is that you don't know how fragile the asteroid is (it could just be a big pile of rubble held together by its own gravity), so anything you do to it through physically touching it, like attaching a cable, landing on it, etc, may break it up into smaller pieces with the result that instead of one large asteroid, you now have a dozen or maybe hundreds of smaller asteroids that you have to deflect. And the set of smaller asteroids will have the same effect on earth as the one large asteroid.
The blast from the little retro rockets hitting the much larger asteroid, will cancel the whole thing out - every action having an equal and opposite reaction and all that pesky old Newtonian conservation of momentum stuff...
Just aim the rockets at an angle from the anchor ship so the mass from the retrorocket exhaust avoids the asteroid.
It's not clear how close the ship needs to be, if it's hundreds or thousands of miles from the asteroid, the gas plume from the rockets may have expanded to many times the diameter of the asteroid, so only a tiny fraction of the energy is transferred to the asteroid.
I agree, he's great for explaining stupid shit to proles, but as far as a professional scientist goes he has very little credibility in my book.
It's scientists like him that are personable and able to "explain stupid shit to proles" that help keep people interested in science and help make sure the scientists in your "credibility book" get enough funding from the proles to do their work.
My employee discount beats any $2 price difference.
What kind of employee discount do you have that can take a $120 drive and a $122 drive and make the prices equivalent?
But when a few dollars can sway a purchase decision, and it's hard to convince consumers through a few sentences on the side of an SSD box that power protection circuitry is important to have, it's hard to justify putting it in
This isn't buying a car. $3 or even $20 isn't going to be detrimental to the purchase oppritunity when the consumer can TELL it is of quality above the competitors. Blaming the consumer in this case sounds like you are on the other side
How can the consumer TELL if its quality is above the competitors? The presence of capacitors doesn't mean that it's a better drive than a drive without capacitors. It just means that you have more protection from one rare set of circumstances -- potentially with less reliability overall, since big electrolytic capacitors are known to fail, especially cheap ones.
I suspect that most SSD's are bought as OEM drives buried inside laptops and desktops where the end user may not ever know what brand and/or model the drive is, so how will a higher cost for a feature that may offer no real benefit for mother users help sell more drives?
Don't believe me? Here's proof: Manufacturers aren't promoting it as a feature in big letters on the side of the box. If they thought they could add $5 of circuitry and sell the drive for $10 more, they would.
If you're reading Slashdot, then you're not a typical consumer, and maybe you really are enough of an SSD expert to compare features to know what makes one SSD better than another, but for the other 99% of consumers, they will either buy an SSD with their next computer, or they'll buy the one at Best Buy that has the lowest price and the highest transfer rate since that's a number he can understand. How would you even quantify "Power protection capacitors" to know if it's worth $5, $50 or $100 to you? If it's really important to you, you can always buy an enterprise class SLC drive that includes the capacitors
Blaming the consumer in this case sounds like you are on the other side
Is this one of those George Bush "If you're not with us, you're against us" false dichotomys? Believe it or not, it's possible for people to have different opinions without being enemies.
I bet no one ever thought of that!!
Based on the paper, I guess they didn't
Some SSDs already have capacitors that do just this, so yes, they did think of it. Did you really think that SSD manufacturers aren't aware of this issue?
But when a few dollars can sway a purchase decision, and it's hard to convince consumers through a few sentences on the side of an SSD box that power protection circuitry is important to have, it's hard to justify putting it in. And since most SSD's are probably sold as OEM equipment where a few pennies can make the difference between getting the sale or not, then it's even harder to justify.
It's not something I'd be willing to pay extra for - my computer hasn't lost power in years (thanks to a UPS that automatically shuts down my computer), but my computer writes to disk so rarely that there's probably a 100 to 1 chance that it will be in the middle of a write if I just walk up and pull the plug. If I do lose data, there's always backups to fall back on.
Laser CNC should be plausible with a lot of the parts from the VCRs / DVDs, assuming you can get or already have the controller boards (or are "electronic" enough to build them from reclaimed bits).
He said DVD *players*, not DVD burners, I don't think he can even melt wax with a 5mw DVD player laser.
A 150mw laser diode from a DVD burner laser might be able to melt plastic, but it sounds like a lot of work for little gain. Blu-ray burners are said to be closer to 1W.
But if you value your eyes, where appropriate laser goggles since an errant reflection from a powerful laser can quickly cause eye damage.
The F35 would probably have more support if it was called a Super-Duper-Marine Spitfire for sure ... nostalgia sells.
Alternatively you can build your own Spitfire for about $395,000 today Link
For that price our military could purchase 1,500 of them for the same price as the lifetime cost of ONE F35 ($600 Million)
Imagine if you were the lone pilot of an F35 and 1,500 Spitfires came down on you .... haha!
Pilots aren't free -- a military pilot costs around $1M to train, so you could economically pit around 100 Spitfires against one $130M F35. I think the superior speed and climbing ability of the F-35 would still win the day, but it might run out of ammo from strafing the spitfires from above before it gets them all. Though maybe a close pass at supersonic speeds would be enough to shake the spitfire out of the sky?
Pilot 1: Hey Bob, where did the drones go?
Pilot 2: Word from ground is some kind of virus.
Pilot 1: Uh oh, they're sending in newer planes.
Pilot 2: Good thing I've been bribing the mechanic to maintain my eject.
ALTERNATE SCENARIO:
Pilot 1: Hey Bob, shouldn't our drones be headed toward the enem--*STATIC*
Right, because computer controlled piloted planes are immune from computer viruses, while computer controlled unpiloted drones have no protection to prevent Jeff Goldblum from uploading a virus.
Sure the FA-18 has been a proven aircraft for some time, and IMHO should continue to be produced after the F-35 is flying, but it doesn't fit all the roles the F-35 is supposed to (I question that capability too). The F-18 has no vertical takeoff capability and upgrading to the same level of avionics I'm sure they are putting in the F-35 would be very costly.
Why is installing new avionics into an existing airframe more costly than installing new avionics into a brand new airframe? Are the space/power needs of the avionics so great that the plane is designed around them?