I don’t expect that Trump being in office will substantially change US policy on Ukraine. This is not a major election factor. I think that what you’re seeing is politicking, and that the major driver of US policy on Ukraine is the bureaucracy, not political leadership. That doesn’t change from administration to administration.
Yeah, it might.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/chinas-balancing-act-between-us-and-russia
The United States’ efforts to limit China’s shipments of dual-use goods to Russia seem to be having an impact. Russia is finding it harder to obtain the semiconductors and machine tools needed to sustain its war effort. Additionally, Putin’s plan to boost his failing gas revenues by building a second pipeline to China remains stalled.
Yet China is a winner in a situation created by Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine. China has expanded its market presence in Russia and secured affordable Russian hydrocarbons, but only to a degree that maintains its diversified portfolio of energy sources.
Aborted Trade Growth
Chinese-Russian trade has seen explosive growth since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With bilateral trade surging from $145 billion in 2021 to $240 billion in 2023, China has solidified its position as Russia’s main trading partner.
The primary areas of cooperation include energy, agriculture, technology, infrastructure construction, and transportation, Putin pointed out during his visit to Beijing. What this really means is that China is Russia’s top source for the types of goods that the United States identifies as “high-priority” items. These goods—including semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, and machine tools—can be used in both civilian and military sectors.
In December 2023, monthly exports of these dual-use products from China to Russia reached over $600 million but have since fallen to over $300 million per month. Despite this decrease, China’s support for Russia’s war effort through these supplies has been substantial. Russia’s dependence on China for these products has surged from 32 percent in 2021 to 89 percent in 2023.
But China also has no reason to do that, and some good reason not to. I bet that they won’t.
China may not have a direct interest in the outcome of the war itself.
However, it does gain from Russia being dependent on China.
The reason that Putin has been willing to have that dependence is because China isn’t actively aiming to oppose the invasion. All China has to do to gain here is, well, nothing.
For China, that’s a pretty low-cost way to gain a bunch of influence in Asia. My guess is that China’s goals probably look something like this:
Make sure that this doesn’t turn nuclear (which would potentially affect China).
Don’t have China become involved in the conflict.
Make use of the period of time where Russia is cut off from the West to extend short-run Russian dependence (like, obtaining substitute parts from China) to long-run dependence (tying Russia to Chinese systems and services) insofar as possible.
If China decides to act in concert with the West, then it gains nothing – China probably doesn’t care much what happens in Ukraine – and loses this new influence in Russia, which Beijing probably does very much want.
I was using it on Linux too!
It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
So it doesn’t sound that bad.
Aside from broken controllers, which I don’t think can reasonably count, the Atari 2600 joystick.
One button, a lot of resistance to push.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, notalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable.
I was pretty happy with my most-recent Logitech gamepad – I think an F310 – but I had another from the 1990s that was terrible, had a D-pad that rolled to diagonal movement far too easily.
I did some time back. I don’t recall it being incredibly difficult to get running. What hardware are you trying to run it on?
Unexploded remotely-triggerable ordinance with a camera on it.
Ruling in the case Ukraine v. Russia (re Crimea), the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found June 25 that Russia is guilty of a pattern of human rights violations since 2014 in Crimea, as codified under the European Convention on Human Rights a
Russia withdrew from the ECHR. Presumably whatever specific incidents they’re talking about were before that, but I’m not sure how much Russia is going to care about that.
Russia also terminated ECHR jurisdiction in 2022.
LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) - Russia’s parliament on Tuesday passed a pair of bills ending the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction in the country, a rupture provoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
I’m not sure whether that ended authority over cases on issues prior to that time or not, in each of the eyes of Russia and the ECHR. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia’s position is that it did, as there wouldn’t be much point to also terminating jurisdiction after leaving if it didn’t.
Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale
(British, Australia) Available for purchase.
(US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.
That’s true, though IIRC there are two planes, and I think that one of them – and the more-numerous one – is a variant of some multirole fighter.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal
Launch platform
- MiG-31BM/K
- Tu-22M3M
- Su-34 (reportedly)
- Su‐57 (planned)
Looks like two confirmed, another possible, another eventually (though I can’t imagine using the rare, intended-for-another-purposes Su-57 if they could use the others).
I wonder if we’re going to see the return of machine gunner ball turrets with this new era
The reason for those was that the bombers were vulnerable to fighters approaching from below. I don’t think that this’ll be applicable for a number of reasons:
No reason to use a large aircraft like that. All they need is a plane that can get altitude and hold two people.
My guess is that one issue for the B-17 in WW2 was that they needed to fly in formation, couldn’t maneuver much, to achieve the “interlocked fields of fire” that was their defensive doctrine of the time. So becomes harder to deal with a blind spot by maneuvering, so there’s a need for exotic things like the ball turret.
The drones that they’re shooting down are defenseless. If Russia does start sending out drones with some kind of air-to-air capability, my guess is that a ball turret won’t be a good counter.
I’m pretty sure that those ball turrets used .50 cal machine guns. They probably don’t need that. My understanding is that the round caliber in WW2 that a fighter carried depended on what they expected to run into. It was a the reason that the US only used .50 cal machine guns, not 20mm autocannons, in its fighters – the 20mm was only considered necessary to bring down a bomber, where the thing was a big structure, big struts, could potentially absorb a lot of damage. The US wasn’t fighting anyone who was going to be using much by way of heavy bombers against them. I suspect that the lightest of bullets will probably mess those little drones up badly. Honestly, they’d probably do best with a shotgun or automatic shotgun at the very short ranges that I’ve seen footage of them engaging at; that’s more likely to expend kinetic energy inside the drone, hit a lot of stuff in there. Also reduces collateral damage to whatever is off in the distance behind the drone.
There was recent news about at least one, which I assume this is referencing.
Honestly, I wish that NCD posts would include a “context” link, since a lot of times they reference things that have happened within very recent periods of time. I get that some people are totally up on the news, but some people – even if they generally follow military issues – aren’t going to know about the most-recent happenings.
Ah, okay, gotcha.
So, there are a couple issues:
I’d guess that Russia is able to prevent a surface ship from approaching Russia in any ocean unless someone can fight an offensive air and naval war to get control of that ocean.
I’m guessing (you said “container ship”) that the idea might be to use a concealed civilian vessel that then unloads some kind of surprise attack. While disguised military ships have been used to conduct armed warfare before, the last time I can think of an example was British Q-ships in World War I; I’m not sure that this is still legal.
Turkey has closed the Turkish Straits to warships due to the conflict, so technically no warships are supposed to pass, from either side. I’m I believe that it violates the convention governing this to either tell Turkey that the warship isn’t actually a warship or if Turkey knows but preferentially lets warships through. That being said, I guess theoretically Ukraine could assemble such an attack using a ship somewhere far away from Ukraine.
My guess is that if Ukraine had a lot of long-range cruise missiles, they’d probably be using them in their own theater of operations, as they’re pretty short on them.
I don’t think that Russia is using strategic bombers for the glide bombing attacks, so whatever the benefits of hitting them, I’m not sure that it would be a counter to the glide bomb attacks. kagis Yeah, this has the (much more numerous) Su-34 being used:
On or just before Thursday, an air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber lobbed a single FAB-3000 bomb with pop-out wings and satellite guidance at a multi-story building Russian intelligence had identified as a staging base for Ukrainian troops in Lyptsi, 10 miles north of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.
APC Back-UPS 850.
I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.
https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html
It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.
Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.
You sure? I mean, sure, it’s possible; there are devices out there that can’t deal with power loss during update. But others can: they’ll typically have space for two firmware versions, write out the new version into the inactive slot, and only when the new version is committed to persistent storage, atomically activate it.
Last device I worked on functioned that way.
you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.
That’s the responsibility of the application if they rely on the data to be persistent at some point; they need to be written to deal with the fact that there may be in-flight data that doesn’t make it to the disk if they intend to take other actions that depend on that fact; they’ll need to call fsync() or whatever their OS has if they expect the data to be on-drive.
Normally, there will always a period where some data being written out is partial: the write() could complete after handing the data off to the OS’s buffer cache. The local drive could complete because data’s in its cache. The app could perform multiple write() calls, and the first could have completed without the second. With a NAS, the window might be a little bit longer than it otherwise would be, but something like a DBMS will do the fsync(); at any point, it’d be hypothetically possible for the OS to crash or power loss or something to happen.
The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize
Like I said in the above comment, you’ll get that even without a clean shutdown; you’ll actually get a bit more time if you don’t do a clean shutdown.
Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers
Ah, okay, it’s not just a file server? Fair enough – then that brings the case #2 back up again, which I didn’t expect to apply to the NAS itself.
As things stand, mobile OSes have some pretty decent out-of-box ways for apps to be isolated. App A can’t fiddle with data private to app B. That Android video game you just downloaded can’t extract data from your web browser or generally fiddle with it.
Desktop OSes today don’t normally have software install and work like that. Yeah, you can manually set something like that up with containers or VMs, but your typical user isn’t going to do that.
I’d guess that those OSes may not permit arbitrary software without administrative privileges to initiate shutdowns. That’s the case on Linux.
I’m assuming that your goal here is automatic shutdown when the UPS battery gets low so you don’t actually have the NAS see unexpected power loss.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but stepping back and getting a big-picture view: do you actually need a clean, automatic shutdown on your Synology server if the power goes out?
I’d assume that the filesystems that the things are set up to run are power-loss safe.
I’d also assume that there isn’t server-side state that needs to be cleanly flushed prior to power loss.
Historically, UPSes providing a clean shutdown were important on personal computers for two reasons:
Some filesystems couldn’t deal with power loss, could produce a corrupted filesystem. FAT, for example, or HFS on the Mac. That’s not much of an issue today, and I can’t imagine that a Synology NAS would be doing that unless you’re explicitly choosing to use an old filesystem.
Some applications maintain state and when told to shut down, will dump it to disk. So maybe someone’s writing a document in Microsoft Word and hasn’t saved it for a long time, a few minutes will provide them time to save it (or the application to do an auto-save). Auto-save usually partially-mitigates this. I don’t have a Synology system, but AFAIK, they don’t run anything like that.
Like, I’d think that the NAS could probably survive a power loss just fine, even with an unclean shutdown.
If you have an attached desktop machine, maybe case #2 would apply, but I’d think that hooking the desktop up to the UPS and having it do a clean shutdown would address the issue – I mean, the NAS can’t force apps on computers using the NAS to dump state out to the NAS, so hooking the NAS up that way won’t solve case #2 for any attached computers.
If all you want is more time before the NAS goes down uncleanly, you can just leave the USB and RS-232 connection out of the picture and let the UPS run until the battery is exhausted and then have the NAS go down uncleanly. Hell, that’d be preferable to an automated shutdown, as you’d get a bit more runtime before the thing goes down.
No. Trump was not largely the factor involved in aid being held up – that was the Freedom Caucus, which was aiming to hold it (and a number of other things, including the budget earlier) hostage to get domestic policy gains that they wanted, given that the Republicans had a very narrow margin in the House and their support was required for a deal.
The Freedom Caucus didn’t actually care much about the fundamental issue of Ukraine aid, but they wanted to force spending reductions – they took the position that we could aid Ukraine, but if so it had to come from cutting government spending, reducing regular spending. It couldn’t be additional spending.
Trump’s faction has not been especially friendly with the Freedom Caucus, and supported the guy who just defeated its leader, Bob Good.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/republican-survive-trumps-wrath-bob-221830141.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-endorses-primary-challenger-gop-rep-bob-good-virginia-rcna154285
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4729084-bob-good-donald-trump-virginia-oklahoma-georgia-tom-cole/mlite/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4727667-bob-good-virginia-donald-trump-kevin-mccarthy-john-mcguire-freedom-caucus/
You can find some people who are friendly with Trump who have opposed Ukraine aid. Vance is one possible running mate pick for Trump, and he has, in the past, pretty consistently advocated for not getting involved in Europe and Russia, and rather focusing on opposing China. On the other hand, Burgum, another possible running mate pick, has been a hawk on Russia. So depending upon how things play out you could wind up with people who do have a voice in advising Trump, will have access to him, and have taken policy positions against support for Ukraine. But I don’t anticipate Trump himself to be much of a factor on Ukraine, and I think that it’ll be recommendations from the Department of State and the like that will be the most influential in a potential second Trump administration.
US foreign policy usually isn’t a major factor in elections, and generally doesn’t swing back and forth around elections.