Hopfgeist

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The Leopard 2 was designed in the 70s. So for battlefield vehicle designs, that is not necessarily outdated. Most fighter aircraft in use today were desgigned in the 70s: Su-27, MiG-29, sure, we think they’re old, but the F-16, F-15, F/A-18 are roughly the same age.

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago

That’s kind of the point of the article, I guess. What is a museum piece doing on the battlefield?

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago

Let’s do the math:

The error-reate of modern hard disks is usually on the order of one undetectable error per 1E15 bits read, see for example the data sheet for the Seagate Exos 7E10. An 8 TB disk contains 6.4E13 (usable) bits, so when reading the whole disk you have roughly a 1 in 16 chance of an unrecoverable read error. Which is ok with zfs if all disks are working. The error-correction will detect and correct it. But during a resilver it can be a big problem.

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago

Bit error rates have barely improved since then. So the probability of an error whenr reading a substantial fraction of a disk is now higher than it was in 2013.

But as others have pointed out. RAID is not, and never was, a substitute for a backup. Its purpose is to increase availability. And if that is critical to your enterprise, these things need to be taken into account, and it may turn out that raidz1 with 8 TB disks is fine for your application, or it may not. For private use, I wouldn’t fret. but make frequent backups.

This article was not about total disk failure, but about the much more insidious undetected bit error.

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago

Then why do you think manufacturers still list these failure rates (to be sure, it is marked as a limit, not an actual rate)? I’m not being sarcastic or facetious, but genuinely curious. Do you know for certain that it doesn’t happen regularly? During a scrub, these are the kinds of errors that are quietly corrected (althouhg the scrub log would list them), as they are during normal operation (also logged).

My theory is that they are being cautious and/or perhaps don’t have any high-confidence data that is more recent.

Hopfgeist, 1 month ago

Bloody bigots (if true). This is a desperate measure by Ukraine, from which the UAF actually refrained as long as the US supported them!

Now they don’t and they don’t.

So give them the means for a meaningful defense (and offensive) on their own land, and they won’t have to resort to strategic bombing. (Or droning, or cruise-missiling, or whatever it’s called.)

I know these are different parts of the government, but still.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

That’s just drawing from a special Presidential fund. I forgot the name. It is only a couple of billions in total, and must last for a year and for everything the administration wants to support without Congressional approval.

And if the $60 billion main aid package is intended for a year, then $300 million is the equivalent of less than 2 day’s worth.

“A drop on a hot stone”, as we say in Germany.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

The very concept of “NATO expands” is misleading. NATO doesn’t decide to expand. Countries that had previously been neutral apply for membership. Contrast that to how “Russkiy Mir” expands.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Yes, and that was codified by all signatories of the Budapest Memorandum. Russia tries to argue that it hasn’t violated the terms because it only uses weapons against another signatory state “in self-defense”, which is an agreed exception. Everyone knows it’s ludicrous, but apparently even Russia does not want to be perceived as violating agreements.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Ukraine never had effective control of the nuclear warheads, although they had physical control and probably could have made them unusable, but not fire them without some serious reverse-engineering and possibly rebuilding large parts.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

The US and the UK were signatories to the Budapest Memorandum (all three memoranda, actually, there are similar ones with Belarus and Kazakhstan), but it was never intended as a mutual assistance treaty in the way the North Atlantic Treaty (the “NAT” part of “NATO”) is. It was just an agreement to respect each other’s territorial integrity and not to use weapons against each other. It literally says:

The Russian Federation, […] reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

The cop-out clause, of course, was “except in self-defence”, which is what Russia implicitly claims, when saying that its citizens in Donbas, and thus Russia itself, were under attack by Ukraine. Playing the victim has always been the preferred way to justify a war of aggression.

The part about giving up the nuclear weapons is implicit in the preamble which welcomes Ukraine to the non-proliferation treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state.

The whole Memorandum is also really short, literally fits on a single page: en.wikisource.org/…/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Securi…

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

They did. What the UK, the US and Russia(!) should do in case Ukraine is attacked, is to “seek immediate UN Security Council action” to provide assistance. Which the UK and the US did. Of course, that didn’t achieve anything because of the veto powers of the permanent UN Security council member Russia.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Must have been someone smoking at work again, igniting that volatile molten steel.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Tragic, if true, but you need to work on your texts and captions. HIMARS is rocket artillery, not an “anti-aircraft missile defense system”: High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System. And what is the caption in the video? PC30? BCY?

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Thanks. I’m not too good with Cyrillic letters.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

I guess the question “why wouldn’t they just build the A-100 instead?” has about the same answer as “why don’t they just build thousands of T-14 tanks?”. They can’t. Partly perhaps because it needs Western electronics, which are difficult to obtain.

That aside, restarting production of a large and complex aeroplane is going to take years.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Saying it hasn’t been built in 30 years is a bit misleading. Although the base Il-76 airframes may be that old, the latest substantial avionics upgrade (designated A-50U) is less than 15 years old or so (first delivery in 2011), which isn’t too bad for military and aircraft systems. A lot of the E-3 equipment is older. That is not to say it is more capable than the E-3, it probably isn’t, but I’d say a fully functioning A-50U should not be underestimated. It’s even got toilets! Then again, it is also not clear to me that any “U” models are currently airworthy.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

This is in such stark contrast to Russian soldiers, who capture and disarm Ukrainian soldiers, who have surrendered, and then shoot them. Yes, not all Russian soldiers, probably a minority, but still, there are now several documented cases (and almost certainly many undocumented).

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Ever since the last A-50 was downed, it has been open Sukhoi season.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Going on an aerial sortie against Ukraine now seems to be just as dangerous as it was to be sent into one of the meatwave attacks on Avdiivka.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

Yes. And unlike foot soldiers, and to some extent tank crews, pilots cannot be replaced in a few weeks, or even months, if you want them to be halfway competent in operating a complex weapons platform. Then again, given the number of pilots who have “accidentally” dropped munitions on Russian towns, “competent” seems to be relative. The alternative explanation is, of course, that the pilots knew what would likely happen over Ukraine, and did the prudent thing, “losing” their ordnance before flying into range of Ukrainian air defence, and then returning safely to base.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago

True, some will probably have survived, and some of those may even fly again (some percentage usually sustain disqualifying injuries during ejection). The A-50 crews probably had no way to bail out, though, regardless of where they were shot down.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

IF Putin can get troops there. Through Ukraine, where the current velocity of the Russian army is roughly 1 km/month (because of massive ammunition shortage on Ukraine’s side, otherwise it would be negative). That’s going to be a decade or two, then.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Did the author just lazily substitute “gasoline” for “fuel”, or is it really specifically a ban on gasoline? I cannot find out exactly what it is. Because farm equipment generally runs on diesel, not gasoline, would have less of an impact, if it’s really specifically only about gasoline.

Hopfgeist, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Missing coordination, and no early warning, because they have no A-50 on station any more. Just speculating.