• 2 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Regardless of the side, if the convicts have proper training, supplies and aren’t used as pure cannon fodder I don’t have any issues with it personally.

    Honestly, I am surprised that Ukraine wasn’t doing it sooner. Unfortunately, the front has been somewhat slow for the last year or so (with an exception or two) and that means both sides are dug in fairly deep.

    If Ukraine decides to push back harder and start retaking large portions of land, their losses are going to skyrocket. Regardless is you agree or not, using convicts to push the lines makes sense and doesn’t risk better trained troops.

    That is just how wars of this type work and the offensive side will need to absorb more damage.

    Personally, if I had the option of fighting or rotting in prison, I would fight and would probably volunteer for some of the hardest work. The thing is, it would need to be my choice and I hope that any convicts, Russian or Ukrainian, get a choice in that.











  • Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

    I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

    However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

    Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

    OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

    What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

    My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.




  • Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

    It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

    I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.



  • Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

    Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

    (Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)