Nvidia is worth about $3 trillion at this point. France’s GDP is about that each year.

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?

Video of the accidental ascent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g

Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale

1. (British, Australia) Available for purchase.

2. (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).

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.

putty

I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I’d personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that’s not really my sticking point. I’m normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it’s just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.

I’m not saying that that’s an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outbursts_of_Everett_True

The Outbursts of Everett True (originally titled A Chapter from the Career of Everett True) was an American two-panel newspaper comic strip created by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper that ran from July 22, 1905[1][2] to January 13, 1927,[3] when Condo had to abandon it for health reasons.

Some of it was before 1924, and some after. The stuff after won’t be tied to the starting date; copyright will be on each strip independently.

The title claims here that the strip shown was one of the last ones, from 1926, so I’d expect that it probably is not in the public domain.

northern ice sea…north of st petersburg.

The Baltic Sea?

and to remote in.

This is the approach I use with laptops domestically, and I think that there’s something to be said for it. Like, the laptop itself doesn’t store important information. A remote server does. The laptop is just a thin client. If the laptop gets lost or stolen – which I’ve had happen – I revoke the credentials. No important information is lost, and no important information is exposed.

Whole-disk laptop encryption has improved things too from an exposure standpoint (albeit not a loss standpoint), though I don’t use it myself (don’t want to spend any battery life on it). I assume that smartphones have some form of reasonably-secure storage hardware, but I don’t know if it involves encryption.

What I found irritating – and this is years back now – was an employer who didn’t care if I took a laptop in or out or what information I stored on it (as long as it was a work system), but who refused to provide remote access to the network, so I couldn’t just keep the important information on the work network. I mean, I get if they want to have some sort of isolated DMZ and require an externally-accessible server to live there, not provide VPN access in to the general network, but not having the ability to have remote network access to work systems at all is just incredibly obnoxious.

I think that some of it is that Windows is not phenomenal to use remotely. Yeah, there are solutions, but they aren’t great if you’re on a high-latency, low-reliability, or low-bandwidth link. I try to use console Linux for as much of my stuff as possible. That whole ecosystem was designed around thin-client, remote use.

I don’t think that there’s any realistic chance that Ukraine can make use of ships in the Black Sea. Russia built their military to contest the US in the Pacific – they’ve got a lot of long-range anti-ship weapons. That surplus capacity is why they’ve been blowing anti-ship missiles on land attack. I’d be pretty confident that Russia can keep a Ukrainian warship from surviving in the Black Sea. Where Ukraine’s pulling off naval attacks, it’s using either small, very-low-profile boats or even-lower-profile, mostly-submerged USVs. Russia apparently doesn’t have the sensor capability to reliably pick those up (and I imagine that Ukrainian strikes on radars probably also complicate that).

I have wondered about maybe Ukraine using larger UUVs that surface to launch a weapon. Such a UUV would have to be something that could be transported on a trailer, so there are some size limitations. But it might permit for a more-capable platform than the small USVs that are currently being used.

I don’t know what kind of anti-submarine-warfare tools Russia has available in the Black Sea, but if they aren’t able to detect the existing USVs, I would assume that they aren’t going to be doing better with UUVs.

EDIT: There’s a reference to a Ukrainian UUV project in progress here; it says that Russia is improving their ability to detect the existing Ukrainian USVs, so UUVs are becoming more important.

Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true.

It’s fine for single-player shooters, which are less demanding, but speaking as someone who has packed on some decades, your reaction time definitely becomes a noticeable factor over the years for competitive multiplayer games. I definitely can’t play competitive twitch shooters nearly as well as when I was 18, which is about when your reaction time is at its best.

That being said, there are shooters where twitch time is less-critical or roles or play-styles that focus less on it.

And I don’t see how someone couldn’t learn to play with a dual-stick or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter), which is what I think OP is talking about. I haven’t had any problems picking up new input methods…that just takes time. Took time to learn when I was 18, too.

I mean, twin stick gamepad or to lesser extent touchpad just isn’t going to be as good as a mouse for an FPS. A good mouse player will beat a good touchpad or gamepad player.

And the problem with the Deck is that it has a PC game library, and a lot of those are designed with a mouse in mind. Console FPSes usually adjust the game difficulty so that playing with twin sticks are practical. Enemies give you more time to slowly turn around without inflicting enormous amounts of damage. Auto-aim assist is common. Ranges are shorter. Stuff like that.

If this is a single-player game – which it sounds like you’re playing – you can reduce the difficulty to compensate for the input mechanism.

There’s an input mechanism that some people developed for twin-stick gyro controllers called Flick Stick, which someone else mentioned; Steam Input supports this. The mouse is still going to win, but it’s an improvement over traditional pure-stick input.

There’s also some input mechanism which I think was different from the “Flick Stick” approach – though maybe I’m wrong and misremembering, didn’t have an interest in exploring it – that IIRC someone put together using Steam Input. The way it worked, as I recall, was that one could tap the thumbstick in a direction and it’d immediately do a 90 degree turn. The idea was to provide for a rapid turn while keeping sensitivity low enough to still permit for accurate aiming. But I’m not able to find the thing with Kagi in a few searches, and it’s not impossible that I’m misremembering…this was only a single video that I’m thinking of.

I don’t think that there’s any trick to learning this, just playing games and picking it up over time. I mean, I was atrocious at using a keyboard+mouse when I first started doing it, and ditto with twin-stick FPSes.

You could also attach a keyboard and mouse, though I think that that kind of eliminates the point of the Deck, at least as long as one also has a PC to play on – it might make sense for someone who just uses a Deck and a phone.

is there an easy FPS game where I don’t have to move or shoot too fast

Play games that are designed for consoles or which have a gamepad mode, rather than a keyboard+mouse PC game. They’ll be tuned for controller limitations. Like, can you play Halo comfortably with the Deck? That was designed for a gamepad originally, and it’s available on Steam (though I’d note that it requires a Microsoft account, which you may-or-may-not be willing to do).

https://old.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/8f7oyr/the_core_reasons_thumbsticks_are_inaccurate/

This also talks about some limitations of thumbstick aiming (if you’re using thumbsticks and not trackpads). It might be possible to tweak some of these, like sensitivity or dead zone, but I’d assume that for a given game, the developers have already chosen pretty reasonable defaults.

For those who haven’t played the series, VATS is an alternate aiming mode where one can pause (or in later games in the 3d series, greatly slow) the game, select a certain number of targets depending upon available action points, and then have all those shots taken in rapid succession, with the game aiming.

I’d say that VATS is kind of a “path” than a purely alternate input method in those games; you need to make a VATS-oriented build, though it’s true that it makes it possible to play the game with minimal FPS elements. Like, in Fallout: New Vegas, VATS provides major benefits close-up. While VATS is active, there’s enormous damage reduction applied to your character, IIRC 90%, so for short periods of time, they have enormous damage output and little risk. They can also turn rapidly and target multiple enemies, probably better than a player manually-playing could. At close ranges, VATS is just superior.

But VATS suffers severe accuracy penalties at range. Whether-or-not a target is moving doesn’t affect VATS accuracy, but range does a lot, whereas with manual aiming, whether-or-not a target is moving makes a big difference and range doesn’t matter much. As a result, VATS isn’t great for sniping, which is also an aspect of the game. You can do it (especially, oddly-enough, with pistols, in Fallout 4, where the Concentrated Fire perk lets later shots in a flurry of pistol shots at range be very accurate.

In Fallout 76, VATS provides such dramatic damage benefits that I’d say that it’s impractical to play a non-VATS build – VATS is required to get damage up to a reasonable level later in the game.

Links:

• Portal

• Portal 2

• Enderal and Steam Store

• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

• Secret World Legends (no dedicated Wikipedia page; apparently this is a remake of the earlier The Secret World)