I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

I saw the man march in a Pride parade in Montreal in 2017. So he’s probably been given enough of a briefing on the mechanics to pull it off.

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

Vampire’s Dawn 3. I suspect I’m exhausting my opportunities to powerlevel through the content, being that my party reached level 86 and never having seen any zone tagged at a level over 85. I might have to use gasp strategy to finish it.

Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the “same” mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.

The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.

But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of “instant boot mini-Linux environments”, and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)

They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.

Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.

You’d think there’s a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.

The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.

Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.

It’s a no-win for them.

They lose the war and pull the trigger, and everyone from the janitor on up is prosecuted by the PRC as saboteurs.

They win the war and have blown up the factory? Goodbye #1 export product.

Its only value is as a hindrance to peaceful negotiation. The threat is actually more useful as a “we’ll pull the plug if you abandon your defence commitments” rather than “we’ll pull the plug when attacked”. That bludgeon prevents Western powers from seeking a managed, Hong Kong/Macao sryle reunification strategy.

Microprose.

Doesn’t saying they’re not “subject to jurisdiction” mean they’re outside general reach of the legal system, like a crime-drama character claiming diplomatic immunity?

I’d love to see someone pull that string.

Sigil of Motif (rare)

• +2 to disguise, if you are attempting to pass for 20 years older than you are
• Stacks with Cape of fvwm

Warhammer of cfdisk (common)

• Cannot be dodged
• Roll 1d10. On critical fail, smash yourself with warhammer for 5d4 damage.

I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:

• Real Motif apps
• Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
• GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”

There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)

Heads will roll if my LS-120 drive stops working!

Coherent theming, although you’ve hardly had that since Windows 98.

I’ve applied themes to make Xaw, Qt, and GTK software more Motif-like, but the GTK ones seem spotty and the Qt theme doesn’t work for Qt6, and fonts are inconsistent.

American security guarantees are the only thing propping up that stupid narrative.

They’ve always made the claim “TSMC will blow up their own fabs in the event of an invasion”. So, they’re dependent on a lose/lose spite play. If an independent Taiwanese state survives, they’ve demolished one of its major economic engines. If, as far more likely, it falls, everyone involved gets locked up or worse for gross sabotage, and you bought, what, 5 years of global economic distress (oh, no, it might pop the AI bubble…) before everyone else gets back to par with your top-line process? Or maybe you successfully blackmailed bigger and more equipped militaries to fight WWIII for you, and even in the unlikely event Taiwan survives the carnage intact, irradiated corpses buy very few semiconductors.

If America washed their hands of the situation, they’d pretty quickly switch to angling for a deal, perhaps expecting that they’d go for a HK-style “one country/two systems” play, which continues to let them make out like bandits. HSBC doesn’t seemed to have suffered too badly after reunification…

I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.

Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.

• Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
• Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
• They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
• Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?

I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.

When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.

That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”

Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?

ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.

They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.

If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.