Posts by Dan 55

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Re: Damn.

If *only* there were an American print outfit. If *only* companies could print on paper without resorting to China. Alas, clearly that's impossible, will never be possible, and to suggest such a thing is a direct, personal attack on those corporations who can't exist without China.

The blog owner replied in the comments below the blog entry:

There is a game manufacturer in the US, Delano. Cartamundi also has a factory here. Both can pretty much only make printed components (mostly cards), but if they need custom tokens made of other materials (plastic, metal, resin, wood, etc), they source them from China. I’m not saying that’s a problem, but it shows that there are manufacturers who have made that long-term investment in US production, yet even they haven’t found a way (or a reason) to source those types of specialty bits and pieces at scale in the US. Is that not telling? And is that not okay in a global economy?

Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key

On a similar note

Commodore OS 3.0 has just been released. It comes with BASIC and an emulator with games. It's just Linux with an opinionated GUI but I guess you could not connect it to the Internet, do your word processing, then play games afterwards when your work is done. Goes well with an 8BitDo keyboard?

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

No idea why people went mad for VSC. MS already have a paid IDE, the only reason to for them to give it away was it was a huge trojan horse for something. Those who didn't take the bait are in the happy position of not being embraced and extended to be an AI datapoint. Those who did take the bait wilfully ignored years of MS history.

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

"[Do] Not ignore the compilation warnings"

However a compiler from 20 years ago would let you get away with a lot more than a compiler from today. Perhaps it never even generated warnings about this problem.

Get some old code, change the compiler options to warn for as much as possible and treat all warnings as errors, and spend the next few hours fixing everything.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: @gnasher729

JD Vance’s bluster over peace in Ukraine shows why Zelensky swerved an American ambush in London

Marco Rubio cancelled his visit to London for ceasefire talks after it emerged that Volodymyr Zelensky wasn’t coming – and then JD Vance got cross. Ukraine’s president certainly swerved an ambush

Economic policy from the man who declared bankruptcy six times

What could possibly go wrong?

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Re: What will China want in return?

Where "humanoid robot" means "some guy in spandex". Can nobody in the US make spandex any more?

European biz calls for Euro tech for local people

Re: Euro tech

Not even sure it's community-led, that seems to be some guy's website.

Back in the real world, I'd have thought the obvious choice would have been SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE.

Spain's economy doesn't seem that broken.

Re: Taxes and housing

If you don't like income tax, what would you replace it with instead? Accumulated wealth is one idea but for some reason the average voter would vote against that, they believe Elon Musk is acting in their interests.

There are already EU green cards, but they are blue.

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

A willing victim of late-stage capitalism

"I for one would gladly pay $10 or maybe even $20/month for a version of Windows Pro that included no telemetry or unnecessary telematics."

Even though you have bought a computer supplied with a Windows licence, i.e. you're willing to rent Windows after buying it.

Boeing offloads some software businesses to private equiteer Thoma Bravo

As we all know, nothing improves the quality of safety critical software more than squeezing the development budget for a bit more profit.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Re: Impeach him, imprison the other

Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize which is why he got involved in Gaza and Ukraine. If there was a real peace process for Gaza nobody talks about it any more and his same crack negotiating team lead to by an estate agent are apparently about to walk from Ukraine too. Perhaps this is to be expected if everyone on the US side is afflicted with chronic Dunning Kruger?

But the Nobel Peace Prize should be dangled in front of him until he leaves office... It's something Obama got that Trump didn't and he can't stand that. He may need someone to explain to him that starting WW3 gets you excluded from the shortlist but I'm sure he'll get it in the end and keep his finger off the button.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

There are a whole bunch of Linux distros which support touch screens. If you wanted to add a ten-foot UI then both Steam (if you're going to be mostly gaming) and Kodi (if you're going to be mostly playing media) can also launch anything else you need including Teams in a web browser and a paint (whiteboard) program, which is what Surface Hubs are mostly about. That's probably not good enough for real enterprise use but if your place of work will let staff have their old SH1s then it's good enough for home use.

Re: Could it be used

Yep. Replacement PC mode accepts a DisplayPort signal.

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: "Copilot enabled itself within various VS Code workspaces on its own"

And promptly uploaded the source code...?

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Damage done

It certainly does. He's also going after the forensic analyst who looked at Hunter Biden's laptop (see comment under article) which is odd because he apparently delivered what was required to start a case.

Re: Next week :

Here ya go:

Trump administration overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead - The Washington Post

If you're declared dead it doesn't just affect your social security, your bank accounts, credit cards, etc... are frozen too.

This is being done to legal foreign residents. And once the courts give up trying to get the Trump administration to stop doing this and to fix the damage already done to these people, then they can start on US citizens.

Re: Damage done

Trumplethinskin will take down both SentinelOne and Krebs, just because he can.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

The data trustee model with German Azure data centres run by T-Systems was terminated in 2018. There doesn't appear to be anything to replace it.

It's all smoke and mirrors, you cannot use servers provided by a US company or subsidiary of one because they're subject to the US' CLOUD Act. Whatever they might claim, there's no way around that.

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

Joe Rogan Debates Himself: Immigration and Border (6 mins)

Joe Rogan’s view on immigration and the border have shifted a LOT over time. Watch as Joe Rogan debates himself, revealing the contradictions, hypocrisy, and unexpected shifts in his views.

In other news...

Trump administration shutters US office countering foreign disinformation

Pentagon’s ‘SWAT team of nerds’ resigns en masse

All forms of defence against online Russian attacks are being neutered by Doge and ways into government systems are being facilitates by Doge. It's difficult to see how Putin could have done any better himself.

Re: It may not be Russia.

If you look at the definition of self-coup it includes "The leader may dissolve or render powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assume extraordinary powers" so it's started.

This article argues "A self-coup is when someone who is already the executive tries to dramatically increase their power at the expense of other government actors, also illegally" and "Verdict: Self coup, in-progress, success still unknown".

Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing

There's one way, which is transferring the file to the other user. Then there's the other way, which is making some kind of Lovecraftian tentacled monster out of Teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive which resembles transferring the file to the other user. It's amazing it works at all.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Re: Yea but Chinaaa...

Totally expecting that that series adapts to the new US media climate and skips forward ten years where we see the Americans and Russians spending ten episodes being the best of pals fighting the good fight against the nasty Chinese and Europeans.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

I regret nothing.

This is why they don't want to return any legal foreign residents deported on Trumped-up charges*, because deporting US citizens on Trumped-up charges is next.

* Yes, I did that on purpose.

CVE program gets last-minute funding from CISA – and maybe a new home

It's only an 11-month contract extension

So in less than a year, everyone will be running round with their hair on fire again.

Perhaps it's time that the somewhat unfortunately abbreviated European Union Vulnerability Database takes on a bigger role?

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

Re: Ouch

Seems if you're going to woo Donald, he needs to be taken out to dinner at least once a week. And he wants only the best food

US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts

Re: China is cheering... every day

If Americans want to cut the budget then all they need to do is not vote for a Republican government. See nice chart near the end.

China is cheering... every day

Lately in the National People's Congress the business of the day is watching Trump's announcements on the Jumbotron and tucking into bucket-sized popcorn.

Ditto Russia.

Trump's tariff turmoil leaves IT projects in deep freeze

Re: @Dan 55

Brexit regret among Leave voters hits record high, poll finds

Did Brexit "winners" look and sound this sour when they "won"?

Yes, a defining feature is they will never be happy. They are still unhappy eight years after the referendum even though they got precisely what they wanted and the political class is still too scared to return in any meaningful way.

Re: Shipments

The keyboard layouts and packaging would be a pain to switch around at short notice (Latin American Spanish, US English, Canadian bilingual).

Dead or alive, Britain hands Schrödinger's industry £121M

Schrödinger's industry

From the headline I thought this article was about the UK steel industry which is currently in an indeterminate state between alive and dead.

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

"Too hard to fix - let's pretend it installed correctly"

Microsoft really are attracting the best and the brightest these days. See also...

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: Tech CEOs backed Trump

Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all also sell hardware.

Trump thinks his External Revenue Service idea will give him free money, if it does finally get off the ground all it means is the supplier will add the cost onto the wholesale or retail price and inflation in the US will still rise just as much as it does when the importer pays now.

Re: Which hole is this?

Congress could impeach any president at any time, utterly regardless of what they have or haven't done.

Yet all enforcement is under the executive branch anyway so if he doesn't want to leave the White House, who's going to drag him out?

Re: Lester. Sadly missed

If they were bots then they would spin up more than one or two. Definitely a couple of people with too much time on their hands yet sadly unable to argue in any convincing way that the great experiment is going well.

Old Fortinet flaws under attack with new method its patch didn't prevent

Re: Remote Re-Writing of EEPROM/Flash is a Security Hole

And likewise, data center owners will have to pay for "write-inhibit-switch monkeys" to do the hands-on when those DC owners want to enable remote firmware updates.

That could be automated with some kind of button pusher driven by a Pi pico or something, which would then be a target for malware...

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

'vibe coding' is happening constantly. Developers prompt the AI, copy the suggestion, and move on

I have no idea how vibe coding is even a thing because almost every command line, regex, or fragment of code I get from an LLM is wrong in some way to the point where it won't run or compile. Perhaps I haven't got what it takes to be a prompt engineer.

Re: Feedback?

Ship it!

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

The single downvote almost all the way down

Absolutely not a MAGA cap wearing Trump-voter in front of their computer having buyer's remorse.

Re: Trump vs the EU

Does it?

I'm sure the SEC will leave no stone unturned and get to the bottom of this.

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

"This is a 1980s computer. Not as clumsy or random as a modern-day PC; an elegant computer for a more civilised age."

Perhaps one day there'll be an article written untangling the Amiga's ongoing legal civil war over the past quarter of a century, however I fear that it'd be as weighty as War and Peace.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Oh good, the laptop and election circus is going to start up again, I wondered how long that would take.

Google's got a hot cloud infosec startup, a new unified platform — and its eye on Microsoft's $20B+ security biz

Re: LOL

Everything will be fine, just upload your data to a YouTube channel, those never get taken over.