Spyke

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What’s even crazier is that corporate customers don’t actually deal with this in any way! There’s no Microsoft account required on an Active Directory controlled PC.

Source: I am big corporate IT. Oh, and my personal AD deployment, outside of work

memes

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Happy Juneteenth everyone!

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Ah yes, the smug European that has no idea that macaroni and cheese originated in Italy in the 14th century, was extremely popular in England from the 18th century, and was introduced to the US via France.

And yes, it’s cheese. Probably cheddar. You start with a bechamel and incorporate cheese to make a mornay sauce. Combine the sauce with the pasta and serve.

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Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet

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Another library in the area has ethernet ports but they are just decoys (dead ports). I asked the librarian what the problem is, why they are disabled, and whether we can turn them on.

They’re not decoys, they’re just not patched. Because we don’t generally patch anything that’s not going to be in use. Also because some rando will probably attempt to plug their nasty ass laptop into it, which is also why we block port intrusions.

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Panda Express Drive-Thru Speaker

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They run windows embedded. They are pretty shitty industrial PCs manufactured for Delphi (there are other brands but they’re all pretty much the same) running on 486s with 512mb or 1gb of RAM. The Aloha server runs a service that communicates with the display via serial or TCP/IP. The other guy that made a joke about it running windows 7 was too generous, every single one I’ve worked on is running Windows Embedded 2002 (AKA XP.)

They are purpose built, passively cooled, waterproof, and very robust industrial PCs. They pre-date using embedded Linux in everything and the effort of building a specialized kernel likely isn’t worth the effort. Since the industry is moving to DMBs (Digital Menu Boards) in drive throughs anyway, these will likely be the last iteration since they can just display the order on the DMB itself.

Kitchen monitors are also industrial PCs running Windows Embedded, but NCR makes those and they’re updated a lot. NCR (and their Aloha system) are fully committed to Windows for some reason, but Windows Embedded and IoT are pretty much on par with Linux for this application. That’s basically what it was made to do, and it works better than you might think.

Sorry about the info dump, I used to be an embedded systems engineer and I’ve spent the past decade in restaurant IT.

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Windows 11 Enterprise likely uses a different OOBE, I just tell it to join during setup. At work, everything is image-based and pre-configured so no standard OOBE.

Like most things at MS, those with the resources get everything they want while the little guy gets screwed.

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How do I wipe a modern SSD to prevent data recovery?

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It is the only approved method for data destruction for the several banks and government agencies I support. If they trust it, I trust it.

I have checked a couple of times out of curiosity, after a secure erase the drive is as clean as if it had been DBANed. Sometimes things are standards because they work properly.

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For example they could refuse to implement reactions or typing indicators

Reactions already work in MMS groups, use them every day.

or they could even deliberately compress videos

Except they’re already advertising improved quality of photos and video in non-iMessage chats. Doubt they would advertise a specific feature only to make it worse.

til

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[TIL] Florida had a smaller official population than West Virginia until the 1950 census. In the 2020 census, Florida had just over 12 times the population of West Virginia.

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1901, designed to lower humidity in a print shop to keep the moisture from affecting the paper. Then to textile mills and other manufacturing facilities.

I think it was installed in a residence in 1915 for the first time, then in 1931 the window unit was invented. They became available for cars in 1932, but the first factory units didn’t come out until 1939 from Packard.

If you don’t count only powered AC, passive air conditioning methods have existed as long as we’ve been building structures. There has been a big push towards these passive cooling methods again.

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Microsoft Please Fix

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I agree that the gatekeeping isn’t a good thing, but you should learn at least the basics of the CLI. It will give you a better understanding of what’s going on behind your GUI and makes troubleshooting and fixing problems a lot easier.

Definitely not required but it is absolutely a skill worth having.