[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

Last I remember, Baldurs Gate was on 6 separate discs, but I haven’t installed it from those in probably 20 years.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 11 points 6 days ago

A corporation is a legal construct. While it’s theoretically possible for a single business to grow very large, most of the exploitation and legal cover provided by the simple act of incorporation becomes nearly impossible.

Plus without a state to push down competition, it becomes a lot harder to monopolize a market. Ideally there wouldn’t even be a market to monopolize, but that’s a different discussion altogether.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 12 points 6 days ago

I wholeheartedly agree!

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 42 points 6 days ago

All corporations are created by the state. Corporations only exist because of the laws that create them. Without that special legal status it’s pretty much impossible to grow to the sizes most corporations do.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 week ago

It’s actually 1 in 1000, 99.0% would be 1/100.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 month ago

Oh yeah? It just magically connects to… nothing then?

Pretty sure you’re thinking that you don’t need a plan to call, but you definitely need a signal.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 76 points 1 month ago

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

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 69 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 months ago

Probably the person that threw the rock and murdered her???

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 47 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 27 points 6 months ago

They generally don’t scream to “go back to your own country” when that happens.

[-] mark3748@sh.itjust.works 23 points 9 months ago

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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mark3748

joined 10 months ago