No, it’s spelled with an ö, not an ő. They aren’t even from the same language. The double accent is Hungarian.

The Idaho researchers observed that reversing the intrinsic angular momentum, or “spin,” of thorium-229’s outermost neutron seemed to take 10,000 times less energy than a typical nuclear excitation. The neutron’s altered spin slightly changes both the electromagnetic and strong forces, but those changes happen to cancel each other out almost exactly. Consequently, the excited nuclear state barely differs from the ground state. Lots of nuclei have similar spin transitions, but only in thorium-229 is this cancellation so nearly perfect.

Basically, thorium-229 can be excited by conventional lasers instead of gamma rays. Instead of millions of electron volts, it takes less than 10, which means it’s more reliable and more precise.

You're saying that data centers are replacing batteries constantly...just imagine the labor costs on that (and the down time), not even considering the material cost.

I’m the tech doing the battery replacements. The big boy UPSes are typically a 3-5 year replacement cycle. Something like this:

(I just picked the last one on my phone so not a great picture, they’re about the size of a small refrigerator)

On rack mount and desktop style UPSes 18-36 months isn’t unreasonable. Some of the smaller UPSes, like APC 750s, go through batteries even faster. My personal theory is that they just get and stay too hot.

There is typically zero downtime while servicing any of them, every critical system has redundant power supply and battery replacements usually don’t interrupt power output anyway. It would take multiple failures to cause any sort of significant downtime, and if it would, we just do them during scheduled downtime.

This is false. Ben Franklin was nearly 70 in 1776. Only a handful were even below 20, let alone early 20s.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.