McD is conservative when it comes to kitchen technology. With certain exceptions, franchisees determine when they buy new equipment and not the corporation. Most of it is designed for a 7-year capex cycle.

But to answer the question: no, the machines aren't net enabled and do not NNTP their clocks. But that's changing.

But I still wouldn't design my architecture to let a central server decide when a machine should go out of service. Think about what else you can fuck up that way.

Why are they off? Good question. Sometimes it's as simple as a store owner setting the heat cycle for 2pm instead of 2am.

Why are they not redundant? They're expensive, take up a lot of valuable space and a lot more valuable energy, they need to be filled with 2x the product, and the customer demand isn't that high at any given moment to warrant the expense in most stores.

> Next up, what about redundancy, do stores only have one machine?

From my (old) experience working at one, yes. The annoyance of having to maintain a second machine (especially when cleaning and maintenance involved a physical person cleaning things) was not worth keeping extra 9's of uptime.

Well again, looking at the graph, I'm seeing 10-20% down time, so it's not "just an extra 9"

I think you might find that in a certain way it is. 90% to 99% is an extra nine.

/ducks

Or even zero 9s (80%) to one 9 (90%).

Cloud based clock.

Don't you mean NTP? We've had this technology for years! If it's connected to the internet, it's a pretty fundamental piece of pretty much any networked OS. You can ensure correct time this way.

NTP is fine but so is pulling time off a server header if it's phoning home to report status.

Not that it matters for ice cream, but NTP can compensate for latency better than HTTPx can.

It's also easy to implement since it will be integrated into the OS of the ice cream machine already.

GPS based clock is better no need for internet connection. Seiko and other company has been doing this for years.

NTP is typically backed by GPS.

If you have a datacenter full of computers, obviously you don't want to run a separate GPS antenna for every system. NTP allows systems to synchronize to GPS over a network.

Need a clear sky connection though.

NTP is what I meant, yes.

The clock probably resets when the power goes out or the fuse blows. They would need a battery as a backup to keep the time current.

Calling fast food workers monkeys won't make you look any smarter.

I've not heard that term used, and its bad. You shouldn't dehumanize people for being "cheap labor". Honestly, that guy flipping burgers is doing more real good for people than any number of highly paid software devs working on VC funded projects that will mostly end up in the trash.

I think it's more acceptable to make fun of people of your level of privilege and up (like the management who underpays) and less of those lower.

If a fast food worker at a better paying, better run chain or restaurant said it, it would be still a little mean (as intended), but not kicking down.

yup. They call it punching up. No one likes someone who punches down. lol