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Tech News
Modder Andy France crammed a Mini-ITX VIA Nehemiah EPIA M10000 motherboard, power supply and a slimline CD drive into the cardboard packaging of a retail Windows XP box measuring just 243mm x 200mm x 48mm. He built an internal support case from Wonderboard plastic to hold the components in place without cutting the motherboard or bulging the box's exterior.
Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer detailed on X how the infamous FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 Windows XP volume license key spread widely despite being reserved for enterprise partners. He explained that XP's copy protection compared install keys against a heavily encrypted 10MB blob on the disc that turned out to be the old Microsoft Bob software, and that retail and volume-license media used entirely different validation keys and discs.
A technical breakdown explains how Windows XP picked a user's initial account picture: it used the RtlRandomEx function seeded with GetTickCount(), scanning the default pictures folder once rather than twice. This single-pass method is a special case of reservoir sampling, selecting one item fairly as the folder is enumerated.