BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called “The City of Light” or perhaps “The City of Love” by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel’s elevators, “The City of Bork” is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
It’s a lost art for sure. I wrote a graphic OS for an instrument my company uses in the field. I had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage to work with, and the latter had to include space for a data logger, so the code effectively had to reside in about a quarter of that.
It gave me a lot of respect for the original Mac OS. Graphic OS with 128 KB of RAM and 400 KB floppy for storage. The latter had to have room for the OS itself + apps + user documents. They did “cheat” somewhat by having a 64 KB ROM to help with the graphics library.
But the lengths they went to to squeeze every last bit of capability out of the hardware was legendary. For example, Wozniak wrote a floppy driver that varied the spin rate depending on which track was being read. He reasoned the outer tracks could hold more data thanks to the greater diameter if the spin were slowed down.
Not using an elevator though
They haven’t installed the ropes yet.
I never get tired of this comparison, esp. with the smartphone in your hand.
One can push it further: ALL of the computing power used for/during the moonlanding has been surpassed by any smartphone, by orders of magnitude.
And required constant monitoring and manual input…
The problem is inefficency exacerbated by the requirement of pesky things like graphics
Decent chance they are running windows 10 or 11 and running some web browser app for getting and displaying whatever its supposed to. Thats probably several levels of isolation for something thats already trusted
With a nice user interface noone is going to ever be looking at unless something stops working
Significantly cheaper to develop at the expence of performance
Even with graphics, you can simply compare the performance and colors of what you had back in the 90s with the bloated bullshit of today - the only exception being video, stuff today much better compressed with low quality loss. On the other hand, electron.
4k definition in screens below 16" is wasteful beyond belief.
Do they make less than 4k definition on 16" screens any more?
Elevators require constant input of where to go too though