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.
Is this part of the elevator, or an advertising billboard installed in the elevator?
Silly goose, they’re one and the same!
No, they very much aren’t. I doubt this actually has anything to do with the function of the elevator at all.
Probably. But even for a billboard this is overkill!
It is probably the cheapest computer you can buy brand new which you can connect to the Internet to deploy the ads.
Probably not cheapest over all, but cheapest standardized system the advertising company/IT support company they use has. If they can handle even 90% of client needs with this hardware, it means easier and more efficient support on the back end.
If the system isn’t standard, that means the company has to eat the labor costs for assembly and possibly some hardware support.
At a certain point, going lower spec means sourcing hardware that’s no longer being produced or putting together the components yourself rather than buying a prefabricated system.
Elevator manufacturers sell the displays with their elevators more often than not. The PC is not installed in the elevator, but in the machine room, and the video is being extended alongside the cabling used for the elevator itself.