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.
Honestly considering the age of this motherboard and cpu. This is legitimately cheaper than a raspberry pi now if you buy used and it’s a lot more powerful. I would also imagine that’ll it’ll be stuck in this elevator forever because why upgrade hardware when this nugget can still show ads completely disconnected from the elevator computer since it’s been doing since 2020. Maybe I would consider this absurd back during the end of Covid but not really that much now. Considering I can buy this for under a hundred dollars on eBay and you should probably be considering as well especially if you wanna run Linux on a cheap machine. Like yeah the ram is probably soldered onto the motherboard and it’s a laptop cpu with integrated graphics worse than that of the intel hd graphics 4000 in my 2012 MacBook. But like you can do a lot with this nugget.