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.
Low powered stuff probably requires more Dev or specialist software, with a off the shelf mini pc you can just put windows with kiosk mode on it. In terms of support time it’s probably cheaper than cheaper hardware.
But why the upgrade? Elevators have existed before computers, seriously. The Empire State building had elevators when it opened in the 1930s, and it didn’t need “8GB Core i5” nor could it have one. The transistor was invented in the 1950s, to late 1940s.
The labor and materials to design and install an analog elevator control was probably more expensive than an x86 board. Not to mention more failure prone.
to show you unavoidable ads in a confined space
I’ve never been in an elevator with displays like this. I take the stairs on the rare occasion anymore that I’m in a large building.
I think I’d just lean against it, so no one need look at it. However, I’m assuming there’s one on each wall, so maybe it’s best just to stare at the doors as is tradition.
Billionaires keep finding every possible way, small and large, to be worse.
Is this one of the newer ones with facial tracking? Could that be the reason for the stupid amount of power for images and video?
I went into a store that sells grills. They all had screens. On a fucking barbecue.
I just want a box that makes fire.
Remote controls. Why the fuck does every fan and window AC need one? Who genuinely searched through a dozen to find the right one instead of using the damn buttons on the thing?
‘Smart’ home things. My dryer and microwave can both be connected to the wifi. Never in my life have I put something in either of those devices and wished I could use a network connection to have it start working later. When I put shit in is when I want it to do it’s job.
I’m a huge nerd, when you lose me on these ‘features’ you’ve definitely lost the plot.
These are perfect devices to be a part of a botnet ;)
It’s a lifesaver when the washer/dryer remind the kids to retrieve their laundry. It depends on your particular situation.
There are use cases for everything. Cheaper electricity during the night - schedule the dryer to sync with that. Disabled and can’t reach the AC or light controls easily? Do it through your phone.
The real problem IMO is that these are implemented poorly, insecurely* and often through closed ecosystems, remote servers and million apps.
If this was done well, users like you could ignore the features, and others could make use of them. When you can’t turn a fan on because your Fast Fans app logged you out, then I’d just rather not…
Webber Kettle grill. BYOF but no screen in sight.
Two of the best meals of my entire life were made on Weber kettle grills
Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
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.
Nokia 3310 is much more powerful than Apollo mission computer. Crazy! And yet we need our phones getting bigger memory and faster CPUs each year. Why? Makes no sense 🤷
Damn you’re right. According to this article the apollo computer hat 32kB RAM and ran on … 0.043MHz
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.
Programmers back in the day had to be super clever. I can’t say much about programs but games used to be very restrictive and some devs managed to pull out incredible mechanics and graphics having barely any memory to work with. Today they’d release 150gb game that is no much better than a game they’ve released in 2008.
This always made me respect old school games.
A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can’t just buy a bigger server… well Google Stadia tried
I love how you can take an old game now and, assuming it’s still playable, the cut scenes often look really bad compared to the regular game play, since they were pre-rendered at what would be considered low-res today. It used to be the other way around!
Also, the further back you go, the less the game industry was locked into a handful of game engines, which in some ways gave devs more creative freedom, though of course it was a lot of work to write the whole thing from scratch every time.
And a few thousand people working 24/7.
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
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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
Is it inflation or 8GB of ram and x86-64 gaming capable CPUs in everything with buttons
Honestly speaking, using readily available hardware instead of specialty made to operate an elevator isn’t a bad idea.
The elevator probably cost $250,000. The i5 is a laptop chip. I’m sure it’s part of a fanless industrial embedded system. I can’t imagine why this is even news.
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Arduino-like could be enough and its easy to buy/replace
Arduino
STOP USING BRAND NAMES, I am TIRED of seeing it.
It’s not “Arduino”, it’s “microcontroller”. STM32 “blue pill” compatible clones are cheap enough to give away in bulk. You don’t even have to consider going 8 bit anymore.
It’s not “Raspberry Pi”, it’s “single board computer”. Although dtb overlays and such are slightly more annoying on other boards, there’s literally not much of any difference functionality wise. AND the other boards are cheaper.
There’s no reason to use the big brands. Unless you are working for someone and your boss demands “enterprise support” Red Hat style, of course.
It’s an elevator, you could run it on a PLC with some ladder logic.
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.
There is 2 things to this, its cheaper to buy hardware like a raspberry pi or similar with 8gb of ram and use that to build the elevator. And it might genuinely easier to source the parts and future spare parts.
But as a developer I want to be snarky and say why does a elevator need 8GB, it should have 256MB and use 168 MB max where 100 MB is display graphics and music, 5 is the control system with 3 copies of the variable for redundancy and the rest is telemetry and a memory leak that eats 1MB every 2 weeks because someone is resizing the audio buffer for floor announcements everytime.
But its probably just a mini pc that’s using 512Mb all in all running some linux distro. and the 8GB is just not being used.
Raspberry pi’s are unreliable POS. We use some at work to just display a static web page that refreshes a few times an hour and somehow they fail at that. They’re good enough for us since we’re just an office showing some stats. But this is proper digital signage.
For something like this where you really need 100% uptime (except for this) there’s a whole army of specialty PCs built for this role. Passive cooking so there’s no fan to fail, beefy over built power supplies, and usually some built in special IO. They’ll usually have hardware watchdogs too, that’ll reboot the system if it’s not responding.
A friend makes game cabinets for casinos and they have a 100% uptime requirement from some customers. And they use odroids for that. And a casino cabinet has more sensors than I ever though possible.
Edit. With that said the machine in the elevator does not need to have 100% uptime a restart is fine, the security systems and locks are controlled by other systems that are not connectied to the carriage in the hoist way.
The computer in the elevator just places floor calls on another system over a bacnet connection. So it handles media and floor calls.
Edit2. Source misspent youth. I can recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I and there is one more I can’t find right now.
display a static web page (…) they fail at that
Depends on how. Although I hate how everything is a web page nowadays.
hardware watchdogs
The x86 monopolists and most aarch64 chips have those. Although not always wired and/or enabled correctly. On ARM it’s often used to reboot: literally just shutdown without resetting watchdog.
All we want is a page that shows various stats about work related things. They refresh every 20 minutes to get the latest info. But the most common point of failure is the network. Wired PIs seem fine, but wireless? Nah.
The PIs are set to fully reboot once a week, but even that doesn’t work. At least once a week at least one will just disconnect from the network and not reconnect. I set up something to restart the network service since I found out that’s what was failing, but that doesn’t fix all of them. Sometimes they’ll just completely lock up. So at least once a month someone will have to manually reboot one of them. Most are in easy to reach places, but a few require some OSHA violations to get to.
Oh wow, amazing. Well, the Raspberry Pis all have Broadc*m SOCs. Which means they have relatively good mainline Linux support overall, but that also means Broadc*m Wi-Fi. That’s god awful. I’ve witnessed two laptops with these and on both it’s miserable. My lifehack of sorts was making a desktop shortcut and/or shell alias:
sudo rmmod wl && sudo modprobe wl.
Better a web page than some pile of surveillance capitalist dog shit from an app store…
wait until you hear about web fingerprinting
I don’t know… I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4 for a home server and I have 243 days straight of uptime and I’ve never had it crash. It’s a great little server doing a good running Pihole and unbound.
I have RPis for DNS. Five years without a hitch on Pi4s
3D printer has been running on a Pi3 for almost 8 years.
Overkill, yes but also almost surely just a standardized hardware set the company uses regardless of the specific advertising situation.
This set of hardware can run 99% of their client requirements and requires only a single hardware configuration to support. Maybe a couple generations of support as time goes on before older hardware is replaced.
Could this particular use case be handled by something as simple as a raspberry pi? Probably, but almost surely not everything the company that provides the hardware/service/support handles for clients.
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.
our HMO medical facilities has elevators with MSMs news, although there isnt any sound.
I feel seen
We got so far into “hardware is cheap” / “developers are expensive” / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.
Nah we’re usong an i5 to blink an LED
Shouldn’t we go with an i7 so we get more cores?
Meanwhile my company keeps using NUCs to control 9 live video feeds per NUC. And when they inevitably keep crashing because of thermal throttling/dust build up after around a year, they just replace them.
Do you get to keep them?
No we even have security checks when leaving the premises. We yearly hear about firings (through the grapevine) because of theft. You can easily steal 1000s worth in equipment everyday.
If they’re replacing them, doesn’t that mean they are binning the replaced devices? Why would the company care if you take the device home without the drive? Are they getting a kickback from the recycling company?
I assume they RMA them or bin them. I genuinely don’t know, not my department. I think they work with HP because nearly everything is HP.
They likely go with HP because their HP rep convinced them it was a better option than Dell, tbh. Most places I’ve worked were fine with me rerouting hardware to my trunk instead of the bin, so it never hurts to ask. But yeah if you’re removed from that particular team it’d be an awkward conversation for sure so I don’t blame you for not asking.
