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.
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…