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.

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[–] 24 points 2 months ago (6 children)

No, they very much aren't. I doubt this actually has anything to do with the function of the elevator at all.

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Probably. But even for a billboard this is overkill!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    It is probably the cheapest computer you can buy brand new which you can connect to the Internet to deploy the ads.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Exactly, even if the hotel is managing their IT internally (as opposed to a contracted IT Support provider, or hotel chain system), they aren't going to be building the systems they use. They're going to be buying standard workstations them from Dell, HP, etc. and using those which whatever software they need for this use case.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    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.

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