Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

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 …

[Dwarf]

Adverts and telemetry

How else do they get enough compute power to serve all the pointless adverts and collect all that juicy telemetry.

[MagikGimp]

Principles (again)

You scoff but show me one xnix box that can show even a rudimentary suitable animated graphics presentation for advertising, just one. There may be games now but Windows has been the workhorse for this task for years thanks to an established and proven accomplished software base.

The screen might even be embedded. But no, stick to principles- "there shouldn't even be adverts!" "give me 400MB and a ThinkPad!" etc etc. These are businesses! This is what they need. And this isn't even a BSOD anyway.

[Mishak]

Re: Principles (again)

I used to supply a custom Yocto system to a customer that worked just fine with 4GB RAM (using GStreamer / OpenGL).

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Principles (again)

I guess you are younger than 30 years old, and are part of the "all computers need to be rebooted every few days, and reinstalled from scratch every 6 months, or they'll slow down and crash" generation?

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Principles (again)

11 years between troll posts? Gotta do better than that, mate.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Principles (again)

I have an original Raspberry Pi doing just that. And it doesn’t ever need rebooting, unlike just about every other solution I’ve tried.

In the average lift, a bit of paper would do just as well, since the adverts rarely change.

The idea of having a FPS on the go between floors sounds quite fun though.

[retiredFool]

Re: Principles (again)

I'd go further and just a pico2 now. They boot faster, and I find them more reliable on a power fail glitch. The W pico2 does wifi so it can send a message if something is awry. Sometimes my pi's after a glitch I have to cycle a 2nd time with a longer off, maybe a couple secs. For an elevator I'd expect reliability is #1. And worse ever so rarely on the pi, power is whacked at just the wrong moment and I get a corrupt SD card that needs a reload. I have probably 8 pi's now that run 24x7 around the house from wifi extenders to AC monitors to some controllers.

[David 132]

Re: Principles (again)

Yeah, using MS Windows on an elevator is just wrong on every level, but no doubt there's a storey involved.

[doublelayer]

Re: Principles (again)

You're making an assumption. All we know is that there's an Intel processor in the box. We have no information about what operating system boots off it if it's working properly. Intel doesn't mean Windows.

[David 132]

Re: Principles (again)

You must be really, really fun at parties!

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Principles (again)

Did posting that awful pun give you some kind of a lift?

[doublelayer]

Re: Principles (again)

A Pico running a video screen is probably not the favored solution. While you can drive some screens from it if you build the hardware, it's not great for decoding random video files or streaming something from the internet, whereas even the most basic Pi Zero can do that with much less work.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Principles (again)

This is a screen in a lift. It will be showing only a select number of images that the owner/operator of the screen wants it to show (as suggested, almost certainly advertising). Probably sent to it from some central location, where there is a box that can run some simple image format conversion to makie suitable for this display.

Why on Earth would it need to decode random video files or stream anything from the internet (that wasn't already in its preferred format and, indeed, not initiating a stream by itself but streamed at the device, display this, don't answer back)?

Heck, every time I read a "what do you do with your home server/home lab?" post, just about everyone seems to be plugging in OTT GPUs to transcode videos for streaming to devices about the house; if all the hobbyists can do it (and want to) pretty sure anyone running digital hoardings, if they were price/reliability conscious enough to use minimalist hardware such as Pico instead of a Zero, could also figure out transcoding.

Not that anyone actually running these blasted screens is going to care about being cost efficient (ref the hardware use indicated by TFA) and they are probably making the hotel pay through the nose for the "premium feel of the digital billboard - oops, sorry, digital lifestyle infomatics delivery subsystem.

[doublelayer]

Re: Principles (again)

It depends how they're getting advertising, but I could easily see someone putting video ads on this screen, and if they do, they might stream them from the source. If they were, getting the basic video decoding that a Pico can manage would be more difficult than putting something less limited in instead. A Pico can sort of decode and display video, but it requires hacking both together using a lot more effort than it really needs. A Pico can have a simple display interface built out of the analog pins, the Pi has an HDMI port with no software implementation required. A Pico can have a decoding algorithm built in and you can transcode for that one method, or a full Pi has a GPU with hardware decoding capability and a CPU powerful enough to handle that in real time. There's no pressing reason to do that when you could use hardware that's perfectly capable of the job and is similar in price ($4/$6 for the Pico, $5 for a Pi Zero).

[ChrisC]

Re: Principles (again)

"This is a screen in a lift. It will be showing only a select number of images that the owner/operator of the screen wants it to show"

Not always - one of the reasons we're seeing larger/higher quality displays appearing in lifts is precisely because the building owners want to push multimedia to lift passengers, so the idea that a screen (and the backend system driving it) like the one in this article would be ticking over on idle power just cycling through a handful of carefully curated still images is somewhat outdated.

e.g. https://www.dewhurst-global.com/emea/product-category/displays-directional-indicators/multimedia/

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Principles (again)

I think there are plenty of intelligent advertising signs powered by various Raspberry Pi SBCs, and these won't be running Windows! I can't point you to one, but I'm absolutely certain that other readers here have relevant information.

[martinusher]

Re: Principles (again)

The fundamental problem with advertising is that it hits a point where adding more decreases its effectiveness. Despite the enormous resources devoted to marketing to me, personally, the typical advert says absolutely nothing relevant to me. It just gibbers the same old slop, day in, day out, wasting resources that could be used to help lower prices. (Its not just the cost of the advertising, its the entire ecosystem, all the businesses, all those jobs, an endless hive of churn trying desperately to separate me from my income.)

...and yes, the reason why Windows dominates this space still is that its easy. It doesn't require any thought to set up endless streams of low quality code and graphics (see "Self Serve Checkout") so the kind of mindset that can't stop pushing meaningless ads at us is going to really like this capability (plus all the business tools to demonstrate how this campaign is really working and, by the way, you wait till you see the next one!).

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: Principles (again)

Quote

"The fundamental problem with advertising is that it hits a point where adding more decreases its effectiveness."

No the fundamental problem of advertising is that only 50% of the advertising spend actually does any good but no one knows WHICH 50%

[that one in the corner]

Re: Principles (again)

Nobody even knows if it is 50% wastage or 75% or 95%. At best all you get is a chart saying "k doolars spent on advertising this month" plotted against "n revenue dollars increase the same month" and if n is positive, or even greater than k, it must be because of the advertising. We suggest you buy some more.

Of course, if n is negative then it was the wring sort of advertising, you won't be seeing that copywriter again, but here is our latest prodigy, that'll be a 76% price hike for the consulting as you are obviously in a crisis only advertising can help with.

Confounding factors? Que? No, is Siberian Hamster.

[Mishak]

The City of Light

The place that A.L.I.E. created?

"There is a place for all of us. When I first landed on the Earth, I met a woman who spoke of a place beyond the Dead Zone, a place where everyone is accepted — a City of Light."

[Spazturtle]

This is likely a networked display, the computer is probably in a network rack in a back office connected to a AV over IP adapter piping it's output to multiple displays throughout the hotel.

[_wojtek]

hush with your logic and whatnot! ;)

alas - in such case many / all screens should be affected...

[laughthisoff]

Oops

The flaw here was having the primary display be the public-facing display. Yes, it's cheaper to have a device with a single video output, but if you have the public display on a separate (and not mirrored) output then it should just go blank if the machine is down.

SB

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Oops

If it's anything like the sanctuary/auditorium screens in my church, some HDMI over Ethernet is all it takes for a long ride from the driver (hotel server rack, or a Mac in our tech booth) to a screen far away, in this case in a moving box. The receiving converter takes less power than a separate PC, surely, possibly PoE -- I didn't set it up, so I don't know.

(No signal? Converter pretends it's not even there; the screens -- LG in my case -- do the usual "no signal" dance.)

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: Oops

The least they could have done is to use the distro which featured the cute penguin pic during boot.

[grumpyoldeyore]

Share and Enjoy

Is it a Happy Vertical People Transporter ?

[mtp]

Re: Share and Enjoy

The diodes on the left hand side don't look so good

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Share and Enjoy

> Is it a Happy Vertical People Transporter ?

… "as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital."

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Share and Enjoy

Have they tried experimenting briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest or demanding participation in the decision-making process and finally taken to squatting in basements sulking yet!

Anyway I'm off to my new job as a counsellor to neurotic lifts & it's not even Thursday.

[Blackjack]

Decent coffee in Paris? HA!

[Paul Herber]

Must be an Italian cafe somewhere!

[RM Myers]

Yes! Or, since it is Paris, oui oui, which is appropriate since that is what I usually do after a decent coffee. Damn prostate!

[billdehaan]

Needs an I5? Or has an I5?

I've done a lot of embedded work on control systems, and for systems that use COTS (commercial off the shelf) systems, it's very common to see overpowered hardware like this.

I've built systems that needed 12GB of disk space, including OS, application, and swapper, that shipped on PCs with a 512GB SSD. People would ask why on earth we needed half a terabyte of storage for the task, and the answer was we didn't, that's what the PC came with. Trying to get a PC with only 32GB of SSD could actually end up costing more, because it was special order.

When you're rolling your own, everything is built to requirements. When using COTS, you're picking from what's currently available. In situations like that, it can actually cost more to get a less powerful machine, because of economics of scale.

I had one project that required an RS-232 connection running at 2400 baud. The only vendors that sold PCs with serial ports cost hundreds of dollars more than those that didn't. We purchased a fifteen dollar USB to serial converter and plugged it into a 5 gigabit USB 3 port on a cheaper machine that didn't have a serial port. This article could be written about that project with the title "Software Bloat? This project needs a 5 gigabit network connection to talk at 2400 baud", and it would be just as valid.

The main deciding factors are usually things like power consumption, form factor, service accessibility for maintenance, warranty, MTBF, and of course cost. The PC has to be powerful enough, certainly. But the purchasing department isn't worried about buying a computer that's too powerful for the job.

Since the purchasers are often buying in quantity, they're often getting consignments from vendors of dead stock, ie. things that didn't sell and are filling up warehouse space. With I9s and I7s being the standard now, there's a lot of unsalable I5 stock available on the cheap.

I don't know when this elevator system was implemented (obviously after 2019), but I wouldn't be surprised if they got the controller PC cheap. I personally have two SFF I5 8GB systems with 240GB SSDs that I picked up around 2023 for Cdn$150. At that price point, the only question the purchasing department asks the engineers is whether it will do the job. If it's overkill, they don't care.

[Scene it all]

I was on an airline flight many years ago and they rebooted the in-seat entertainment system as we were taxiing out. Apparently, the default configuration of their video output switcher was to feed the console video to EVERY seat on the aircraft. So all us passengers got to watch a Linux boot sequence scroll by.

[that one in the corner]

Think of this like the old "is there a doctor on the flight?" question.

Showing *everyone* on the plane the bootup screen is like asking "is there a nerd on this flight? (who can help decode these messages and tell us why the inflight entertainment keeps crashing)".

[ecofeco]

I would be taking the stairs

If I saw that, I would be taking the stairs.

[ChrisC]

Re: I would be taking the stairs

Given that displays like this will play at best a minimal role in providing core functionality of the lift (i.e. at most, they might be used to provide the audible and visible indication of which floor the lift is on/heading to), with all of the serious stuff required to ensure the lift actually does function correctly and safely being handled by devices with far more attention paid to their design re reliability/stability/etc, then my only reaction to seeing this might be a raised eyebrow or a wry smile, as I happily used said lift to convey me to my chosen destination. It's no more of a safety issue than, say, having the in flight entertainment system reboot mid-flight. or having your car stereo lock up during a drive. Inconvenient, perhaps, unsafe, no.

[justandras]

Theory

I think there is a very high chance that what we are seeing is a remote bios screen fed into a video distribution system.

But who knows, they might using off the shelf mini pcs.

[Bitbeisser]

Some people seriously don't seem to realize that this is not the computer that runs the elevator itself, but is providing some user intended information/advertising...

[cageordie]

What size memory do you think you can buy?

We are making a small, throw away, machine. It is basically one time use. I need a total of about 256MB of RAM during development, and maybe 16MB in service. So we have an 8GB LPDDR4. Because that's what we can get. The device mostly uses programmable logic, and that device comes with a pair of ARM cores. Our choice of memory is limited by what the SOC supports, and what we can buy. Due to availability, we may even end up with 16GB.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

"The City of Light" or perhaps "The City of Love"

.. or, for those of us with functioning noses, "The City of the Stench".

Possibly the worst-smelling city I've ever been to in Europe.