51–60 of 164 posts
Last year I was on an aircraft watching the IFE, then it froze, I got a kernel panic, then it restarted, I was left looking at a Linux logo then the init output before being thrown back into the IFE interface. My point is that no general purpose OS is immune from fault. All you can really do is remove or disable things which aren't absolutely needed to get your work done. In this case they should have disabled Window…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
".NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs" - it makes it easy for any kind of developer, that's the defining characteristic of best frameworks.
It makes it so simple, any idiot can write a GUI program ... so you get GUI programs that look like they were written by idiots.
I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…
> Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it.
They understand it, have an idea about the cost and amount of support necessary. "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else.
> The IT department only wanted Windows machines on their network
Again: a complete valid reason in my view. Here on this forum you have even people advocating that server and client in web apps should be written in the same language to keep things consistent.
> The customer was afraid of Mac OS X because they thought it would not be stable enough
You make that sound like there teeth were rattling in horror, but apparently failed to convince them that OSX would be stable enough?
I'm not a Windows developer or -user, indications that win 98 runs on my ATM also make me concerned.
But "muhaha, they are just stupid bricks for using windows" (no, you did not say that, but it sums the attitude) shows a lack of understanding and, as a consequence, does not advance the spread of alternatives into these environments IMO.
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There's an office near work that gives its receptionists Macs; it looks great, but an insane amount of money for the functionality they use I'm sure.
You are forgetting the IT support headache for 2 Windows PC while the rest of the company might be using Macs
I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…
No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (or IBM) :) A lot of professional grade display screens also come with a built in computer running embedded Windows. Although for web based signs a Raspberry Pi works really well: https://shutdownscanner.com/Blog/Posts/Raspberry-Pi-Digital-...
The problem arises if people buy the lightweight hardware like a Pi and then try to run the complex stuff.
Also, most people seem to ignore just how important the backend / cms system for these installations is. The content that is deployed on systems is already out of sync as soon as you plug the systems in :) I still remember fondly how I watched one of our competitors distribute content (on a digital signage fair) to his systems using WS FTP for Windows. That's not a solution you should sell to a demanding customer, he'll simply call you whenever he wants a new image on there.
Last year I was on an aircraft watching the IFE, then it froze, I got a kernel panic, then it restarted, I was left looking at a Linux logo then the init output before being thrown back into the IFE interface. My point is that no general purpose OS is immune from fault. All you can really do is remove or disable things which aren't absolutely needed to get your work done. In this case they should have disabled Window…
I saw one boot last week on a Delta flight. I was very surprised to see Tux.
Because .NET makes it very easy for average developers to write GUI programs, and Visual Studio is what they use to write them. In theory, this developer could just use Mono to run his .NET app on Linux. But that requires them to learn how to do that. Personally, I've never found a clear tutorial on how to take a .NET GUI app that you've just written in Visual Studio and get it running on Mono. I haven't looked in se…
You know, this is an extremely valid reason
You just write the program (making it go fullscreen), put it on the Startup folder and that's it.
If there was a turnkey solution for other platforms I'm sure this would be very helpful.
And the cost of the windows license is irrelevant if you consider the other signage material (displays, mounts, etc)
I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…
You frame the three points a bit derogatory and seem to have missed the point of your customers. > Windows was the OS that the company was also using for employee machines, so they knew it. They understand it, have an idea about the cost and amount of support necessary. "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else. > The IT department only wanted Win…
> "They knew it" seems to convey that they were essentially stupid or not adventurous enough to try something else. I did not intend to convey that they were stupid or not adventurous enough, I simply thought "knew it" would be a sufficient enough description. I did not intend "knew it" in a pejorative way at all.
> You make that sound like there teeth were rattling in horror No, not really, actually I remember discussions with big companies where those were the exact words ("Our IT department is concerned with the stability of this Mac OS X")
> "muhaha, they are just stupid bricks for using windows Again, no, I just tried to explain the seemingly irrational behaviour (for tech people) of choosing a technologically worse solution even though better solutions exists. I wasn't even talking about Windows actually, but about digital signage solutions based on Windows. I'd rather not go and open the box of pandora that is Windows Linux Mac OS X. Most of our competitors that ran on Windows (situation may have changed, I left that company more than 2 years ago) were on the feature side and in terms of possibilities worse than our solution (not only because it was easy to pull of a lot of things with Core Graphics really easy).
I really can't see where you read the "those people were stupid" attitude, but it may be a cultural difference, I'm not a native english speaker. Nevertheless, even if I sounded that way, it totally wasn't intended that way. If I were in a big (non-tech) company in such a situation, I might even decide in a similar way out of the above reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (or IBM) :) A lot of professional grade display screens also come with a built in computer running embedded Windows. Although for web based signs a Raspberry Pi works really well: https://shutdownscanner.com/Blog/Posts/Raspberry-Pi-Digital-...
I found that there's a great gap or schism between common digital signage projects. On the one hand you have solutions that just want to display 5 pictures or a simple website (current dish of the day, bus tables, train schedules, current news) and on the other hand you have high profile vendors that want (multiple) absolutely stutter free HD content (with huge bitrates because so much is going on in their animations…
The Pi has a surprisingly powerful GPU but I've not tried HW acceleration from the browser. Something to look into maybe.