131–140 of 164 posts
Like anything shitty in tech being used, decisions pulled by non-engineers.
...who are good at estimating business value rather then playing with obscure unsupported tech.
I'm not a fan of Windows, but when I saw this post it reminded me of a picture I took at 30th street station in Philadelphia. I guess this was an attempt to use Linux for an visitor information kiosk. http://imgur.com/oULGTjJ
https://plus.google.com/108455147088522730235/posts/bjQyyUip...
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…
Not to detract from your points (you make good ones); web is probably not a good medium for such displays. Not always, at least. You'd want them to be reasonably functional without comms. Last I checked (I may be wrong), HTML 5 constrains local storage to 5Mb, which is precious little, if the display uses images/media.
The biggest reason for html as the menu format was it would be the best format (in terms of flexibility) to use for the display content and localization. The local db was embedded FirebirdSQL, and connected to a remote Firebird instance running on a central server (transactional data was replicated as connectivity was available, and it wasn't more than half the time)
If I were going for a digital signage solution even two years ago, I would probably lean towards windows. There still aren't tools for developing visual animations that match what Flash (though deprecated) offered. Flash is really easy to embed in a full-screnn app, and offers a lot of flexibility for the purpose. The tooling is broadly available, and setting up a canvas of the right proportions is all you need to start.
Flash costs a lot more than Windows even. IMHO The cost of software licensing is really minimal for most companies for these kinds of things.
Today it would be a tossup of a windows solution with Flash and/or an embedded or otherwise chromeless/fullscreen browser and a linux solution. If I were to guess, the windows solution would probably be done faster. Dealing with multiple displays and orientations in Linux is much more of a PITA, let alone that VS is actually pretty decent.
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Web server means additional complexity both to deploy and maintain. After 20+ years in the corporate world I can guarantee that an alone-standing native client it going to beat anything with a web server.
"Beat", how exactly? 20+ years in the corporate world doesn't mean much if you can't back your opinion up with proper arguments. Besides the confusing fact that you bring HTML5 local storage into the equation for some reason, a local web server doesn't necessarily mean more complex deployment/maintenance than maintaining a .NET application.
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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…
Sorry, that wasn't my attitude nor was I intending to sound that way. I fully understand why they'd rather use a Windows solution, I just wanted to explain in a simple way what I thought their motivations were. > "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…
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Not to detract from your points (you make good ones); web is probably not a good medium for such displays. Not always, at least. You'd want them to be reasonably functional without comms. Last I checked (I may be wrong), HTML 5 constrains local storage to 5Mb, which is precious little, if the display uses images/media.
I'm not an expert in embedded displays, but I assume you'd simply run a webserver on localhost.
I started with a small "industrial" computer — Intel D525, 2g RAM, 40g SSD — costing about $300. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 Alternate with X and Fluxbox. I used Chrome for the display. I configured it to log on automatically upon booting, start X, and run a script configured to start Chrome pointed at the proper URL.
Then I used remastersy† to create an installation USB stick. Boot from the stick, and it installs the customized Ubuntu non-interactively. The first time the system boots, it runs a little dialog where you tell it its role in the system (i.e, what view of the overall status should it display).
If you later need to reconfigure it, you can log in over SSH and run scripts to change the configuration. Or, if absolutely necessary, you can visit in person, open the cabinet, and hook up a keyboard.
It spends almost all its life waiting on an XHR, which asks essentially, I'm showing version x, send me the next version when ready. When version x+1 comes along, the server replies to all the XHRs waiting for version x+1 with a chunk of JSON describing version x+1. The displays then all update their DOMs and hang an XHR for the next version.
I later added a separate heartbeat loop. Once a minute, it asks the server if it's alive, and it puts up an out-of-service screen if the server stops responding.
Before that, we had a Mac mini in the conference room because we found a nice mount, and now we are just buying TVs and mounting an Apple TV.
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Or because, you know, they find that paying a little more up front gives them a better overall product - longer usable life, less maintenance, etc. Just because you don’t see the point of an Apple product beyond “ooh shiny” doesn’t mean others don’t. I work for a global company where > 50% of people work from home offices and > 90% of our staff use Macs. I can only actually think of 2 specific people (out of 200+) th…
>longer usable life, less maintenance I'm not aware of any evidence of this, and I don't even remember any of my Apple fanatic friends even claiming this. Any references? >Are you suggesting that all these people, many of whom are in countries with lower wage standards, pay “extra” just to have a shiny apple logo on their desk at home that no one but them sees? This is a dishonest way of having a discussion.
From my personal experience, yeah they do last a lot longer than my other PCs, maybe with the exception of ThinkPad. Mac hardwares are very strong and well designed. Most other PC manufacturers needs to cut cost from every single component, thus they won't be able to use the highest quality components.
People use what they know. Given a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you work in IT for any length of time, you come across people who use Excel as a text combiner to parse tabular text in ways similar to how a regex could, or have similar convoluted workarounds for any number of tasks. In some ways, these are quite clever hacks. In other ways, it's kind of sad as it obviously shows how badly GUI-centric "It's…