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Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

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Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#141

Post by csmuk »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #8

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…

This.

Done this a few times. Entire process for a kiosk is:

1. Build a full screen app in Visual Studio with WPF. WPF is great here - 2d, 3d, interactive, animations, video everything, all without any code. This is beyond trivial and the tooling is entirely free.

2. Build it and copy the exe to target windows machine (a cheap AIO desktop - Sony VPC are nice as they have VESA mounts, touch screens and don't break that often)

3. Set the machine to auto login and set the shell to the program.

4. reboot it. Done.

This takes literally minutes.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#142

Post by ShirtlessRod »

simonw wrote: post #20
alexchamberlain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alternatively, if it saves them a few days of work in lost productivity due to malware, viruses and unintuitive software, it's a great investment.

Are you being serious with this comment?

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#143

Post by csense »

zdw wrote: post #10

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…

Obligatory xkcd reference:

http://xkcd.com/763/

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#144

Post by ChuckMcM »

I don't know the answer to the question, I do know the answer to the question "Why do digital signage vendors use Windows as their host platform?" seems to be so that they can hire unskilled labor. In various embedded forums I see questions about doing digital signage on Android/Linux while exploiting the graphics acceleration of the SoC get met by stony silence (no drivers) or complex installs (blobs + release compatibilty). Its way too much work so these guys get Windows, and all the vendors have Windows drivers and are willing to let you incorporate them into your code and hiring a Windows programmer has a bigger pool to draw upon.

Combine that with customers who want to use Windows tools to configure/upload to their signs and IT folks who are "comfortable" with Windows on their network and voila, mutual lock in.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#145

Post by nopassrecover »

cynwoody wrote: post #137
krallin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in embedded displays, but I assume you'd simply run a webserver on localhost.

I've done a couple of these, and that's close to what I did. 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 insta…

Tangent, but I've found it a bit odd to see Out of Service messages on billboards. Why not display a default ad (e.g. "Your Ad Here")?

Actually on that note I'm surprised I don't see more community/charitable notices in the mix for digital boards (these could serve as "defaults"). Having non-commercial and regularly changing ads in the mix would actually get me watching, and is potentially even tax-deductible.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#146

Post by toddkaufmann »

rangelreale wrote: post #69

I'm the lead developer in a company that does just digital signage software in Brazil. Recently we rewrote from stratch our software in Qt so it would run on Linux and Android, even on the Raspberry Pi. The main barriers we found in Linux adoption were: - Support staff only knows Windows. This gets worse when screens get installed in remote areas, like we have some screens at Manaus, in the Amazon Forest. There is ju…

To login to remote machines with dynamic IPs, have a loop on the remote machine that logs in using ssh to your server and creates an ssh connection back to it. Remote has ssh key, with ssh config that says "Remoteforward 23456 localhost:22" and on your server have the shell for the remote id be a command like "sleep 300". Tunnel will restart every five minutes (unless it has active connections), this reduces the likelihood of it hanging. A ~20 line cron or daemon script, an ssh key, ssh config file, account on server, authorized_keys entry with command specified, and some testing.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#147

Post by jroseattle »

There is a Windows-based digital display in the grocery near our house. It is perpetually displaying some Windows dialog about the advertising program they have installed has failed/ab-ended in some manner. Seriously, I'm not sure the display has ever worked correctly (I go there a lot.)

However, I watched the crew on a Virgin America flight announce that we had to "reboot" the plane because the entertainment system was frozen. It was, and everyone could see it -- it was Linux-based (not certain which flavor, pretty sure it was Debian-based though.) It had frozen, and all the screens (one for every seat) had a console stuck in some batch job and displaying the output to the screen. Luckily, we were still on the ground, so the reboot wasn't so bad.

But it was alarming. Reboot a Windows-based advertising display? Who cares. Reboot the plane because the Linux-based system is frozen? Quite a bit more alarming.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#148

Post by [deleted] »

jroseattle wrote: post #147

There is a Windows-based digital display in the grocery near our house. It is perpetually displaying some Windows dialog about the advertising program they have installed has failed/ab-ended in some manner. Seriously, I'm not sure the display has ever worked correctly (I go there a lot.) However, I watched the crew on a Virgin America flight announce that we had to "reboot" the plane because the entertainment system…

[deleted]
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