Friday, October 08, 2004
What were they thinking?
The kind of stories that make you shake your head ruefully and wonder "why?". Or, for those who have more money than brains.
# posted by Ron @ 10/08/2004 06:38:00 AM 
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First entry.
This first entry seems to fit the category of What were they thinking?
I was reading somewhere recently about a new use of technology which just seemed to me to be overkill in both price and function for what should have been a cheap and easy job otherwise. It was a restaurant menu system that used 4+ Large screen (52" plasma) monitors driven by a high-end windows based system with heavy duty graphics cards, total cost $30K+, compared to a typical menu board which might run about $5k. While the computer driven large screen system looked very nice, and was easy to maintain and make menu changes on the fly, it was prone to the usual hardware issues that are common on a PC. Add to this, all of the fun that comes with the Microsoft Windows OS and security issues because the system was connected to a network and had virus software, spy ware software, firewall and the likes. It was prone to have messages pop up over the menu while "working" specifying virus warnings and such, thus making it both tacky and somewhat ineffective.
Don't get me wrong, it was a nice system and gave a beautiful presentation to the customer, but I just couldn't see how an average business could afford or justify such an expensive "Menu System" like this. Of course, the restaurant owner isn't exactly "average". They own/manage many restaurants and are installing this system into a good many of their locations.
This first entry seems to fit the category of What were they thinking?
I was reading somewhere recently about a new use of technology which just seemed to me to be overkill in both price and function for what should have been a cheap and easy job otherwise. It was a restaurant menu system that used 4+ Large screen (52" plasma) monitors driven by a high-end windows based system with heavy duty graphics cards, total cost $30K+, compared to a typical menu board which might run about $5k. While the computer driven large screen system looked very nice, and was easy to maintain and make menu changes on the fly, it was prone to the usual hardware issues that are common on a PC. Add to this, all of the fun that comes with the Microsoft Windows OS and security issues because the system was connected to a network and had virus software, spy ware software, firewall and the likes. It was prone to have messages pop up over the menu while "working" specifying virus warnings and such, thus making it both tacky and somewhat ineffective.
Don't get me wrong, it was a nice system and gave a beautiful presentation to the customer, but I just couldn't see how an average business could afford or justify such an expensive "Menu System" like this. Of course, the restaurant owner isn't exactly "average". They own/manage many restaurants and are installing this system into a good many of their locations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm not sure exactly sure which ones would be used on this, because I'm just dumb-founded on it.
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/ive-got-a-fever-a-fever-for-tuba-022977.php
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