[SPARCbook] 3GX powered kiosk delivered

[Douglas K Landau]

I used the sparcbook mostly because it's what I had ...
last year a client of mine saw mine and bought twenty of them;
some time later Ross offerred me a deal I could not refuse on
the very last palette-load of em if I took em all ...    :-)

The next will be installed in Halted Electronics in Santa Clara
just as soon as I get it and the printer bolted to a table.

I guess I'll try to install 6 or 7 more 3GX kiosks.  I dunno what the
life will be will worry about that at the time.  As for heat, f*ck 
it.  Put the little feet down and hope for the best.  Mel Cotton's 
is air-conditioned and always cool so that particular one won't have 
a problem.

The 3GX has alot of advantages for this application - it's small of
course is the #1 reason - retailers are very sensitive about their
floorspace, I have learned recently.  They ask "can you get it in a laptop?"

Also, the 1200x1600 mode, while slower, will be a real boon the map 
viewer.  Loading large images of course is slow but printing seems
unaffected.

Then too I'm familiar with them, and not with peecees, and wouldn't know 
how to control the users' session from login to logout on a PC.
I did try in parallel to make win98 and winNT kiosks, and concluded that 
those OSes are really toys, and that you can't actually get any work done
on them.  Which is a bit confusing because it certainly looks like
there are alot of people using them at work.  I can only assume that
those people don't open big files.  The maps on my site are 1-5MB, and
were 10-30MB in the form that I got them in (400DPI TIFFs).  A 32 MB
3GX can crunch and display them as long as you please, albeit slowly.
When my 128MB NT machine bluescreened upon loading one map into two
programs, I figured why waste time any more time on it.  So I wasted 
another several hours on it and then gave up  :-)

Hoping to install 3GXs in yosemite and GC soon.
If the kiosks are successful, perhaps I will have a use for your
tadpoles with dead keyboards - as long as an external mouse will 
work.  Also - get this - I finally found a use for those trakballs!
For a kiosk theyre lust the ticket - just add velcro.

Doug



> Details please, also out of curiousity, how many SPARCbooks did you get
> for this purpose? How are you handling heat build-up? What do you estimate
> the usable life of this system as? Why did you decide on the SPARCbook 3GX
> as your platform - familiarity, price, reputation, available software, etc.?