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Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by slekker on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @02:41AM (#41564913)
Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by guappa on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @02:49AM (#41564974)
Try copenhagen. They use the screen for ads and flash the name of the next stop for a couple of seconds between ads.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by chgs on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @02:52AM (#41564997)
Adverts are a cancer on society, the reason we can’t have nice things.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by generic92034 on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @03:46AM (#41565343)
I share your sentiment, but do not forget the nice things we do have ads are paying for.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by chrismorgan on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @09:01AM (#41567189)
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by generic92034 on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @09:08AM (#41567237)
Certainly, for information systems in public transit that would be hard to argue for. However, I took chgs' remark to be more general.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by mrguyorama on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @03:09PM (#41571496)
Maine has no billboards for several decades now, and miraculously our state has not suffered existence failure, and we still build and sell a bunch of nice stuff.

Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.

Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by rightbyte on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @09:13AM (#41567283)
On the scale of the public, the public should just not sell ad space. The public finance the conaumer prices in the end anyway.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by rbanffy on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @03:49AM (#41565357)
Capitalism causes cancer. That’s not even surprising ;-)
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by grecy on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @06:49AM (#41566313)
They can and have been banned in some cities. It’s glorious.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by slekker on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @04:31AM (#41565642)
That's a shame, where I live we thankfully don't have ads on those!
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by thaumasiotes on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @05:47AM (#41566018)
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:

1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.

2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.

The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.

But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.

Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by jaclaz on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @06:52AM (#41566330)
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by rty32 on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @08:56AM (#41567147)
The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.