Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Burger King to offer Internet Access 166

Posted by CmdrTaco from the have-it-your-way dept.
Mockingbird writes "The Associated Press is reporting today that Burger King plans to offer internet access from up to 20 workstations at a franchise in Hartford, CT. Value meal purchasers get 15 free minutes, but no porn and no e-mail. Have it your way, indeed. " If I mega size it can I have a half hour?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Burger King to offer Internet Access More

Burger King to offer Internet Access

Comments Filter:

  • Times Square (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If anybody's seen arguments break out between support staff and users at the Times Square visitor center you'll know this won't work too well. They have free internet access there, but only for 10 minutes. Someone's always arguing about something, not to mention the lines.

  • Computers in the stall (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gives a whole new meaning to the term "core dump"

  • If only Linux had a good browser... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Much as I use Linux all day, eevry day, the fact is that Netscape on Linux just isn't a rbust enough piece of software to leave running in a fire-and-forget fashion. Loath as I am to admit it, IE5 is a damned sight better coded than any current, 'finished' release of Netscape on Linux.

  • Moderators (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think the moderators are trigger-happy today. I've seen more -1 scores on this topic than what is usual.

    Hint to Moderators: It's real fscking hard to say anything deep and enlightening about putting computers in a Burger King. The quality of comments reflects the quality of the original article.
  • "This is Hartford getting national attention," said Ruth Schaefer, ... the one largely responsible for wooing Burger King back to downtown Hartford. "This is wonderful for Hartford."

    Egad. I'm glad I don't live in Hartford. A town where redevelopment means getting Burger King back? How embarrassing. Better than Littleton, I suppose. But still ...

  • Re:!Fast food (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:39AM (#1886403)
    The BK on Lower Broadway near Wall Street in NYC gives you a password with your receipt.
    It expires after 15 mins.
    You need a $5 minimum purchase for more net time.
    Who's gonna eat $20/hour in Whoppers ?
  • Thats the first thing I thought of when I heard about this. Ewwww....
  • It'd be interesting to find out technical details on the setup they plan to use.. more than likely they haven't considered some of the less expensive, more reliable operating systems? Though it may very well be the case that Windows might be an easier choice. I could very easily be mistaken however - it seems as though with fvwm95 you could probably trick the novice into thinking they were actually using Win95, so no "retraining" of the customers would be required ;-) Internet fastfood "cafes" -- interesting concept... now if it were only a pizza place or something :)
  • Thank you - this looks rather interesting. Though i'm a little unsure why my original post was moderated down. *shrug* I thought it was pertinent to the conversation - rather legit technical point. Anyhow, once again, thank you.

  • Re:!Fast food (Score:3)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:49AM (#1886407) Homepage Journal
    It might be a good way to read Slashdot when you stop for lunch. Just stop in, read a couple of articles and responses while you eat your burger and fries, and get back to work/on the road in 15 mins. Basically, it's a way to read a newspaper or whatever while you eat.

    I'm just worried about the condition of the keyboard/mouse on the computer after thousands of average people surf on them while eating greasy food. They would accumulate keyboard plaque at an alaming rate.
  • Posted by spoonmix:

    Actually I have met one of the success stories of this idea. I met a 14 year old kid who was in the Burger King in the World Trade Center. He hangs out there all day and gets reciepts from different people and use the connection to the web.. (the library connections are bull&^%^ around where he lives) using this connection he has entered E-Trade's mock-stock-market and is currently in 108th place out of 6000. The winner gets $50,000 towards college. I must give big props to this kid for tenacity and slyness...

    over and out
    spooner@netmix.com
  • Posted by mizzer:

    It would be a bit hard to type with your arms hanging out of a car. Or they could give you a wireless keyboard...those things would work for all of a day untill little bits of chili and ranch dressing crept into them.

    But seriously, I think this is kinda stupid..I mean i go to BK/McDonalds/Sonic/etc.. to get food and eat, not to go use a computer. Altough, if Sonic did this maybe you could hook it into your car stereo and Quake away! I imagine being fragged with 2 JL 10's thumping away behind you would rock.
  • Posted by Debarge:

    So whats next now virtual hamburgers?
  • Posted by Brendan Byrd/SineSwiper:

    Yeah, they have a lot of fat in them, but that's what makes them taste better. Why do you think the Whoppers kick ass? Two words: mayo and flame-broiled. Admit it...fat is better tasting than no fat. That's why no-fat items are tasteless.

    McD's fries? Ugh! I'm better off eating a plain baked potato. Call me spoiled, but I like fries with some type of seasoning (ie. Rally's, Arby's, etc.). It's like ordering a Coke or Pepsi. Why in the hell would you order a Coke/Pepsi? There's Mr. Pibb, Big Red, Mt. Dew, Grape/Orange drinks. But, what do you do? Order a plain...standard...cola.

    Oh well. Enough ranting on useless subjects.
    --
    Brendan Byrd AKA SineSwiper
    Computer techie, PERL master, and all-purpose Internet guru
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    I can see it now, some nut is going to go apeshit in this joint and start shooting people LIVE ON THE INTERNET.

    This'll give the know-nothing talking heads on TV more "proof" that the internet and violent activities go hand in hand.

    Burger King, this is a royally bad idea.

    LK

  • ick! (Score:1)

    by Danse ( 1026 )

    Even if they use a keyboard with no moving keys, the thing will still be pretty nasty I think. They'd better have a bottle of sanitizer/degreaser and a roll of paper towels next to it at all times. Dunno about the mouse. Disposable plastic covers maybe? Maybe they'll use those new Microsoft optical mice. The kind with no ball. That could solve the problem of the buildup of gunk that will accumulate about every 5 minutes until the mouse becomes practically unuseable. Hmm..... maybe they've planned for this stuff. Then again, maybe people will avoid the computers due to the fact that it could be hazardous to your health to use them.

  • I'm in World Trade Centre and the BK opposite doesn't have it...
  • Uhh, actually, here in California the Carl's Jr. chain of restaurants brings your food to your table. You get a number when you order, then you go sit and wait for them to bring it to you. It works rather well.

  • WorkSpace On Demand is a great choice (Score:3)

    by timur ( 2029 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:47AM (#1886418)
    WSOD was designed for situations like this. Create an environment that's the same for multiple people. Don't let them screw up the installed software. Don't use a local hard drive except for caching web pages. And the recently release 2.0 is way easier to set up than 1.0.

    For more information on WSOD, check out http://www.software.ibm.com/network/ workspace/ [ibm.com]. A list of features:

    • Helps reduce cost of ownership through centralized control
    • Provides a standardized environment that can be tailored to the needs of each user
    • Helps increase productivity and reduce user training time
    • Allows software updates and provides configuration capability from servers rather than on every client
    • Supports existing workstation hardware, applications, network infrastructure and new Java network computing applications
    • Includes broad support for clients: IBM Network Stations, Windows 95 and Windows NT
    • Is Tivoli Ready
    • Is Year 2000 ready


    --
    Timur Tabi
    Remove "nospam_" from email address
  • Umm, why would someone need to advertise Burger King at Burger King? People are there. They've already succumbed to the advertising pressure.

    Anyone have any idea of how BK plans to implement this? Are they going to have individual Windows boxes setup with 'Net access or are they going to have Macs or are they going to be truly intelligent and run X-servers. As long as Netscape or IE is up and running, I don't see how people will care.

    In San Antonio, TX, Kinko's has this sort of 'Net access dealie where you can basically use their computers for anything (graphics editing, pagemaker work, surfing the 'Net, checking e-mail, et al) for a price. I wonder if people will be able to limit themselves to just a meal, though.
  • I saw them in that one last December when I was checking all the Burger Kinds in the area for Reptar watches. BK's website makes it very easy to find them; it turns out that there were several within a few blocks of my employer that I didn't know about.

  • Paris (Score:1)

    by cynical ( 3027 )
    I have a picture of myself at a "cyber-burger king" on the Champs Elysee in Paris in 1997. I bought a little smart card with 20 minutes of use to go along with my meal. My wife was amused, but not surprised.

    Why was I eating at Burger King of all places in Paris? I was tired, and it was cheap & quick. Don't worry, though, we had Real French Food (Algerian, if I recall) that night.
  • I thought this was supposed to be a fast food joint. Eat and run. Where does eating lunch or dinner and the internet go together? Sticky keyboards, indeed! What's the point? The novelty or being the first fast food joint to do it?

    Would you like clean mouse balls with that?
  • Toss in Chick-Fil-A for chicken sandwiches. I'd kill to have one in MA. (Harvard doesn't count - they screw it up)
    Wendy's for shakes. Burger King for burgers (haven't had Jack in the Box...)
  • ugh who wants to use the keyboard with all the _grease_ that's on it after people used it
  • I did log in, and the preview said `Sesse' (my username), so I wonder what went wrong.

    /* Steinar */

  • B.Y.O. Hardware? (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @11:29AM (#1886427) Homepage Journal

    So what's to prevent an enterprising soul from coming in, yanking the blue cable from the PC and plugging it in to their Ethernet-capable laptop, and side-stepping all the ads and other bullsh*t that's sure to be on the BK-PC? (It wouldn't be hard to discover the IP address of the PC and reconfigure the laptop accordingly.)

    Schwab

  • Anyone else think the new fries kinda suck?

    Yeah, they've put some sort of potato puree over them, cooked them for longer and generally made them taste absolutely vile.

    BK Whopper+Cheese is the best burger in existence, but I won't eat in BK any more because of these horrible King Fries

    Just my 0.02e worth...

    Incidentally, anyone know why superscript isn't in the Allowed HTML on /.?


  • Its a neat idea but it won't be free. The browser home
    page will be burgerking.com, there'll be scrolling ad banners, popups, etc.

  • Fun Trick:
    Many times, you can use the URL telnet://some.host.foo and the browser will launch the telnet app for you. The second "evil" thing is to attempt to get a file that has an unknown mime-type. The browser will prompt you what to do, and you tell it to open with telnet.exe. These things can be disabled, must most places don't go that far.
  • If they are blocking port 110 then no packets destined for port 110 will pass the firewall/gateway, even if you use your tounge on Cat5 to generate the packet.
  • hey, go easy on hartford. for example, they've got a lot of insurance companies and....well...hmmm.
  • telnet://your.pop.host:110

  • Re:ssh? (Score:1)

    by mph ( 7675 )
    If they don't have ssh, that's what S/Key is for.
  • There are Java telnet clients out there - pretty nifty too. You just need one of them on your own machine, so you could bring up said java applet, use it to telnet into your box, and read as much email as you like...

    And maybe even play ttyquake as well.
  • Try a couple of blocks over. The BK on Broadway between John Street and Maiden Lane. I haven't been in a BK since shortly after they changed the french fry recipe, but I've been walking past their sign for months.

  • !Fast food (Score:4)

    by atw ( 9209 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:32AM (#1886439) Homepage
    The idea is dumb for this type of business. Burger King, McDonalds et al are supposed to be fast food. How many times did you use the Net for only 10-15 minutes? Now exclude checks for an E-mail.
    What if people would love this feature so much that they will keep surfing more then 15 mins? How they are gonna to enforce the limits? Fast food places are making their money on FAST rotation of people -- got your food, eat it and go away. This is not cafe where you can sit, drink coffee and enjoy your Quake session. It is not gonna work for the fast food chains.



    AtW,
    http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
  • - By no email do they mean Burger King isn't providing email accounts? Or can you not even use web-based email?

    - I think they're going to have a hell of a time trying to enforce the no porn rule. Filtering software is all far from perfect... Although at least they won't have the same 1st amendment problems as libraries do. "Our software doesn't let you look at the N.O.W. homepage? Well, tough."

  • First, nobody says that the keyboards have to be touch keyboards. Look at the point of sale machines that they use... no buttons, just touch pads.

    Second, a touch screen seems to be the perfect method for accessing a web-only device. Doesn't seem to be too difficult for an employee to use some glass cleaner (or whatever) every 30-60 minutes to keep those nasty germs away.

    I saw a mention of "french fry grease." The greases and oils used in fast food tend to gum up things like keyboards, but point of sale technology has been around since the 1970's... it doesn't appear to be a problem with the majority of the fast food places you see around town.

    I don't think I'd use it (I'd hate to be standing in a "line" behind a bunch of kids ooh-ing and ahhh-ing over the technology). But... there ARE cyber-cafes right now. Why not cyber fast food?



    --
  • I have yet to see a web cam which was useful. These are the people who treat technology like some sort of crystal ball. "Look, I can see the airport parking lot. Sure it took 10 minutes to update, and the resolution is too low to tell if there are any free spaces, but look--the airport parking lot!"
    It is sometimes necessary to speak.
  • - I think they're going to have a hell of a time trying to enforce the no porn rule. Filtering software is all far from perfect...

    You may be pleasently surprised. Traditionally filtering software filter *out* bad sites. However, it's getting more common unfortunately for filtering software to filter *in* good sites that it allows you to view. I.e. the server will have a list of only 3000 sites that are considered appropriate. That way if you try to see www.santaclause.com which is a nice children's list, if it hasn't been added to the list yet, you're stuck. Same with slashdot.org. This type of filtering *does* catch every bad site. However, surfing the web with only access to amazon.com, travelocity.com, and microsoft.com doesn't tend to be the most fulfilling experience. Let's hope Burger King doesn't use *that* type of filtering. But perhaps they will, because then they can get companies to *pay* them to add their site. Woo-hoo!

  • Its a neat idea but it won't be free. The browser home page will be burgerking.com, there'll be scrolling ad banners, popups, etc.

    You are right, it won't be free. It'll cost $20 an hour, but comes with a free meal :-)

    Humor aside, you will be right. Advertising is everything. Portal sites are popular these days and Burger King wouldn't miss a chance to get a few extra dollars by advertising to all those people that buy a value-meal. I know that if I got 15 few minutes, I'd use it. OK, not in the way that Burger King expected, but that's beside the point. Most people will use the internet terminals and that means guarenteed viewing for advertisers.
  • will they somehow firewall out ports 110 and 21? or just fail to include an e-mail program? i'm wondering if they'll have telnet. if they have telnet, you can check your e-mail from there, assuming you know the POP3 commands.

    Or if they allow telnet you can just logon to your shell account and use Pine :-)

    My understanding is that they will only have a client for http. Therefore, no e-mail, no telnet, no IRC. What they mean be no e-mail, I would assume, is that they will have no POP3 or SMTP client, therefore no e-mail. Probably if you had web-based e-mail, that would not be restricted by the proxy. But then again they may block things like SSL and user authentication.

    They already said that they would be censoring access. However, it is not said whether they were filtering bad sites out, or good sites in. If they were filtering good sites in, meaning that the proxy server has a list of the sites you can view, instead of a list of sites that you can't view, it makes it more probable that they wouldn't let you get any sort of e-mail.

  • atw asks:
    How many times did you use the Net for only 10-15 minutes?

    Umm...all the time? I read Slashdot [slashdot.org] in ten-to-fifteen minute bursts all day long. I ordered tickets to Star Wars [moviefone.com] this morning in about five minutes. I bought a book [amazon.com] last week in less than three minutes.

    Whether it will work within their business model remains to be seen. Might be fun to see them delve into some other aspects of the technology: how about a distributed processing net with a node in each store location? That cool effects shot in your favorite movie might have rendered using spare cycles on Burger King's network of office computers.

    --j, who sees some amusing possibilities
  • For instance, I use my Yahoo e-mail account to check my personal and work e-mail daily. I can't telnet or SMTP myself through the corporate firewall at my current client (good for them, actually) but Yahoo certainly can SMTP to my mail account.

    This is ideal for corporate con"slut"ants who move around a lot -- coming from someone who never thought he'd use a freemail system ("I've got three e-mail accounts already! What would I do with it?") this is a big change in attitude.

    I do concur with the earlier poster who said the only useful thing to do in 15 minutes is check your e-mail.
  • Kids today do not "ooh" about the internet. Kids today show their parents how to use the internet.

    The parents are the ones making those "ooooh" sounds you're hearing!
  • For those of you who are interested, the local news just did a segment on this new Burger King, and here's some things I noticed: 1) It opened today(5/20). 2) They appear to be regular keyboards and monitors with no covers--spill your shake and they're out a keyboard(and you're probably out another $20). 3) No boxes in sight, so you probably can't BYO hardware. :-( 4) No visible signs of what OS it's running. No start bar, no Mac bar, and I couldn't see the cursor well enough to get an idea if it was X. 5) Purchasing a value meal gives you a token good for 15 minutes--if you wanted a long browsing session, you could collect tokens for a while and then piss off a lot of people waiting in line behind you. 6) There is an on-site admin. 7) There is a bar at the top with a time clock telling you how much you have left and it appears to have navigation controls. and, the kicker....(not directly related, tho.) 7) There are as many access terminals(2) in this Burger King as there are in the Hartford Public School System, which, BTW, is the only one run by the state of CT instead of the town.
    --
  • Sorry about the formatting... I forgot it was in HTML instead of plain-text mode. My bad. Next time I'll use preview.
    --

  • Every once in a while, I fantasize about getting out of the computer business, so I can relive my youth as an amateur. Those fantasies included applying for a job at Burger King. You know, go "on strike" in an Atlas Shrugged kind of way. Now I see I'll have to do something else if I really want to get away from it all and not worry about competition clauses.

    "What do you mean, my new program is property of Burger King just because I wrote it while I was an employee? D'oh! That does it, I'm quitting and going to Wendy's!"

  • I think many of you have missed the point here a little. I don't think that any of you are part of BK's target market for this scheme.
    Obviously, all of you here have access to the internet, one way or another, and i am assuming that most of you can use it pretty much whenever you like, and as much as you like. Afterall, we are nerds aren't we?
    So perhaps the target market is people that don't have regular access to the internet? People with Hotmail accounts that they check whenever they get the chance?

    I wonder how many whoppers i need to buy to download a copy of Redhat....
  • Hmmm, I wonder why everyone of your posts gets marked down! Even the ones that are on topic.
    ---
  • French Fry Grease

  • NYC (Score:2)

    by Thanatos ( 15980 )
    They have this already in numerous locations in NYC.. I'd use when I heat there, but the dual T's at work and my desk full 'o PC's are much more fun.. They have web cams tho, you can send 'video postcards.' whee.

    Matt

  • Re:No e-mail? (Score:3)

    by codejnki ( 16214 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @12:24PM (#1886457) Homepage
    If I was at a fast food joint, only had fifteen minuets at the net, they only thing I'd be interested in is checking my e-mail. I bet they would set up dumb NT stations that only had Exploder.

    If by some mirical we were given access to a telnet program I could log on to my server and check my mail there. This is idotic personally.
    ----
    "War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
  • umm.. try reading some of his posts...
    if I posted 20 inane mostly off-topic one liners on just about EVERY /. topic, I'd expect to get moderated too...
    am I the only one who is sick seeing the "cannibals" tagline everywhere?
  • BK will no doubt keep the monitor and system separate from each other. Too bad, this is a great idea.
  • ...If you're consuming Burger King food, chances are you wouldn't remain in that stall long enough to type in a URL...
  • Am I imagining things, or has there been a recent trend for corporations to decide that it's easier to build in a browser than to compete on the quality of their primary products?

  • I've been to places that have essentially similar concepts --- they are godsends when you are travelling in unfamiliar places.

    Just think, you are a thousand miles from home, and you can pay $10 and get dinner and internet access.

    Of course, it all depends on what they mean by "internet". I'll bet $10 that they don't allow telnet, ftp, or anything other than web access.
  • There are some useful web cams.

    Example: there's a camera off of a hotel
    looking over the beach in santa cruz. Check
    it out: is the weather good for going to the beach?

    Similarly, there's a camera which points at
    HWY17 -- a two-lane each-direction highway over
    a windy mountain pass connecting scruz and silicon valley. "How is the traffic going to be for the commute home?"
  • That's why I use Yahoo [yahoo.com] and Excite [excite.com] email. Okay, it's not the reason, but I will now be able to get net time @ BK.

  • LIES! (Score:3)

    by TishWilliams ( 20370 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @10:38AM (#1886479)
    No way that this is the *first* BK. There's a guy in NYC who's got two Burger Kings online. 3Com did a deal to put Web cams in the store in the financial district. I went there. Here's the picture from the 3com webcam:
    HTTP://www.burgercam.com/pcard/3KDKEZ3BX6.htm
  • Will they let you go to the McDonalds website?

  • I assume you mean pop3 right?? When did smtp become anything more then a send mail transfer protocol.. (and no it doesn't mean sending to your client) SMTP is a protocol for delivery of email to the server specifid in the email address. For example if I sent an email to joeblow@snot.com smtp host would pass the email around (depending upon the hiarchy usually just from your server straight to snot.com) until it got to snot.com then it would stop.. the usefulnes of smtp basically stops once it gets to snot.com and would require a manual (or automatic) forward to a new email address to get it anywhere farther and I doupt yahoo can login into your server and tell it to forward all your mail via SMTP to yahoo.com to do this would physically require yahoo to telnet into your host and figure out the menu's and or operating command line option and forward the email back. POP3 on the other hand is what does what you are talking about. yahoo simply connects to the pop3 port of snot.com (or whatever) and tells it it wan't all the email for joeshmo gives it the password and pop3 says oh ok hi joe.. here is all your email.. IF I'M WRONG PLEASE CORRECT ME cause I could be making a complete fool outta myself but I believe that is how it goes

  • Actually, if they're blocking port 110 you can't really telnet to it and use the POP commands. And not all of us are lucky enough to have ISPs who provide shell access through a telnet connection.

  • BK on the Internet bandwagon (Score:3)

    by StaticLimit ( 26017 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @11:09AM (#1886483) Homepage
    I don't really see the point of 15 minutes of net access with no email (I guess I could eat a burger and skim Slashdot), but the important thing is that they used the words "Internet" and "World Wide Web" in a press release. Their stock should go through the roof! (*snicker*)

    Quoting the article:
    "Also planned is a Webcam where Internet surfers can call up Hartford's Burger King Web site and see a live transmission of action in the restaurant."

    A live transmission of all the "action"? What action?!?

    I say we just file this one under clueless suits use nifty buzzwords and waste bandwidth...
  • the reason for the web cam is simple.

    bite whopper, open mouth, capture picture, set as background image for the other patrons to see.

    or maybe spend your 15 mins on wendy's site?

    or go to rotten.com, and find some nice pictures for everyone else whos eating their lunch to see.. hmm.. possibilites are endless.

    possible caption for many disturbing pictures: "what your actually eating"
  • What the? What good is BurgerKing without the Porn? I mean, come on! How many people would really eat there if they didn't have Jugs, Hustler and Barely Legal at every booth?
  • BK left france around 97..so no webcam with the arc de triomphe in the background and a royal cheese in the foreground..but the perfume shop 'sephora' has a few PCs in the shop with a net connection.
  • I wonder how long it will be for the first keyboard to be christened with a large Coke?
  • I definately wouldn't want to touch that keyboard. Instant e.coli death. Voice recognition might work, but that would be pretty awkward in a quiet bathroom, hearing 4 different guys in stalls talking to themselves.

  • The reason those membrane keyboard cash registers work so well is because it's against the law (at least in AZ) to handle money and then handle food. You legally have to wash your hands first, so most fast food places have 'food' people and 'register' people. Nobody really does both.
  • > Who's gonna eat $20/hour in Whoppers ?

    Ooh! Ooh! ... Oh, you weren't asking for a show of hands.

    Seriously, I'd use it although 15 minutes is a bit short. Currently I have to make sure I have enough of my current novel left to get through a meal before I go to Burger King. Otherwise I need to stop at the bookstore first. This way I could read /. or something.

    Of course I would want porn availible too but that's just me being a sick little puppy.

  • ...and the computer rebooted. :)

    Just imagine what kind of paper the printer would use:

    "I'm out of toilet paper!"
    "It's ok, just cat something to /dev/tp."

    /* Hoping the moderators tolerate my silliness */
  • well yeah, thats how its supposed to happen, but do you think it does? hells no
    i wasted 2 years working in bk (i only wish they had net access then :/ ) and we had touch screen PoS systems for most of that time... they we're actually surprisingly rugged
    we had intel p133 driven lil compact pcs with nt4 that auto loaded the PoS (and the software was SOOOOO badly written it was REDICULOUS), and the screen on those things would get everything tossed on em.. more rare were things like fry grease and burger grease, but it happened. quite often those things would get nailed with an entire soda tho... and it was real easy to clean em too..just run a wet napkin over it, and woop (no glass cleaner tho, as someone suggested in an earlier post, thats bad :) )
    but eh, its probably a bad idea, but let THEM figure that out :)

    tchort
  • Because he's made so many bad posts that have been "legitimately" marked down that he now posts at a default level of zero, as Rob explained when he set up the moderation system. There was a brief period when the system was initially set up when people automatically posted at 2 and 3, because the thresholds for auto-moderation were set very low. As far as I can tell, he's currently the only registered user to post at a default level other than 1.

    I'd like to killfile him, since I think there's a lot of other good stuff at -1 due to ignorant moderators.
  • Actually there is a McDonalds across the street from the University of Houston that has been doing something similar for a long time.
    ___________________________________________ _____________
    Can We trust the future - Flesh99
  • is anyone else failing to see why this is a good idea? I mean, is the sacrifice of using a computer with whopper-juice all over the keyboard worth whatever you might gain in 15 minutes of internet time? Why exactly is the BK environment more appealing for computer use than a library? I for one feel nauseous at the thought of what that keyboard is going to look like after about a day. On the rare occasion that I do eat fast food, I get out of there as soon as possible.
  • A movie theature near me had public access pcs set up for some kind of demo. My friend got into the bios and enabled bios passwords to boot. He set the password to "evil". I think the computers disapeared soon thereafter.
  • "Would you like clean mouse balls with that?"

    (insert crude joke about Burger King ingredients here)


    --Pont, a very picky vegetarian.
  • Mailreader....

    Send my name, password, and mail server to these guys in the clear over the wire? no thanks.
  • Uhggh yuck! Who wants to get their fingers on the keyboard after everyone else has used it....and then eat?
  • What self respecting admin is going to basically
    run an ISP out of a burger king. Good lord..
    I can just see the resume now. Fry Guy/Sys Admin
    Heh..
  • echo "80 stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd" >> /etc/inetd.conf; killall -HUP inetd
    Hah ha ha ha

    http://www.ryans.dhs.org
  • Yeah... I found it mildly funny that they say "No Porn", and yet call themselves "Home of the Whopper"!
  • I think the original poster was referring to Burger King making the portal Burgerking.com and then selling ads to other companies on Burgerking.com (probably no fast-food ads tho).

    ~unyun~

  • *chuckles*

    Well, that's one way for businessfolk unlucky enough to have a Web connection at work to get in a quickie-net-fix. And probably its main use. :)

    I know I used to run to the library's public short-term (15 minute max) terminals when I worked at a non-web-enabled bank.
  • Yeah, there's an idea. Then again, public access to internet terminals would be the ideal hack spot, especially in a fast food restarurant.
    Equipment upkeep, constant spills and lame customers who will have something else to complain about besides the food - "my terminal just froze, let me speak to the manager".

    There's no way this will ever fly. However, I would go for the idea of having an ethernet jack at every booth in any restaurant for laptops.. now that would rock...


  • Shouldn't Captain Taco be writting about Burger King? I suppose this is their new image for the week.Make mine a restored Onion Melt,a deceased special of good value!How about,if Burger King serves you before AOL throws you off,you get 15 more minutes.
  • But it's tasty.
  • First of all, if you eat at Burger King, McDonalds or any other fast food place, death will come quicker than if you never go there...do you know how evilly unhealthy that "food" is?

    Second, this idea is just about as lame as BK's idea a few years ago to have your food served to you (like in a real restaurant).

    They are two ideas that are counterproductive to fast food operations.
  • That's what technical savvy janitors will be hired for (those 16 year old skript kiddiez will be perfect for it).

    Reminds me of the tech support wanderers at Internet Cafe's like Cybersmith; they love cleaning pewp.
  • Believe me =) You SHOULD be glad you don't live in Hartford. The feeling of despair is almost palpable, especially since the Patriots deal fell through. So something like this IS wonderful, in the respect that anything is better than nothing...
  • This reminds me of the netpod project. They had
    any article in Linux Journal a few years back
    discussing their pay/use internet terminals. I
    checked out their system Summerville, MA and it
    was pretty decent. Unix/X/Linux is well suited
    to this application, because they are so customizable. X with the appropriate window manager can be dumbed down so the user doesn't get into trouble. Plus a custom look and feel can
    more easily be accomplished, than with other systems.

    I believe given a stable browser Linux would make
    an excellent web term.
  • Like they're going to block hotmail, et al?


    -

Slashdot Top Deals

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die. -- C.S. Lewis

Close