Luis Is Back From Holiday, And He’s Broke And (Still) Cranky

September 8, 2017 by guest author, Mitch Leathers

Guest Post: Luis Villafane, Maler

It’s been a long summer… and I have fully enjoyed it.

I have worked half-days since early June, and taken about five weeks worth of holidays. If I have to go to the beach again, I will literally jump out a window.

Luis Villafane

I started September in economic distress (traveling with three kids is expensive), but full of energy and ready to become a nastier and even whinier guest blogger. Reading through some of the posts from 16:9 in the last few weeks, I thought I’d pass on my thoughts on a few developments and news items.

The first thing is easy – the end of Flash. Oh boy. What are all those 1,000s of Windows XP embedded systems going to do now?

I never liked Flash … Sorry, let me re-phrase: I loved Flash, but I never liked bad Flash programmers.  Testing a 10 second Flash file that used 2GB of RAM just pissed  me off, especially when the file only helds a simple jpg and some crappy overlay.

BUT the topic remains – all XP and early Windows 7 embedded devices will not fully support HTML5, so I guess that all of the software houses that use Microsoft  engines will need to do some urgent coding.  They still have a few years to complete before Flash is totally gone. It is sad … the king is dead, long live the new king.

Porn on digital signage. Why porn?  I mean, its not like porn isn´t fully accessible from every type of device.  Why not put the latest screw-ups of the town’s council? Or list different conspiracy theories?  I wish hackers would be more original … porn thumbnails? Really?  That is just lazy after all the effort put in to hack the system.

SO, you want to put in and run a digital signage system over a commercial ADSL connection? With a public IP address, probably a non-configured router,  auto logins? It’s a system screaming “hack me and show me porn.”

To anyone planning to put in a digital signage network: Do your homework, and spend the money on your hardware and configuration.  Managed service companies exist for a reason.

Digital Signage Awards.  I am going to try and get myself a pretty award this year. Is it a cup?  I always wanted to win a cup, but I always got medals.

So Dave, wink wink … hee-hee.   I sure have done some networks that deserve a nice trophy. Is there an award for the best complaining about the industry? That’s mine.

New digital signage systems – Just a few notes:  Sharp, if your panel interface is going to look exactly like Philips, don’t bother.  Toshiba – just stop trying. Close down the digital signage department and don´t spend any more money.  Talk to Fujitsu or to Brightsign and embed their applications into “your” hardware.  Samsung and LG:  keep trying, you’ve almost got it.  But if I see another panel with the default MagicInfo video, or a picture of a mushroom or a dog I will withdraw my support.  NEC:  you have a nice RS232/RJ45 interface, but I am tired of having to send the same command three times so the monitor does what it’s told.

Now, a few to put a smile on your faces

Snap-in Devices:  This is a free one.  Do three different openings on the screen so we can choose in which one to slide in the device depending on its physical installation.  This way I don´t have to take the damn screen down because the spot is just un-freaking-reachable.

Cannabis Club:  Will work for food. Call me. 🙂

Coca-Cola´s morphing board:   Impressive.  But more impressive was the video from 1967, sorry.

Stratacache launches turnkey service:  Good luck guys. Didn´t want to be the Borg anymore and chose to become red-shirt engineers, huh?  I can understand it. We redshirts make a good living.  🙂   Remember, you can buy me out so I can dedicate myself to do … nothing.  It seems that you would now have a department to integrate our contracts.

PatientPoint:  $140M investor round.  Outcome Health: $600M.  No comment.  The things I could do with that amount of money … I´ll take 100K from each, thank you, nobody will notice really.  Call me before the Cannabis Club does.

That is it for now … I hope you all enjoyed your summer as much as I did. It’s back to work!

  1. Chris Stone says:

    ? love his honesty and take on things!

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