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.
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!
? love his honesty and take on things!