On a recent visit to the FlatIron Crossing in Colorado, the first thing that greeted me was a large, hanging widescreen television with a PC BIOS start up screen imploring the user to remove any system disks and press any key to boot the computer. Another hanging screen nearby showed a Windows XP login screen. These screens were scattered throughout the shopping center and luckily, many of them were showing what they were supposed to be showing, I suppose. The regular presentation was some rather choppy video that made me wonder if the video stream was being piped in via a constrained 115Kbit/sec serial cable.

I do not even want to guess how much it cost to deploy dozens of these widescreen, flat-panel monitors all over the building, or what the underlying justification was. And how are they administered? Is there actually one PC driving each monitor? I understand that 1 PC driving the whole show would be unappealing as all the monitors would be in complete sync for an eerie, techno-dystopian effect. Perhaps 1 PC is driving 3-5 monitors?

Then there is the potential for misuse. I hope the back office with the PCs is well-secured. The program running these video files ad nauseum could probably be easily subverted to show anything. One unlocked door and a prankster with a CD-ROM of some choice cuts from the internet “adult content” community could turn family-friendly shopping on its ear.

Then again, perhaps the video streams are being transmitted via DSL from some central office, hence the quality.

Now that I think about it, I was probably paying more attention to the multitude of monitors than any other patron in the entire mall.

There are few things that annoy me quicker than a licensing war erupting on a free software project mailing list. Self-righteous geeks with dubious grasp on legal matters tediously dissecting the minutiae of different licensing terms. But I could not believe what I found when I asked Google to bring up the text of the GNU LGPL:

Sure, there are those who claim that ‘GPL’ is more commonly searched for than ‘LGPL’. But I see so few good conspiracies to latch onto, can’t you just give me this one?