Sunday, January 13, 2008

Warning: MacWorld IR chaos

Mac disable IR port info box

Scott McNulty at The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a warning for MacWorld attendees: disable your IR port. Apparently, some CES attendees used a TV-B-Gone-type device to turn off displays during presentations.

As you may or may not know there has been something of a dust up across the tech blogosphere regarding a prank that a certain tech blog performed during CES. The prank involved a little gizmo that turned off a number of televisions at once, which one could use to turn off displays during presentations (which is just what the people in question did).

This is probably a good idea, although I think users are also likely to face inadvertent problems. We recently installed the new iMacs in some our labs at the CWRL, and, with the computers arranged along the walls, it is almost impossible to use the Apple remote without activating every machine on one side of the room. If this is the case, imagine what a carelessly directed remote would do on the conference floor at MacWorld.

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