January 10th, 2008
How to temporarily "kill your television"-and everyone else's, too
Folks who attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week had been wondering just what happened to the monitors at the Panasonic booth.
First, as you see at top of this post, they were displaying just fine. Then, all of a sudden, they went dark. All of them:
Although I was not at the booth when this all went down, I guess my first thought would have been-uh, oh, electrical problems. As the world’s largest gadget show, CES has to be a huge power hog. And you know what can happen to power hogs.
OK, but maybe not. The more imaginative side of my brain might have tracked the greeting from the Outer Limits: “there is nothing wrong with your television set. We will control the horizontal..we will control the vertical.”
Actually, that second assumption would have been closer to the truth.
This all went down as a result of a bloggers at the tech site Gizmodo. In what may have started as a test but appears to have descended into an ill-considered prank, one Gizmodo-ers went through the hall, shutting off tvs and monitors by using some an $18.99 T-V B-Gone clickers.
Motorola and Panasonic screens went dark for a bit.
Imagine, a tiny device like this 
causing havoc for dozens of big screens.
As well as havoc for the marketers who paid astronomical amounts for their exhibit floor space.
What do you think of this prank?
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
