Hey, My TV Just Crashed!
Posted by Harry McCracken | Tuesday, January 04, 2005 12:52 PM PT
I'm in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show--which doesn't officially get underway until Thursday, but is preceded by a bunch of related events. I'm staying at a hotel which shall remain nameless (hint: it's named after a Robert Louis Stevenson novel). Naturally, the moment I checked into my room, I wanted to get online to check e-mail.
When I tried to use its in-room broadband to connect to the Net, I got a message saying I needed to request an access code by using my TV and its remote control. That seemed a tad odd, but I was really surprised by what I saw when I tried to get the number. Here's a bad photo of it:
I'd know that anywhere--yup, my TV gave me an Internet Explorer error message. (I presume that the backend for the hotel's TV-based entertainment/data network runs some flavor of Windows.)
It was a funny way to kick off a visit to a huge tradeshow which will be bursting at the seams with hype about the way that technology is going to make our lives easier and more enjoyable. But it was also a reminder that much of the hype we'll hear this week is, indeed, nothing but hype. Technology is indeed doing wondrous things--but until it's a lot more trouble-free, it will also
complicate our lives in new ways.
(As you can tell by the fact I'm posting this, I was eventually able to...well, troubleshoot my TV and get it working properly again.)
Your TV travails are on www.thisisbroken.com now
This is one thing we may have to endure if we let Bill Gate dictate all CE and Widow OS.
Microsoft does not deserve to dominate our life until we let it does.
Hey Harry,
You're probably LUCKY that the thing didn't even work. I recently stayed in the same hotel, and managed to get the internet access to work. Aside from the ridiculous resolution, which didn't even cater for the hotel's internal website, the dinky little fingerstick/mouse kept drifting continuously up and up and it took me about twenty minutes to complete a two-line email.
Very frustrating.
"At the foot of my bed is a low wooden cabinet that conceals a flat, 40-inch screen.
Touch a button and the screen rises out of the cabinet so that my wife and I can watch a movie or the news or browse through family photos. Touch another button and the screen retracts unobtrusively.
At least, that is what's supposed to happen.
But one night, not long after I'd moved into my computerized house, the screen wouldn't retract when it was time to go to sleep. It wouldn't turn off, either. It glowed brightly in the dark, right above my feet.
I could have bothered somebody to come and fix it but I did the simple thing instead. I threw a blanket over the big monitor, covered my eyes with a mask, and went to sleep." -- By Bill Gates (7/15/98)
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1998Essay/7-15col.asp
My tv crashed too!
I was staying in the Mirage, and I couldnt get into the 'menu' to activate my net service. They said they'd send a tech up to fix it, but I had to go to bed. The next day, the TV was stuck in the menu section, and I couldn't change the channel or power it off. I unplugged it, plugged it back in, and it was happy again.
When in doubt, reboot.
i have msn tv and had web tv to, any thing i can buy like web tv but better
I wonder if there's Linux for TVs...