As I was not sufficiently thrilled with shipping myself across the length of Europe I decided that a trip to the USA "West Coast" was in order. A gruelling eleven hours of "economy" (intended as "the airline spends the least possible on your comfort") later I land in Los Angeles. A bit of business today and then a commuter flight up to San Jose in the afternoon.
Guess what? Orange County to Silicon Valley? Bound to be people with laptops even in "coach" (fascinating, their marketing staff clearly worked out that "economy "was ambiguous, with "coach" there can be no mistake: wave goodbye to legroom). Indeed there were and what a marvellous time to see if my friendly IR port had anything useful to say.
A bit of tinkering later and a quick sweep of the neighbour on my row indicates that the gentleman is running Windows with an open IR port. Within 10s we have a connection and not surprisingly the services are all wide open. The poor victim's company will not be named but let it suffice to say that they don't like Windows at all and sell a competitor to Office. A business plan and a bid later the plane has to land and they politely ask us to switch off our electronic devices.
The question I'd like to ask is: how many people actually use IR? Fine, so a few hands of worthy europeans with GSM phones go up. How many people in the USA use IR? What for? Oh yes, now you have GSM too... You don't really sync your Palm or iPAQ with it so why is it enabled by default on 100% of the laptops I've had the pleasure of scanning out of sheer boredom on airplanes and/or airport lounges?
Funnily enough my laptop (a Compaq Armada M300) has a design "feature" which helps avoiding people scanning your IR port: you can't get to it unless you turn the battery down by 90 degrees. As a matter of fact you can't get to the USB or the monitor port either which is rather less of a smart idea.
Folks, please turn off your IR port or at least put a little bit of duct tape over it...
Posted by arrigo at December 4, 2002 04:42 AM