teleprompter malfunction

This is sci.electronics.design. We are presumably more interested in what when wrong with the teleprompter than the identity of the guy it was teleprompting when it went wrong.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Now you are ragging me for posting off-topic? Hilarious.

John

Wow, do you think there's a way to hack into them, like Diebold (et al)'s voting machines? ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That could be wonderful. We could make him say all sorts of fun stuff.

John

Uh, John? Have you learned nothing? It is Off Topic, hence put in "OT:" or GTFO.

Tim

One episode of the old 'Mary Tyler Moore' TV show had the newscaster, Ted Baxter reading the teleprompter. One of the staff added a comment like 'I'm a big idiot' to his news roll and he read it, live on camera. Unfortunately, most people who need a teleprompter are really that stupid.

But OT means On Topic too! I guess some people can't figure out that something like "Rum" isn't immediately about electronics.

John

You mean like Cheney did with his George Bush sock puppet?

TMT

Possibly there was an electronic malfunction that caused this bus crash?

It can also mean "Obsequiously Truent", but that's clearly not what's meant on Usenet.

Tim

I often felt that Bush was more under the influence of Rumsfeld than Cheney...

Granted, Rumsfeld and Cheney are quite chummy with one another anyway.

"I shall resign the Presidency effective immediately" would do it for me.

" I WAS born in Kenya, and knocked off granny to keep her from squealing!" ;-)

Are teleprompters fed video via cable, or is there a VCR involved? ...Jim Thompson

The ones I worked with were a simple video text generator that was fed from a RS-232 port on a computer. The data was fed from the computer at the same rate as the text scrolled across the display.

The unit hung under the camera lens, facing up. A sheet of glass was mounted at a 45° angle to reflect the image outward, and allows the camera to see the target with only a couple percent loss in light transmission. That way the 'talent' could look straight at the camera and pretend they knew what they were talking about.