{"id":25093,"date":"2007-09-17T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/09\/17\/nearly-everybody-has-a-500-flashlight\/"},"modified":"2007-09-17T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2007-09-17T10:00:01","slug":"nearly-everybody-has-a-500-flashlight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070917-01\/?p=25093","title":{"rendered":"Nearly everybody has a $500 flashlight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> When I described <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/09\/20\/471749.aspx\"> using a laptop computer as an impromptu flashlight<\/a>, that triggered a lot of comments from people using their cell phone or PDA as a flashlight. One nickname I&#8217;ve heard for this phenomenon is &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/tjotala.com\/archives\/54\">the $500 flashlight<\/a>&#8220;, $500 being the price of a PDA or SmartPhone at the time the term was coined. (I was amused to find that <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20061024023059\/http:\/\/dilbertblog.typepad.com\/the_dilbert_blog\/2006\/09\/index.html#entry-12516191\"> even Scott Adams does this<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p> A few years ago, on a trip to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tikalpark.com\/\"> Tikal<\/a>, I took part in a pre-dawn hike into the park in order to observe the sunrise from <a href=\"http:\/\/mayaruins.com\/tikal\/b3_028.html\"> atop Temple IV<\/a>. For many people (including me), this was an impulse tour rather than a planned option, so we hadn&#8217;t packed flashlights in our gear. There were a lot of $500 flashlights on that hike. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I described using a laptop computer as an impromptu flashlight, that triggered a lot of comments from people using their cell phone or PDA as a flashlight. One nickname I&#8217;ve heard for this phenomenon is &#8220;the $500 flashlight&#8220;, $500 being the price of a PDA or SmartPhone at the time the term was coined. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-25093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>When I described using a laptop computer as an impromptu flashlight, that triggered a lot of comments from people using their cell phone or PDA as a flashlight. One nickname I&#8217;ve heard for this phenomenon is &#8220;the $500 flashlight&#8220;, $500 being the price of a PDA or SmartPhone at the time the term was coined. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}