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Wi-Fi Enabled Stereo From Philips In Beta
Orangerobot writes "Philips Electronics is undergoing the beta test for the latest model in the Streamium line called the MC-i250. You have to trudge through a cheesy Flash presentation to get all the details, but it looks pretty good: Wi-Fi, CDDB support, online playlist management and more. It looks like they might actually get it right." Reader UVWarning's review of the current generation of Streamium indicates plenty of ways the next generation could improve on the current one.
Do we need a WiFi NetRadio adding to the constant din of packets in the limited bandwidth available?
-- Multics
Get yourself a $200 PC (lots of other companies are offering them as well) and you'll have something much more flexible, without Philips or some other company spying on you.
Danger Danger. I might buy a licence to listen to my new Coldplay album this week and assume its a licence FOREVER. But - the bastards go bust and shut down the service 3 years from now to replace it with a SUBSCRIPTION service - now I have to pay a $20 initial purchase plus $5 annual subscripiton for that album.
No. I wan't some media! In my hand - that plays on generic hardware. No more. No less.
Since I seem to remember Philips being a supporter of the zeroconf (Rendezvous) standard it would be nice to see this having support for this. Then maybe it could support playlists from the next version of iTunes.
If they're really trying to build a device to listen to music from any room in the house, as they say in the article, they're going to have to use something other than 80211b ... in my apartment, I get a weak signal just from going 80 feet between rooms, with none of the obvious obstructions except walls, even when all doors are open and I hold my laptop in the air and rotate it. They can say whatever they want, but if people are buying these to listen to stuff at opposite (or even not-so-opposite) parts of their house, they are going to be *sorely* disappointed.
only pir8tes use ogg vorbis
Think about it. The vasy majority of people who use Ogg Vorbis, encode it from CD. Encoding one from MP3 or other format is just stupid!
So, if they have the CD's then it's a good bet they also own it. And there ain't *nothing* illegal about ripping your own CD's for your own use! So there.
Mp3 is for people who want music, Ogg Vorbis is for people who want quality!
(Or Ogg FLAC if you've got a boatload of disk space)
Peercast will die the fate of popular P2P networks. Hailed as "the more users the better it works", the reality is: "too many users and it dies becasue non of these users have enough bandwidth to be hub". I have seen 10Mbit connections die because a PC was a Kazaa host. Kazaa saw it had a lot of bandwidth and made it a master. Ofcourse IT infrastructure shut this PC down.
A carefully designed P2P protocol will not necessarily suffer this fate. If I remember correctly the PeerCast protocol is designed to avoid this by rerouting streams when a link gets saturated.
Generally speaking design can greatly affect a P2P network. I'm not surprised that Kazaa would have a problem like this, but don't forget that even DNS and Usenet are in a very real sense P2P applications. P2P doesn't mean that an application has to be completely disstributed (like gnutella) or centralized (like napster). P2P is about having autonomous nodes accomplishing a task together. Protocol design is the key to harnessing all that power lying around.
.: Max Romantschuk
Why not integrate the wifi stuff into the loudspeakers? Just put your 110/220 in the speaker and voila, done. If you really want a user interface, put it on the remote.
I guess it wouldn't work if you want a CDR/MP3 player, but the same can be done there too.
There should only be one sort of wire: power wires (because I haven't thought of a better solution for that).
nosig today
you've got some facts horribly wrong.
Venezuelan oil accounted for more than 17% of total U.S. oil imports, compared to just 12% during the first nine months of 2002.
look here
Iraq has more proven oil than Venezuela, and about 90% of the country is unexplored. It's second to Saudi Arabia, and many people believe it's first. However, if it is 'for the oil' chances are it's also for the natural gas as well. Iraq is also loaded with that.