A Serious Contender for the Couch Throne

TractorJector writes "It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne."

Comments

Also known as Hifidelio

[Anonymous Coward]

Visit http://www.hifidelio.net/
Looks really rather similar :)

These guys (hermstedt) need a good kicking at the moment because they are up to version 2.0 of their firmware and still have not released source code.

Putting that to one side, I have one of these and it really is rather good.

This thing is seriously overpriced !

[The_Spectry]

Whats it consist of ? A hard drive , a basic display ,a cheap MB , and a cd rom . Sound familiar ? It should Those are all components of an XBOX minus the screen . SO figure a display might cost $100 to implement . How much does an XBOX cost ? Is it cool? Yes. Is it worth $899 ? NO . I just bought a laptop from dell for less than that . The price makes it laughable .

Re:At 900$, where's the value?

[foonf]

I haven't ever seen or heard one of these things, but the purported benefits, if you look at the actual datasheet (the specs start on page 16), are:

• Support for many more file formats, including FLAC and OGG Vorbis
• The hard drive is twice as large (80gb)
• It has optical and coaxial digital outputs
• It has a built in CD player/burner
• It has a 4-port ethernet switch and wireless access point
• Allegedly the electronics are equal to an "audiophile-grade" CD player

Yes, there might not be any benefits to you or most people, which is probably why it is marketed the way it is, but it is not identical to an iPod.

Who is Christian Einfeldt?

[Eil]

TractorJector writes "It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch.

I was about to say, "No, TractorJector didn't write that. It was cut and pasted verbatim from the first sentence of the article. Have the common decency blah blah blah." But hmm, now this is odd. It seems that every Slashdot story that TractorJector has submitted has been a Mad Penguin article by Christian Einfeldt.

Christian Einfeldt, if you are indeed TractorJector or are affiliated with Mad Penguin in some way, please have the monads to disclose in your Slashdot submissions that you're the one who wrote the article. Really, it's okay to pimp your own stuff one the web. Everybody does it now that blogging is the current fashion. But submitting the articles under a pseudonym (especially ones with naive editors, like Slashdot) is just a wee bit underhanded and deceitful.

Re: broadband

[pboulang]

I think you are over simplifying and making a generalization on the meaning of broadband which is misleading.

Broadband is analog versus baseband which is digital. The fact that using broadband allows using mulitple channels means that overall, yes, can allow for higher bandwidth.. Compare ISDN to DSL. Baseband ISDN has a limitation due to the total amount of bits it can send (compressed lossless) over very specific channels/frequencies. Broadband DSL on the other hand, converts to analog, sends over multiple channels/frequencies.. More channels means aggregation, plus with higher frequencies, higher bandwidths can be accomodated.

You say that broadband is BROADER than things like dialup.. Dialup is technically broadband, but uses frequencies that are lower and thus do not have "distance to central office" limitations that DSL would have. You simply tradeoff speed for compatibility with almost any infrastructure. Your example is correct in colloquial usage of the word broadband, yet I felt some small clarification was in order.