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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."
Really, isn't that all this is? Its a networked mp3 player that looks like a stereo component - because it is, but whats the big deal? It has linux?
What "throne" is it supposed to capture? Networked dvd players do this, plus they play movies. A mythtv box does much more.
For $899 it better deliver my morning toast. I'm all for linux, but isn't the whole idea open source, low cost and "do it yourself"?
Why would I be more interested in that than, say, a $99 Tivo that can stream MP3s, has an accessible UI, and can also record video.
This thing is, in fact, neither a couch NOR a throne nor indeed any form of seating?
qntm.org
...and it's not the one in the living room.
Would it be too much to ask the "editors" of /. to stop posting stories of the form "There is a new device X out there that is controlled by Linux. Look out Microsoft/MPAA/RIAA/TSA/CIA/FBI/DoJ/Apple whoever because they're soon going to 0wnz0r all of your base!". I mean really, the fact that someone has come out with an MP3 player that is controlled via embeded Linux isn't news. It might have been eight years ago, but it isn't in 2005.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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.
i'll tell you why - i have a VCR, a DVD player, a CD changer, a game cube, a receiver, and a digital cable box. this is not an uncommon setup. i have four remotes, and going from watching a movie to playing a game, or to recording a tv show, or to doing anything else involves a nightmarish process of changing the receiver to AUX1, or to VID2, or changing the audio output to dolby 5.1, or changing the aspect ratio on the TV to...
imagine if you had to go through this same process on your PC every time you wanted to go from listening to an mp3 to watching a video. it's insane.
you see where i'm going? all of these machines are dumb - none of them talk to each other. if i put in a DVD, i want the TV and all the audio components to know what's going on. if i turn on the game cube, i want the components to know what's going on. that's what this machine does - it makes stuff just work out of the box.