On 22 Apr 2008, at 12:47, Joe Greco wrote:
You mean a computer? Like the one that runs file-sharing clients?
Like the one that nobody really wants to watch large quantities of television on?
Perhaps more like the mac mini that's plugged into the big plasma screen in the living room? Or one of the many stereo-component-styled "media" PCs sold for the same purpose, perhaps even running Windows MCE, a commercial operating system sold precisely because people want to hook their computers up to televisions?
Or the old-school hacked XBox running XBMC, pulling video over SMB from the PC in the other room?
Or the XBox 360 which can play media from the home-user NAS in the back room? The one with the bittorrent client on it? :-)
Pretty much. People have a fairly clear bias against watching anything on your conventional PC. This probably has something to do with the way the display ergonomics work; my best guess is that most people have their PC's set up in a corner with a chair and a screen suitable for work at a distance of a few feet. As a result, there's usually a clear delineation between devices that are used as general purpose computers, and devices that are used as specialized media display devices. The "Mac Mini" may be an example of a device that can be used either way, but do you know of many people that use it as a computer (and do all their normal computing tasks) while it's hooked up to a large TV? Even Apple acknowledged the legitimacy of this market by releasing AppleTV. People generally do not want to hook their _computer_ up to televisions, but rather they want to hook _a_ computer up to television so that they're able to do things with their TV that an off-the-shelf product won't do for them. That's an important distinction, and all of the examples you've provided seem to be examples of the latter, rather than the former, which is what I was talking about originally. If you want to discuss the latter, then we've got to include a large field of other devices, ironically including the TiVo, which are actually programmable computers that have been designed for specific media tasks, and are theoretically reprogrammable to support a wide variety of interesting possibilities, and there we have the entry into the avalanche of troubling operational issues that could result from someone releasing software that distributes large amounts of content over the Internet, and ... oh, my bad, that brings us back to what we were talking about. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list NANOG@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog