After having my Sonos whole home audio system along with Rhapsody streaming over the Internet for more than a year, I can’t help but ponder something that most definitely has been asked before. Why aren’t we seeing service providers creating portable devices that can stream audio directly from a satellite?
Satellite TV/Internet exist. GPS devices fetch your location and map the location you’re heading to via satellite. It seems entirely plausible that one could make a portable device or a car head unit that is capable of accessing the libraries of your paid subscription service such as Rhapsody and stream that to you anywhere you are, regardless of lack of an internet connection.
We love being able to have virtually any track at our disposal while using the Sonos or downloading it to an MP3 player with Rhapsody to Go. It would be pure audio utopia to stream tracks to your car wherever you are. Get a song in your head – search it and play it instantly.
What do you see as the major hangups in this scenario? I’m not seeing satellite “bandwidth” as an issue as they already push HD channels out with full 5.1 audio tracks and high bit-rate video. Is it a safety issue where companies don’t want drivers distracted searching for a song? (Disclaimer like the GPS units would solve that!) Costs for deploying the satellites? Maintenance? I think the idea is great…but why have we not seen it yet?
Three years ago i purchased a Rockford Fosgate digital media server. This device streamed MP3’s from my PC to my hifi setup. At that point i decided to rip all of my CD’s for access by the streamer. The omnifi only supports MP3 or WAV so i chose to rip everything according to the uberstandard at the highest possible bit rate per the standard.
Fast forward three years and i have since ditched the bug laden Omnifi. However – the open source simplecenter that powered the interface to the PC is awesome…perusing the source made me very happy to see their technology choices. The replacement? A Sonos system! Since seeing this incredible whole home audio system in action at the owner of my company’s house i had to have one.
Now that I’ve got a system that is totally bug free and supports lossless audio formats I’m rethinking my decision to go with the uberstandard. Now that hard drive space is ubiquitous and my player supports it FLAC with its own DAC has peaked my interest.
What say you audiophiles? FLAC or go home?
Occasionally your team won’t be the only team on a big league project. Sometimes you find yourself as the man in the middle. This is the first time that i find myself on the outside of the good ‘ol boy network. For the perseverance of the team we must push through. The shame of it is when the good ‘ol boy network determines enterprise solution decisions. Good times.
Thought I’d post a snippet of applicationContext.xml for all the people out there trying a JNDI data source wired up in IBM’s WebSphere Application Server through Spring Framework and Hibernate. I couldn’t find this information as a whole anywhere out there so hopefully it helps someone.
Hit the jump for the xml.
Continue reading…
As I sit here wondering why on earth the glamazons would embarrass themselves on national tv via the show America’s Got Talent, I reflect on all of the stats packages available to us bloggers and site admins. The cat’s gravy is obviously Google Analytics. Great coverage and slick UI. Awstats is what I run since I host all of these sites off a server at my house — gives more detail than you could imagine.
Reinvigorate presents another look at stats with slick graphs and ajax based UI. Enter wordpress.com! Since I’ve switched from b2evolution to wordpress, I’ve used my wordpress API key to utilize Akismet. Now the crew offers a stats collection for all blogs registered under my API key. Andy Skelton released a plugin that logs all hits appropriately.
I guess you can never have TOO many stats apps, unless the javascript they load adds to your user’s page load times.
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