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Road Kill on the Convergence Highway: Three months with Windows Media Center
Page: 1/4
(2082 total words in this text)
(84152 Reads) 
 Special Contribution to BYOPVR by:
Duke Weber ( dukeweber AT gmail.com )
10/7/2005
I’m with Stupid
Gadget Jones comin’ down. I had to have something with a plug, or at the least a battery compartment. Primal cravings make people do strange and stupid things. They made me build a Windows Media Center PC.
This has been going on since I was 12. Mom would drag me to Radio Shack to buy diodes. Diodes, a gateway gadget, lead to stronger stuff. Pretty soon you’re soldering everything in sight. Then stereos with speakers as big as refrigerators, wires made from single crystals of silver. Zones of audio, zones of video. DVI and HDMI and panels and plugs that no one else in the house understands, except maybe the 15 year-old girl with the 16:9 rectangular eyes.
Computers everywhere. Windows and Macs and Linux. Ethernet Cat 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. Routers, hubs and switches blinking under tables and in closets. Eventually the computer stuff gets lucky with the hi-fi and video heap and that is what magazines like this call “Convergence”. Digital devices, music and video converging in a whole new pile of stuff with plugs that we can all go out and buy RIGHT NOW.
I’d already plucked the low-hanging convergence fruit. Hang a bunch of beater laptops on network, plug ‘em into stereos with he-man external sound boxes. Run iTunes all around and pat yourself on the back ‘cause you are CONVERGED, and you didn’t have to pay the price of a Buick for some gadget with an 80 gig drive and a blue light to do it.
But when the Gadget Jones is down, you need more wire. A few months ago, I made the mistake of cruising websites that traffic in this convergence porn. The news, behold, is that Microsoft, after a few tries, now has a product that doesn’t suck - Media Center Edition 2005. Mister Softee, we all know, has become the behemoth it is by selling software that sucks. It doesn’t suck quite enough for you to toss it out and get a pencil and a typewriter, but it AWAYS sucks enough that you’re willing to bite for the next version, which might suck a little less.
If you read it on the Internet, it must be true
I was ready to bite when “Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows” told me that, unlike Media Center Editions 2002 and 2004, the new one didn’t suck. This could be a two-channel HDTV TIVO, an archive for all those VHS tapes, and a DVD recording factory.
I was ready to bite harder when “Build It, Tweak It, Know It” (Extreme Tech) told me the secrets of turning the heap of computer innards in the closet into an uber-converged monster machine that would have the lesser nerds drooling on the socks in their Teva sandals.
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