Re: Why not more enthused about Roku? (other devices)

At 30/12/2004 02:57 AM, you wrote:
>How much does your PC draw?

All my PCs are energy star and all power down their hard disks and monitors
when not in use. I've always assumed that that was so much savings that,
afterwards, I didn't have to think about it any more. And I don't have a
wattmeter to check.

(and I live in an apartment and don't pay for power .... although I know
that's not a good argument).

But my point was something else - about the slimboxen vs AT architecture.

Since the server code for slim (and perhaps others) is public domain, it
can run on a variety of hosts. In particular, it could (probably) run on
the Linksys hard disk box. Or some other such trivial PC. Almost anything
fanless will have no moving parts and should power down to next to nothing.

So perhaps the correct architecture is a chip beside the MP3 decoder & DAC
which is sized to handle the decoding rates and no more, and embedded.
Everything else should be more standard components and upgradeable. Hard
disk, server, etc. This is the AT idea, taken another step. Too bad Voyetra
didn't take it.

By embedding their database server in the (slow) AT processor, and putting
it lower priority than the MP3 decoding load (which of course they had to
do) they made a very unresponsive unit. Even the front panel volume control
(which is fly by wire) has noticeable lag. And the web server can hang for
6 to 8 seconds on my modest collection (8,000 songs). Since you could put
30,000 in the box, according to the specs, should we expect 20 second
response time when it's fully loaded? This is clearly a processor load that
needs to go on a different processor. But the AT design prohibits this,
because it's closed.

TB could still (I think) recapture this market by taking their code,
splitting it and running the time-critical MP3 decode load and front panel
support on one (faster in the mean time) processor, the rest of it on
another processor, and allow this second processor to be shut off and
replaced somewhere on the network by a beefier one running the same code.
Then the box would run "out of the box" for simple configurations, and
could run a more sensible configuration (100,000 song database running on a
larger processor feeding 10 stations, say) for more sophisticated uses.

But, sigh, I guess they won't be doing that now (or any time soon). Time's
a wasting. I have to move fairly soon. Which is why I'll likely be going to
another architecture at some point. Like the squeezebox. Or whatever.

Michael

http://home.cogeco.ca/~michaelwagner/personal-page.htm
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Sheryl Crow