IT Tidbits - Who needs Windows Home Server with Linux around?

Oh the choices we have with technology today. It is overwhelming to those of us who eat, sleep and breathe it daily so how are the general masses supposed to cope? Well, the same way they have for the last decade plus some will tell you; just follow the leader. And today's leader is Microsoft so they have the most to lose when people choose NOT to follow them. Sure, Apple is still a small player in the larger scheme of things but that could all change if Steve and company would only find a way to release the OS for those of us who choose to build our own. Imagine the day we can walk into FutureShop or BestBuy or Circuit City or Fry's or London Drugs and just go to the shelf to choose or own flavour of operating system BEFORE we choose which machine we want to take it home on. Alas, that is a bit of a ways off and back in reality, we have the mess we have today.

Anyhow, I work with Windows, and I like lots of things in Windows and that Windows does, but I like choice and I like power and Windows does not offer enough of that to compete with Linux and UNIX in those arenas. Linux though proves that too much choice is not necessarily a good thing either. Apple, on the other hand, illustrates that too restrictive a choice also breeds issues. So what do we do? We mix and match until such a time we find the appropriate balance.

In our home, the computers run Windows for the simple reason that I need it for my job and it is easier to conform when one has to be on-call for work. Our PVR machine used to run Snapstream's Beyond TV but too many bugs and crashes made me turn to Vista Ultimate and the upgraded built-in Media Center components.

Stop your wretching!

The biggest thing about Vista's MCE service is that it can record a show on ANY channel, remembers that it already recorded a particular show or that it is already set to record elsewhere and, super sweet since we have one, seamlessly connects with the Xbox 360 to stream those recorded shows to another location in the house. For us that means it records in the office and streams to the big screen in the living room. Naturally, this can include other video, and music, and Live TV and FM radio (if you have a tuner installed). Some things that Vista does not include from the start that you get in a commercial product like Snapstream's BTV is the ability to compress the recorded file into other formats, to stream video over the Internet, to remote control the settings via a webpage, and to include unlimited tuners (there is a hack to do this in MCE, email me if you want it).

If I can get Linux to do all of this, I would consider the switch. I cannot, so I will not. However, if I can create a media server that Vista can connect to and utilize making it seamless to access the files from the 360, I will heartily look forward to building it. Homogeneous networks are a thing of the past and we need to embrace the change that the winds have brought.

Ciao.

Who needs Windows Home Server with Linux around?: "Who needs Windows Home Server with Linux around?"