Comments on: Yahoo, Linksys offer link for digital music

Companies unveil $99.99 product to better stream music from computers to stereo systems in the home.

[cobioguy]

A new step??

How is this a new step for companies to link the stereo to the
computer. Apple has had this product for iTunes for over a year!!

Supports only WEP!

I just checked the datasheet for this device at Linksys, and like a number of their other products, it only supports WEP security. That means that the entire wireless network has to be downgraded to WEP. It's useless on any network using WPA.

[Wildcat0695]

Dumb

Who in their right mind would want to go backwards. No thanks.

[SteveBarry687]

Big deal

Must be nice for Linksys to be a part of Cisco now, so they can push out old technology and have it called new.

This is old technology that has been around for a long time.

[Joe Blow]

If This is an Example of Cisco's Push into the Living Room ...

then the other companies already doing this sort of thing have nothing to worry about from Cisco. There's an old wives' tale in the marketing world that says that the impulse-buying threshold price for consumer electronics products is around $200, and that if you can enter below that, you can sell lots of anything, if the buyer isn't very sophisticated and the packaging and advertising use convincing buzz words and tricky phrases. This is clearly an attempt to market a pig as a thorougbred (and a pig with retread paws, at that - WEP???). Well, I suppose there are a lot of people out there that don't really know the difference between WEP and WPA, that WEP keys can be easily broken by brute-force attacks within hours using a myriad of free tools available for download over the Internet, and that WEP is associated with the slower 802.11b equipment (which probably is fine for streaming music, but is inadequate for full-on video streaming, especially in HD formats - so look for an 802.11g box to do video streaming next - for, guess what - another $99). Of course, that doesn't even take into account that most people don't bother even turning on WEP/WPA and create a key, turn off SSID visibility, or even change the default SSID and admin password.

If this isn't proof that Cisco is going to fall flat on its face in the living room in its recently-announced attempt to expand its market beyond server farms, I don't know what would be. That is, unless the unsophisticated drones out there are even more numerous than today's crop of crap TV shows suggests. The IQ of each new In-Duh-Vidual that reaches the age of reproduction continues to decline with their ever-increasing numbers, thus maintaining the Law of Conservation of Intelligence across the Known Universe. But, I'm really an optimist deep down, and am heartened to see that even my brother-in-law, Joe Six-Pack, can see through this smoke-and-mirrors job. To him, $99 is still a significant amount of money - hell that's more than I'm willing to part with without proof that I'm going to get some bang for my buck, and that I can't already do the same thing via reconfiguration of equipment I already have.

All the Best,
Joe Blow

So it's wireless

I'm think of buying a $10 (max) cable to connect the stereo output from a laptop loaded with tunes to my stereo. OK it is not wireless but it sure is cheaper.