This is one of
Sun Microsystems' most bandied about slogans.
I have decided to
hijack it for the title of my piece because it seemed most
appropriate.
While living in a dorm last term, my roommate was about as big a computer geek as I am & both of us had similiar taste in music. Naturally, we let each other have accounts on our linux boxes and shared our collections of digital music over the 100Mbps LAN.
Halfway through the semester, thanks to the wonders of Esound, X11 and Samba, we had a truly noteworthy audio system in place! Since I had a larger hard drive, I stored all the songs we could appropriate. And because there was something wacky wrong with my system's decoder software that made MP3s sound like shit, we abused the network the way it should be.
I would run XMMS off his computer but display it on my screen, thanks to the X11 protocol. Then I'd load up songs off the directory that he had mounted off my computer using Samba's smbmount. His XMMS was configured to send the decoded audio stream over the network to the Esound daemon running on my system, which played them on my speakers, which had better sound quality and volume than his did.