Winamp Remote Beta works, and when it's working right, it's about as close to magic as I've ever seen a complicated, convoluted synergy of software and bitstreams get. I sat here the other day, holding my Treo, which was connected to nothing but air, watching it stream a movie off my hard drive a few feet in front of me. That movie was going through Winamp Remote Beta on my laptop, out over the Internet through my router and cable modem, hopping across and through God knows how many different servers, into and out of the Winamp Remote servers, up into space, over to Sprint, (maybe stopping for a Coke and a burger on Jupiter for all I know).. then back down into my Treo where I watched it in Kinoma Player.

In a way it seems roundabout convoluted silly.. in another way it seems totally amazing that it works at all, but technology marches on, and this is really bleeding-edge stuff.

Orb needs to hammer away on their code some more, that's for sure. WR's behavior gets quirky, often unpredictable, and sometimes downright infuriating, while other times it works exactly as it should for hours on end.

I've thrown plenty of bug reports their way, although I'm not an "official" Beta tester, but they're listening, and again, the caveat that this is Betaware applies. Don't expect it to perform flawlessly every time you use it. Certainly don't fiddle with it if it goes into "what the.." mode while you're driving. Just understand that it's not quite "there" yet, but even in its current incarnation, it's remarkable. The fact that it's free means that more people will be using it, turning in bug reports, and the coders and engineers behind it will have that much more feedback to bring out a finished product they can be proud of.

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Read Merciful by Casey Adolfsson