So here we have several devices, all of which run Android, a wonderfully portable OS based on Linux, and yet Netflix can't be bothered to get their service to work on Linux desktops? Sure, they use Silverlight to run the thing in a browser, but why couldn't they just port this app and give us a desktop client to view our paid subscriptions from? Is the source to this available somewhere?

Exactly what I was trying to figure out. The story is /.ed, but last I checked figuring out an algorithm was a far cry from refreshing a page over and over.

Recently some of my in-laws brought me their new HP notebook complaining that it was (of course) slow, and that intermittently they could or could not load their pictures onto it. Turned out that it was one of these notebooks HP had shipped with the webos as some kind of pre-boot setup and my less than technically savvy family members weren't able to tell when they were in windows (yes, a nightmare unto itself) or were in the webos. The solution was to backup their data, wipe the machine and install stock Windows 7 from scratch. They haven't had any complaints since.

HP, this does not bode well!

.. and when I come home and want to 'zone out' in front of a video game I'm not really interested in making sure my system is up to snuff in order to play my favorite games so I pick up my 360's controller and go to town. Now don't get me wrong, I grew up playing PC games, I was around when Kings Quest was 'cutting edge' and migrated through Doom to Quake to UT, etc, etc - but these days the desktop computer (and even the laptop as so many of them are quite the gaming rigs these days) is not the set-it-and-forget-it experience it used to be. Heck, even back in the 80's we'd make all kinds of hardware tweaks just to get a game up and running and _that was part of the fun_! But I'm getting older now and when I want to game I want to get right to it and fiddling with my machine settings shouldn't be part of the equation. Now get off my lawn, etc, etc.

It makes perfect sense now! C3PO was directly in line for being one of the most powerful and manipulative beings in the galaxy! Think about it for a second; Anakin was actually (unknowingly perhaps) creating an automaton version of his future master! 3PO being a master at reading and understanding not only spoken language but also digital forms of communication and even body language would be the perfect tool for manipulating the unsuspecting populace! Who would ever think a droid capable of such machinations?

Seriously though, the 6 million forms of communication was always pretty straight-forward I thought. I sure wish I had a system that had such capabilities as such a thing would make data conversions from one application to another trivial at most.

I use Vista on my Dell laptop since getting Linux to sleep and recover is still too spotty for my tastes but so far this is my experience with SP1:

• Started Install at 2:04 PM PST
• grind, grind grind
• Finished at 2:32 PM PST
• Process list reports dwm.exe (the 'window manager') is using ~27 megs rather than the 33 it was using previously
• Shutdown/Reboot time has diminished by around 5 seconds .. nothing to write home about as I don't reboot often anyway
• Switching between wired/wireless seems to pick up the networks faster and with less fiddling - previously Vista had trouble at times switching between the two and I would have to run their diagnostic tool to reset the ip
• There is a 'screen flash' present at login that was not previously apparent. Could just be a matter of waiting til everything settles down and might just need a defrag after all those files were updated
• Yep, O&O defrag reports the system went from 1.3% fragmented before the upgrade to about 8% fragmentation after

Overall, I don't 'feel' much of a difference. I copied a couple 1 gig isos across my network and the speed was fairly similar to what it was before - the calculation time was less, but the actual copy was almost the same but that could be due to other loads on this network right now (no, I'm not going to qualify that).

I cant say for certain but it looks like there might be one or two more services installed now that werent there before. Have to do a bit more research on that but contrary to what others have said this update does not appear to have re-enabled services that I previously had turned off such as windows search.

It will be interesting to see what other reports we get on this as it gets pushed out to the main stream users next month.