Not a single XBox owner in the crowd.

Silverlight, Micrsoft’s media delivery platform now used by Netflix, is a win for both Macs and PCs.

Macs, you can now Watch Instantly.  Welcome to the club.  High-fives from the PCs.

Windows users, things just got better.  The annoying media acquisition & digital rights prompts are gone.  Better still, Silverlight lets you Watch Instantly with Firefox; no more IE-only watching.  Playback is much faster, with less badwidth adjustments, and improved controls.

1) DoPDF for Windows | There are lots of PDF writers/printers available for Windows - CutePDF, PrimoPDF are some I’ve used before.  This week LifeHacker mentioned doPDF and I quickly adopted.  The installation is quick and the interface is very simple.  Mac users have easily been able to print to PDF for a while and I’ve always wanted the same ease in Windows.  CutePDF and PrimoPDF generate a PDF, but they do so with either bulky installation files and prereqs, or with a multi-step process that takes more time to click through than it does to actually create the file.  DoPDF is lightweight and replicates the Mac experience nicely for Windows.

2)  PDF Import for OpenOffice.org | Sun created an add-on for the new release of OpenOffice which lets you import a PDF to Writer (the OO version of Word) and edit.  Eureka!  What a brilliant solution to an issue that has been nearly impossible - or at least unaffordable - to solve with MS Word.  Peep LifeHacker’s post for more details.  OpenOffice.org and Sun PDF Import are available for all platforms.

Wow, Dell has come out with a small desktop computer that looks pretty decent! It’s called the Dell Studio Hybrid, though I’m not sure what it is a hybrid of, it’s still got some respectable features.

I should say that we’ve been using the Apple Mac Mini in our Deli offices, where space it extremely tight, and everyone has been really impressed by them. We bootcamp them into an OEM licensed version of Windows XP and they crank away.

So it’s in this light that this Dell looks good. It’s about the same size profile and costs only 5% more at $629. Similar to the Mini we’d need to get an OEM license for XP separately. CPU, memory, and harddrive are better in the Dell. Warranty, like the Mini, would need to be extended to 3 years.

The only area that the Dell falls short compared to the Apple Mini is that it can’t run Mac OS. I know, that’s perhaps a strange take on it, but we’re not sure that we couldn’t reach a point in the next year or so where we could switch desktops over from XP to Mac OS X without undue pain. The Mac OS machines that we have now tend to be dramatically different in terms of trouble - they tend to not need much support. So, something to think about. We’ll probably give one of these a try in a situation that’s tight on space, like our Bakeshop.

Engadget has a post about rumors having been confirmed of Microsoft once again extending the ability to legitimately downgrade Vista to XP. Which is what we’ve been doing. And is a good thing. ‘Cause we can’t find a good reason to move to Vista.

I have not run a screensaver in years. Usually I just set my LCD to go off after 30 minutes of inactivity. But that’s changed. I’m hooked on a really cool screensaver that makes beautiful ever-changing images

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

The software is available for download for PC or Mac or Linux.

We use Microsoft’s Terminal Services to bring windows-only software to our Apple laptops. Works great. Even works great to bring apps to Windows machines.

Recently we heard about the opposite - terminal services for Mac from aquaconnect.net. At first we tried to wrap our brains around how to use it but I think we’re going to give it a demo run and just try it.