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Perhaps you've noticed this already: Getting media to play in a Windows-based network is a lot like siphoning water from a pond using a hose running uphill. If you can get enough suction, enough momentum going, you can get a decent stream, but there are way too many factors working against you. Foremost among these is the fact that you're at the top of the hill sucking through a hose, rather than at the bottom pushing with a pump.

So home media networking is, at least for most users today, precisely nothing like broadcasting whatsoever. That fact doesn't sit well with very small networked devices like PMPs, digital photo frames, and the new and burgeoning field of portable Wi-Fi radios like Roku's SoundBridge. Devices like these don't want or even need to be "Windows devices;" and what's more, they don't want to be the ones negotiating their way through the network, begging for media to be streamed uphill in their general direction. They want to be plugged in, shown the loot, and told, "Go." Back in 2004, a group of networked device manufacturers -- the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA, and yes, it's another network association) -- coalesced with the idea of promoting a single standard for being told "Go." But up until today, there hasn't been a singular, driving force uniting the standards together, something to look up to and follow the way Web developers followed Internet Explorer.

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Among the stronger and more flourishing cottage industries that have sprouted forth as a result of Microsoft Windows has been documenting all of its problems. One of the most successful of these efforts has been Annoyances.org, which sprouted forth from "Windows Annoyances" -- much of what Internet publishers have learned today about search engine optimization comes from revelations directly gleaned from the trailblazing work of Annoyances.org. Imagine, if you will, if the instructions that Annoyances.org painstakingly gives its readers for how to eradicate those little changes that Microsoft makes without your permission, were encoded not in English but instead in a language that Windows could actually execute on the user's behalf.

Windows 7 is actually making such an environment -- a system where, if you trust someone else other than Microsoft to make corrections to your system, you can accept that someone into your circle of trust and put him to work in Troubleshooting. Can't make that Wi-Fi connection? How do you test for the presence of other interfering signals? Streaming media suddenly get slow, or running in fits and starts? Maybe there's an excess of browser-related processes clogging up memory and resources. Did something you just install cause Flash not to work in your browser? Maybe you don't have time to check the 36 or so places in the Registry where that something altered your file associations.

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Ever since the command-line tool code-named Monad escaped by the skin of its fingernails from Microsoft's laboratories in 2006, there has been debate and dispute over whether the company has finally, once and for all, replaced DOS. Since that time, we've seen the arrival of an entirely new generation of Windows users who believe "DOS" is an acronym for "denial of service," and who are baffled as to the reasons why anyone would want to command or control an operating system using text.

It isn't so much that text or command-line syntax is the "old" way of working and that Microsoft Management Console is the "new" way. As Microsoft discovered, to the delight of some in its employ and the dismay of others, using the command line as the fundamental basis for Exchange Server improved its usability and efficiency immensely. The graphical environment simply does not translate well -- or to be fairer, not effectively -- to the task of administration.

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Beginning now, Betanews is going to get a lot more intimate with technology than you've seen us before, particularly with Microsoft Windows 7 now that it's becoming a reality. Next Tuesday, the first and probably only Release Candidate of the operating system will become available for free download.

It's probably not so much a testing exercise as a colossal promotional giveaway, a way to get Windows 7 out in the field very fast...and use that leverage to push Vista out of the way of history. So much of what you'll see in the Release Candidate in terms of underlying technology is finalized; any tweaks that will be done between now and the general release date (which PC manufacturer Acer blabbed last night will be October 23) will likely be in the looks department.

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