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In the last year, Netflix on-demand video streaming has made its way into connected optical media players by LG, Samsung, and Sony, and at the beginning of the last quarter, CEO Reed Hastings said the public could expect new Netflix-enabled consumer electronics products every quarter. Today, Best Buy's Insignia brand became the latest to support Netflix streaming with a firmware update to two of the brand's connected Blu-ray players.

This is another important partnership to differentiate Best Buy's exclusive store brand from lower-quality department store brands, which often have more in common with Chinese knock-offs than with products by major manufacturers. In July, for example, Best Buy announced a partnership with TiVo that would improve the interface and search in Insignia and Dynex televisions.

The good news in Apple's earnings call this afternoon, according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer, is that the Cupertino company has sold more Macs and iPhones than it ever has in the past, beating previous Mac sales records by 444,000 or 17% year over year and beating iPhone records by 7% unit growth year over year.

The bad news is that the MP3 player product class where Apple has actual market dominance, not just dominant mindshare (as with the iPhone), has begun to slide, despite a 100% increase in iPod touch sales year over year.

Have you reserved your copy of Windows 7 yet? Did you book off work? Get a babysitter for the kids? Stock up on Red Bull and Doritos?...No? If you're one of the dozens who pine for midnight door-crasher sales at the electronics big box store and Rolling Stones-themed launch events, you may want to make alternate plans.

For anyone who doesn't live in a cave in Afghanistan (and even for a few folks who do), this week could be the most exciting one in an age as Microsoft launches its newest -- and possibly company-saving -- operating system, Windows 7, on Thursday. But 14 years after it redefined the rock-star launch party with Windows 95, and nearly four years after having invested a half-billion dollars selling us Vista, this time around, Microsoft is taking a lower-key approach.

[Editor's Note: Post was updated with quotes from Apple financial analysts conference call and four charts at 6:20 p.m. EDT.]

Today, Apple delivered yet another gravity-defying performance, as sales surged across most product lines. After the bell, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company announced fiscal 2009 fourth quarter results that beat its guidance and Wall Street analysts' over-inflated consensus.

Out of concern that Google may yet be able to scan the printed works of authors worldwide and make them available to Americans but not Europeans, two leading European Commissioners this morning set forth on a plan they hope could beat Google to market. Their plan involves Europeana, the online portal for the collected works of the EU's member countries, which is still officially in beta, though has come a long way from its extremely rocky first tests last year.

Commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Viviane Reding this morning issued an official "Communication" regarding their plan to use Europeana.eu as a portal for the publication of printed European works that have fallen into the public domain, as well as "orphaned" works -- books that may still be under copyright protection, but which no author or publisher has recently claimed.

During an industry event whose original purpose was to concentrate on SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's collaborative server product, CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that his company is making ready an official "public beta" of Office 2010, the applications suite for Windows.

The most likely timeframe for such a release would be during PDC 2009, Microsoft's annual developers' conference now scheduled for the third week of November in Los Angeles.

Every major iteration of Android is named after a pastry (Cupcake, Donut, etc.), and whenever the latest version is being worked on, a giant foam rendition of that pastry is planted on the lawn of Google's headquarters. Last week, a giant eclair, signifying the impending drop of Android 2.0, was unveiled.

This is normally a pretty big event in and of itself, but it happened on the same day that Google had its quarterly earnings call, and CEO Eric Schmidt made the bold statement that "Android adoption is about to explode," without providing too much more detail.

In what is now indisputably the most important vulnerability addressed during last Tuesday's record round of Windows patches, the two companies most affected by the problem -- Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Mozilla -- could not help but be caught in a tangle of miscommunication exacerbated to a large extent by overhype from a sea of blogs. As a result, it's everyday users who are left confused and bewildered, even though no known exploit for the vulnerability exists.

The problem involves both the ".NET Framework Assistant" add-on and "Windows Presentation Manager" plug-in made by Microsoft for Mozilla Firefox, both of which are installed automatically -- and without warning -- by Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. One of Microsoft's patches last week, as explained in a Microsoft bulletin, addresses the functionality of 3.5 SP1 that's made available through these Firefox extensions.

While initiatives at various levels of United States government strive to put current documents and publications online for public consumption, the European Union has been keeping up with new documents and scanning its archives to boot.

As a result, the EU Bookshop opened its Digital Library last week, an online repository of more than 110,000 scanned historical EU documents which date all the way back to 1952.

Today was the Federal Communications Commission's deadline for public comment on the Berkman Center For Internet and Society's recent study, which examines the growth of broadband Internet access in other countries, along with the factors that have made those markets overseas more competitive than in the US.

"International comparisons...have been a political hot button in the past few years. Because the United States began the first decade of this century with the fourth-highest levels of broadband penetration among OECD nations, and is closing the decade in 15th place in these same rankings, and because, according to International Telecommunications Union measures, the United States slipped from 11th to 17th between 2002 and 2007, many have used these data to argue that the United States, on its present policy trajectory, is in decline," the study says.

Last night, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) unanimously agreed on the final mobile broadcast TV standard, the ATSC A/153 Mobile DTV Vestigial Side Band (VSB). This standard lets broadcasters take a portion of their existing DTV band and rebroadcast it as a shortwave sideband for mobile consumption.

But even in places where mobile broadcast television is popular, such as South Korea, it still isn't that popular. In the United States, where the average household watches more than 8 hours of television per day, mobile television remains as unpopular as ever.

In a blog post yesterday first noticed by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer, a member of Mozilla's user experience team -- stating she was not writing on behalf of Mozilla, as the organization allows -- suggested that Microsoft's revised proposal for a Web browser selection screen for European Windows users still isn't fair enough to the browser market.

Because more computer users are accustomed to the typical ways to install software, states Mozilla UX team member Jenny Boriss, they may assume that the first choice that appears in a list is the preferred choice. In Microsoft's original proposal, Internet Explorer 8 appeared in the leftmost column. But in the company's more neutral alternative as proposed last March, it placed browsers in columns sorted in alphabetical order by their manufacturer. As a result, Apple Safari fell first.

With the music industry's business model in flux, mostly due to forces seemingly beyond its control, one way of potentially reducing some of the stress from lost CD sales is by Congress lifting terrestrial radio broadcasters' exemption from paying royalties to musical performers -- an exemption that has been allowed since the beginnings of radio. Though a majority of representatives in the US House have voiced opposition to such a measure, a similar majority has yet to coalesce in the Senate.

Yesterday, concerted leadership in the Senate Judiciary Committee passed its version of a bill authored in the house by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D - Mich.), effectively striking language from US Code granting radio broadcasters exemption from paying royalties to performers. (Broadcasters currently do pay royalties for copyright holders, typically through annual fees.)

Today, Google said it will launch its own e-book store in the first half of 2010 called "Google Editions." This store will sell in-print books in addition to its archive of public domain titles, and will be accessible to "any device with a Web browser," not just for the dedicated e-readers that have gained so much notoriety in the past few years. Users will reportedly need to be connected to the Web to initially obtain their books, but they are then cached for offline consumption.

Google has long been expected to enter this space, and did not mention this week with whom it intends to partner in the hardware space. But reading headlines today, you'd think this was the first melee in a full-scale war between Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Google. Some have called it an "e-book fight," some an "eReader war," and then there was the inexplicably silly "Google wants you dead, Amazon!"

System performance is an interesting concept; everyone seems to define it differently. To some, it involves chewing through a complex spreadsheet. To others, it's how fast a 3D video sequence can be rendered, or how easily Web pages are served up.

Call me a rebel, but after years of living off of a BlackBerry, my thinking has evolved. As much as I focused on megahertz and gigahertz for much of my computing life, the most important criteria for me these days are how fast the thing turns on, and how long it stays on before I have to recharge it.