Zune’s “Device to Cloud” built on Mesh?

This might be a stretch, and in less than 48 hours I’ll either be proven right or wrong, but since it just seems so plausible… UPDATE: I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out what the Zune software’s built on, since the new features will be rolled out on the 16th…

I’ve read the recent leaks regarding the upcoming Zune and what it might add, which is interesting and all, but what really caught my attention is the “Device to Cloud” feature, which allows you to “automatically update your collection”. If that means what I think it means, then it’ll literally update the desktop collection to include any new media that you’ve bought or p2p-synced from the Zune while away.

Being more specific on my interest here: my hunch is that this is is probably built on Microsoft’s Live Mesh platform, which is designed specifically for applications like this. (Although the complexity of Microsoft’s management and internal organization could reveal an all-new paralleled technology to fight with an existing technology like Mesh.)

To further connect the dots, Long Zheng hints at the possibility of storing an entire music collection “across all devices wherever you are” with Mesh, which means that he either knows something juicy or just randomly picked this topic.

Eh, I could be right or I could be wrong. On Tuesday evening we’ll all know the truth.

Psych’s Shawn & Gus = Mac versus PC?

Okay, mostly deceptive title, because I’m not really going to compare the two…

I was watching this week’s Psych (“Talk Derby to Me”) and caught a decent glimpse of the computer that Gus uses:

Apparently Gus isn’t doing too shabby, since he’s got a Tablet PC that was custom-made by ASUS for select partners and was never sold in retail. So either he got a great deal off of eBay or he happens to really know a few high-ups at MS. Anyway, this Tablet was build to show off Vista, which the following screenshot says otherwise:

It appears to be Windows 2000 with either a custom-built application or a Photoshopped image of IE, because IE7 doesn’t use the old-school style of back/forward buttons (so it’s not just Vista in “classic” mode). Also, since the “Log in error – try again” dialog shouldn’t have a maximize button (nor a minimize button), this indicates that it was a 2-minute VB application job. (Oh yeah, here’s a shot of what the interface should look like.)

What made me ponder why on earth they’d go through all that trouble to make Windows look so bad can only be summed up by the image that follows:

Psych – great show, but producers: please leave your computer politics out of it.

Actually, while I’m on the topic: I went to HULU to watch that episode (you know, their legal alternative), but was shot down with this dialog:

It’s almost like they’re begging people to visit a certain site (let’s call it a “bay”) in order to watch this online…