Flutterby™! :

Ya now how everything comes together sometimes? In Kool Aid colored boxes this morning, and later in a message I posted to Userland's discussion board I thought I was going out on a limb by predicting that networks in houses will be common place (an extrapolation based on the proliferation of cablemodems with lightweight routers doing essentially what I've got a 486 doing with my network at home). Now Microsoft is trying to beat down Sun's Jini, with a set of standards for printers, scanners and other peripherals over TCP/IP. This is a much more reasonable way to implement these sorts of things than, say, USB, and if we start to see chipsets which support lightweight TCP/IP protocols it won't be too long before you can hook your oven up to the network in your house and see how long 'til dinner's done. Cat5 in every room.