Hulu.com, a well-made site offering free, ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies through a Web browser, now tops CNN and Turner in U.S. video site rankings, according to Nielsen stats relayed by Silicon Alley Insider.

Despite an official launch only five months ago and a relatively small library of shows and movies, the site offered up 105 million streams in July, just behind ESPN's 106 million streams.

Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP.

Still other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige. The sketchy early reports of Windows 7 have lately grown into a steady trickle of hints and rumors. The catch is, not all of it sounds particularly encouraging.

Sure, Yahoo Finance rocks. But plenty of other, smaller sites offer good data for the online investor. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle outlined seven of them.

In Harry Domash's piece, most of the seven were new to me, though I had written about one of them (tickerspy.com) here previously.

It looks as if Microsoft's OOXML office document file format will be published as an open standard after all. The International Standards Organization (ISO) today rejected four appeals from subsidiary national standards bodies that claimed ballot irregularities during the standardization process. Had these appeals been upheld, an OOXML standard could have been delayed indefinitely, despite Microsoft's best efforts to fast-track the process.

Barring any further hold-ups, ISO is expected to publish the full text of the standard within the next few weeks. But as the dust clears, many IT managers and office software users will likely be left scratching their heads: What does an open standard office file format from Microsoft actually get us?

With the constant flow of me-too social networking sites these days, it's nice to see a well-made site that identifies a real need and meets it. For solar power planning, that's Roofray.com, which just launched this week. 

For your own custom plans, head to the site and start with a satellite view of an address you enter.  Then define the solar panel coverage area by adding successive points around space where you'd put panels. 

Intel has announced a new power-saving technology called Remote Wake that will let outfitted computers doze in a power-saving mode until an appropriate message is received over the Internet, either via a VoIP call or another messaging medium. While the Wake on LAN protocol has been around for some years, allowing computers with the right Ethernet card and software to monitor a network even while sleeping for a Sleeping Beauty like magic kiss, Remote Wake goes far beyond that.

Intel has only released sketchy details--there's not even a link on their Web site--but Remote Wake would have to maintain a persistent network connection with a central server to function as Intel intends, as most computers in homes are behind Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways that prevent direct access. It's possible that a combination of UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and Remote Wake are required to leave an external port on the Internet-facing side of the gateway active, that can be used to route traffic to the snoozing system.

The Transportation Security Administration is apparently trying to make our lives a bit easier while not reducing one aspect of the security theater that's more reality than acting. The TSA will, starting tomorrow, let you keep your laptop in a bag that provides a clear image.

The "checkpoint friendly" bags either have to open up in a butterfly or trifold style so that the laptop can lay flat and be seen from top to bottom as it passes through a scanner. Laptop sleeves are also acceptable.

Users are rightfully annoyed when services like Gmail experience unexpected outages. We've come to expect that our e-mail should be available whenever we need it -- even when the service is provided for free. Imagine your frustration, then, if you found out that software you had bought and paid for had suddenly stopped functioning on a certain date.

This is exactly the problem faced by customers of VMware ESX, VMware's enterprise-class virtualization engine. As of today, due to a bug in VMware's license management software, no new virtual machine instances will launch for customers running VMware ESX 3.5 U2. And so far, there's no fix.

Creative types have a new option for turning their efforts into income online. Open Salon, now out of private beta, allows anyone to post their work after a quick registration.

Those posts can earn money, but unlike Google's new Knol, income doesn't come from ads. Instead, readers can click a small button to tip the writer through a system called Tippem.

The Mozilla Labs, which acts as the idea wing for the organization behind Firefox, is expanding its call for open-source contributions to those outside its base of community-minded coders and techies.  Now, they want to get designers and creative types in on the deal.

When I chatted with Chris Beard, Vice President of Mozilla Labs, he talked about how the basic browser UI really hasn't changed much. In part, that's intentional - when I've talked with other folks at Mozilla, the people with their sleeves rolled and their fingers typing as they get new versions pushed out the door, they tend to say that they and Firefox users are content with the basic browser design.