If you're flying BA and the VOD just shows four channels, that's the in-flight entertainment having crashed. Ask the crew for a reboot. I haven't had a BA flight in a long time where I didn't ask the crew for a reboot. They have to reboot the in-flight for everybody, but that's fine, as it's usually at least a third or so of the seats that are down.

And then the navigation is as bad as what you describe for the 380. And you learn that they using an ancient version of Windows ;-)

Actually, while I won't dispute that that's bad design, it sounds like a huge improvement. Last time I flew, the backs of the seats just had a pocket containing a couple of completely uninteresting magazines, a safety tip sheet, a brochure for the airline's services, and a bag in case you got airsick. Fortunately I had a window seat, am interested in geography, and wasn't flying across an ocean.

And I'll add that running an old version of a Linux kernel is itself not a problem. At least, not the biggest problem possible -- for hard-to-access hardware like a seatback rig, the basic idea is: 1) get OS stable 2) never, ever even consider upgrading again. It's simply not worth anybody's time to make sure that the "one line" security patch doesn't break everything and introduce a bunch of dependencies. Yes, they could devote IT resources to it, but it's probably very low on their priority list, well after making sure the call to rand() when it figures your ticket price works.

Was this in economy or business class? I've yet to see a decent widescreen monitor in economy before so if that's the case that's something of an improvement.

It's a shame that they didn't at least try to make the system consistent and usable, seems to be often overlooked these days.

Jason: Well possibly. It depends how isolated the user network is from the seatbacks. Given that they take CC numbers for shopping etc., if you could trojan them, it might be a nice little earner and very hard to detect. And the network has the ability to IM out, which would be a good exit route for the stolen data.

No More NXEC: It would be wonderful if the Foundation were able to send me places business class, but sadly it's not so :-( This was economy.