Ah, so it displays an estimated time to completion, I had a GE washer that did that, it was based off of the time it took todo previous loads of the size & temp, nice feature, except that washer kept blowing main boards
I was going to say that Tony apparently never owned GE appliances when he wrote this

There are tons of devices that would benefit from being web-enabled, if only the people who made those devices could write decent software. There was always a lot of talk about web-enabled appliances, but it turns out most of the appliance manufacturers are only good at making reliable appliances.
I had a friend with a GE refrigerator that must've had the mainboard replaced half a dozen times, it took two after the warranty period expired before he just got a new fridge.