Or, in plain English, “Windows XP Service Pack 2 has been Released To Manufacturing”.

Expect the bits to show up in your auto-update soon - and if you haven't already turned on auto-update, now is a great time to do so!

Note that I don't think we're saying how soon they'll show up for anyone, because one of the nifty features about auto-update is that updates can be “revealed” to only as many customers as we've actually got the bandwidth to handle. A bit of math reveals why: taking a guess at 100 MBytes for a typical SP2 download, and 100 million consumers using auto-update, gives us 8 * (100 * 106) * (100 * 106) = 80 * 1015 bits.

That's a bandwidth-hoggin', fat-pipe-chokin' 80 petabits of SP2 goodness going out from auto-update.

Update: Michael Swanson has posted a full time-line of when the bits go where:

8/6  Release to manufacturing
8/9  Release to Microsoft Download Center (network installation package)
8/9  Release to MSDN subscription site (CD ISO image)
8/10  Release to Automatic Updates (for machines running pre-release versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2 only)
8/16  Release to Automatic Updates (for machines NOT running pre-releases versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2)
8/16  Release to Software Update Services