

Wait until you find out what Jim Henson was up to before he got real famous.
Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.


Wait until you find out what Jim Henson was up to before he got real famous.


Active Desktop. That actually started with Windows 98, or at least that’s when it came bundled with. You had to install it on purpose on Windows 95 and NT4.
You could do some interesting tricks with this if you wrote your own local content for it. Different wallpaper images on different monitors, interactive wallpaper effects, and so forth. I have no idea what its actual intended use case was nor what anyone at Microsoft was smoking when they made this available by default. Parking anything on there that accessed external web content always struck me as rather a bad idea.


Yeah, and it’s just dumb terminals with extra steps.


I am predicting at some point Windows itself will become a business only product and cease to be marketed to consumers, and the home user platform will be some kind of live service bullshit probably served in a browser. Basically the Chromebook idea, but Microsoft.
All you need is a Vespa that’s been hastily reassembled into a tri-ream to explore it with!


Yes. And using Rufus to create your install media, you can even configure it to create a local account for you so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole yourself.
Actually, I wonder if that still works with an image of the new current Win11 releases where the local account functionality has been “removed.” I haven’t tried it. Someone will probably chime in.


How about seven instead, and for free?


This is how hardware accelerated TV tuners worked back in the day, and probably also MPEG cards during their brief flash in the pan when they were necessary to play MPEG encoded video before processors were powerful enough to do it in software (and/or had various extensions added to them to assist, like MMX and SSE, etc., etc.).
I had an ATI TV Wonder card back in those dark days, and its mask color was hot magenta: RGB(255,0,255). Any pixels in your framebuffer of that color would be overwritten with TV output, although the player that came with the card already seemed to broadly know approximately where its output should be located so you couldn’t relocate the video on your screen by doing this. If you full screened the player and then minimized it, though, you could color in any pixels on your display with e.g. Paint and they’d magically become little slices of broadcast television.
It already does. Samsung’s Tizen OS these things run is Linux based, albeit at this point broadly in the same sense that Android is.