Atre was far from your typical sweetheart tech magnate.

Uh. Is there actually any such thing? Every tech bigwig or, indeed, any high level business person in general I’ve ever had exposure to has been a monumental dickhead. Bar none, and without exception.

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.

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.

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.

https://massgrave.dev/

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.

There was one in the original Legend of Zelda, too.

“Apparently there’s never the money to do it right, but somehow there’s always the money to do it twice.”

Management never likes to have this brought to their attention, especially in a Told You So tone of voice. One thinks if this bothered pointy-haired types so much, maybe they could learn from their mistakes once in a while.

The micromirror arrays are the wildest of the bunch to me. That is just such a prima facie batshit insane idea and it’s astonishing that it actually works.

“Yeah, we need to be able to individually display and shut off these pixels, so we’re going to go ahead and design a chip with 6,220,800 tiny mirrors that physically tilt when you poke them with electricity. Rather than, I don’t know, literally any other solution that presents itself.”

I miss my N900 every day.

I don’t know, but I find myself mentioning it often enough I feel like somebody ought to be paying me for it.

This already exists, and it doesn’t cost $60. What you want is the Windows 10 IoT LTSC Edition.

https://massgrave.dev/.

(Brought to you by Carl’s, Jr.)

I always ignore the downvotes. I am both waterpoof and invincible!

It’s satire, dude.

Obviously Apple is previewing their next upcoming invention: After dropping physical buttons and the headphone jack, the iPhone 18 will remove Wi-Fi support. Apple will call themselves “corageous” and make up a laundry list of reasons why we don’t need it. (But obviously, it’ll actually be because they are in cahoots with all the cell carriers who want to charge you for data 100% of the time.)

The iPhone 19 will drop the charging port, and the iPhone 20 won’t have a screen. It’ll retail for $1899, and millions of people will buy it anyway.

Yes, but the other poster is correct with the other half of the argument. Right now at this very moment in history, appliances are the cheapest adjusted for the median household income than they’ve ever been. Why? Because that’s what consumers demand. The manufacturer knows full well they can’t make a durable machine at the price point consumers are willing to pay, but it’s okay for them because they also know consumers will happily buy another one in 5 years.

Don’t like it? Buy a Speed Queen washer or dryer.

“But there’s no way in hell I’m paying $1449 just for a damn for a washing machine!!!”

Yeah, my point exactly. And theirs, too.

Guess what, my dudes and dudettes: That oldschool classic Kenmore or whatever-the-hell washer your parents had when you were growing up that’s still trucking? Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what it would cost in today’s money, give or take a couple of percent.

(I sourced that Sears pricing by stealing it from here, by the way. The management apologizes deeply in advance if you wind up pissing away your entire afternoon going all nostalgic over the contents of that link.)

And if you need a full sized machine from either Miele or Bosch, you get to employ the GTFO option early since neither of them make one.

And for the ones that do, you can just go sit in your car. No need to stand there staring at the stupid thing for half an hour.