I don't believe it was through the entire OS but GoBe Productive, an office application, was built in that way. Shift from the word processor to the spreadsheet using tabs. It was ported to Windows and is still for sale.

...soon to become a supernova...

When they say "soon" is that "soon" in cosmic terms, like say within 10,000 years, or "soon" as within my lifetime?

I've had extensive experience with aiming a TV camera at a TV set using a different video standard. That's how we used to convert video from PAL to NTSC back in the 80s. There were decent quality converters, but they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Presumably NASA used a very good camera to do this conversion, but the Vidicon/Newvicon/Plumbicon cameras of the time had a lot of lag which would show up as blurring and having the adjust the iris of the scanning camera would dramatically limit the dynamic range of the broadcast image. All of which is visible on the moon landing footage as seen.

It sounds like Rutan has found a new use for the Proteus plane he built for Raytheon for the "Angel Halo" system to supply high-speed, low latency bandwidth for a metropolitan area by flying in circles at 60,000 feet. From the Scaled Composites web page about it:

Proteus is a twin turbofan high altitude multi mission aircraft powered by Williams International FJ44-2E engines. It is designed to carry payloads in the 2000-pound class to altitudes above 60,000 feet and remain on station up to 14 hours.

The original plan proposed 3 aircraft on 8 hour shifts. There would be a large AWACS style dish underneath (payload up to one ton) with the jet engines supplying 14 KVA of electricity.

Sounds like they may still deploy the system, with a secondary revenue stream with a camera. The question for Slashdot readers is: would you be so freaked out if the city was going to use the same plane to supply free gigibit wireless?

The Junior High School I attended in the 1970s (Bingham Junior High in Kansas City, MO) had "modular scheduling" in 20 minute increments, some classes were 20 minutes, some 60 minutes...and some 40 minutes.

...when he's emulated a Connection Machine.

I could give a damn about a 3D game controller. But I would very much like to see cheap 3D input devices for animation and motion capture. Perhaps we'll first see this new Wii remote retrofitted to 3D software like Max. Can't happen soon enough!