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Comment by organsnyder | Hacker News Reader

Ha. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I think I remember this behavior (not using the user background in safe mode) back in Windows 95.

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“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” - Robert Jordan

"And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge." - Tolkien

Unexpected diss to Robert Jordan for being a copycat.

I love both (I'm one of the few who wrestled through the entire WoT twice and enjoyed that) but your citation shows very pointedly how Jordan was often just copying LoTR.

I think they both just copied the idiom that history will repeat itself.

I'm fairly confident that Tolkein didn't write that. It's the prologue to the Fellowship of the Ring movie, and not in the text, as far as I'm aware.

So maybe Jordan is actually the one who got ripped off. Still though, pretty cliché idea, but the formulation is too close to not be influenced one way or another.

I just tried booting my Windows 10 in "Safe Mode" It, too, didn't display custom lock or desktop image in this mode.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12376/windows-10-st...

Microsoft knows what its doing.

The bummer is that they made Safe Mode about 10 times harder to get into. Last time I tried, you could not hit F8 at boot time to select safe mode. You have to either be able to boot into the OS and say boot to safe mode, or you have to do it from recovery media, which doesn't come with new PCs. I think there's also the condition that you can get to recovery mode after the PC fails to start 3 times... either way, F8 made it easy enough to tell someone how to boot into Safe Mode over the phone without all the extra steps... but I guess you gotta save that half a second of boot time.

They had a fun blog post about it back in the day: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/b8/designing-...

I guess the obvious idea of holding down the Shift or Alt keys to extend the boot time and/or bring up the boot menu was off the table?

I think there's a problem of how the keyboard works and when in the boot process it's reset. With NVMe drives, the boot processes is even faster!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12376/windows-10-st...

It's an unnecessary rigmarole to boot into safe mode without OS access, but is still possible.

Seems like it still falls under the condition that "you can get to recovery mode after the PC fails to start 3 times," as parent mentioned. Just a more explicit way of forcing the PC to fail to start.

Just yesterday I pointed out how a teal wall had a similar color to the Windows 95 background. To me, it's as iconic as the hilly Windows XP scene.

It also removed the IE thing which showed icons or some stuff like that... Wait, that was in 98.

Active Desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

Was that the feature that would occasionally replace your desktop background with an error message?

Ugh. Disabling that was always my first action on a fresh install.

What, you mean you didn’t feel the need to give up 75% of your system resources so you could have an active website as the wallpaper of your desktop?

...but hey, it allowed you to use a non-BMP image as a wallpaper! :)

And Super Metroid (1992) let you customize the controls. Firefox (2001), after about twenty years of development (more if you count its predecessor's code), won’t let you, as of the 2016 add-on API change.

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