Phoenix Technologies, a company that has been making motherboard BIOS's for as long as I can remember has recently announced that their developing technologies that will allow you to run PC-like apps at a level deeper than the operating system. Seems like and interesting idea, and is something I've seen before but on a much smaller scale.

Obviously Mircrosoft is not amused since something like this could be developed into a product that makes their Media Centre PC model obsolete.