A bank I did some consulting work for had a very effective cultural rule to force people to lock their machines when they left their desks: if you find an unlocked machine, pull up the email client and send a message to everyone: "today's my birthday, drinks on me after work!" (other NSFW messages left to the readers imagination.)
Apparently, very few people left their machines unlocked more than once...
- Remember 8250 UART serial ports? Long dead.
Maybe 8250 chips have been superseded, but 8250 compatible ports continue to be available on many mainboards. And there's always USB adapters. And given how cheap a serial port is to implement, I'm sure we will continue to see it for at least service access to many devices going forward.
- Remember 2400bps modems? Long dead. How about accoustic couplers?
Again, V.22bis only modems are not sold anymore, but practically any modem that support V.92 will also support V.22 (and probably Bell 212 and even Bell 103 modes). And accoustic couplers do the same thing, but were motivated mostly by the insistence of Bell that you couldn't hook up your own equipment to the phone line directly. Until high-speed links get a better coverage, people in the boondocks will continue to rely on modems to get online.
- We had pensioned CGA and EGA - and gone for VGA by 1993. SVGA came soon afterwards.
But the VGA signal standard (plug, levels, etc.) has continued to work, and even fancy new 24" 1920x1200 monitors will display a 640x480@60Hz signal, just because creaky old BIOSes still start up with this or other equally outdated video modes.
The use of TWT in satellites are recent, as in 25-30 years ago.
Huh?! Traveling-wave tube:
On July 10, 1962, the first communications satellite, Telstar 1, was launched with a 2 W, 4 GHz RCA-designed TWT transponder used for transmitting RF signals back to the earth. Syncom 2, the first synchronous satellite (Syncom 1 did not reach its final orbit), launched on July 26, 1963 with two 2 W, 1850 MHz Hughes-designed TWT transponders (one active and one spare).
This is the experience YouTube can't deliver.
They could if they wanted to. I haven't looked at their bitrates recently, but I'm suspecting they're in the 800kbit/s range. You can get decent quality out of h.264 for 720p30 at around 4 Mbit/s. That's less than an order of magnitude, and Flash can play back videos at that rate on many machines, including Atom-based ones.
My personal prediction is that we'll habve full-blown "Internet TV stations" in less than five years. Think Hulu or Netflix, just with Internet-only distribution of original programming.
Of course the main issue are the rights holders and their inability to untangle the legal mess that are the distribution agreements. But like the music industry, they have no chance but to adapt.
Hey Microsoft, where's my laptop? Could I have one of these? I hear it runs Windows."Someone at Microsoft has lost their minds! Well first Microsoft gives bloggers laptops with Vista loaded on it for review and they are told they can do whatever they want with the laptop as in keep it, give it away when they were done with the review. But shockingly today Microsoft has asked that the laptops be returned after the people get done doing the reviews.
"Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'" -- Comedian Jay Leno
