Imagine this scenario, you buy a new laptop and you fire up Mozilla Firefox to check your email. “Server not found?” How can that be? You then see a friendly little bubble notifying you that there are networks available. Why doesn’t your new notebook automatically connect to your usual network?
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(Note: Caleb, this is for you. 🙂 )
With the rise of online file sharing, we’ve been introduced to a wide plethora of file formats. For pictures, you have *.gif, *.jpg, *.tif, and *.png as the major contenders. With documents, you mainly deal with *.pdf, *.doc, and *.rtf. However with video, you face several formats competing in compression, quality, price, speed, and compatibility factors.
It’s hard to even begin naming the top 5 video formats without assistance! You’ve got Real Media *.rm, MPEG4-wrapped *.avi, MPEG2 *.vob, Windows Media *.wmv, Flash *.flv, and Apple *.mov. AVI alone branches into several subgroup formats since it is a wrapped format extension! Often, people just want an ideal, common format that works with most software, compresses with a high ratio, looks decent, and costs nothing. (Sigh) If only there is such a format!
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Floppy drives are a thing of the past and CD drives seem to be on their way out as well. USB flash drives and higher definition optical disks have replaced them. Today, newer portable data technologies appear faster than ever to satisfy the insatiable cutting edge appetite.
I remember when floppy disks were phasing out in the late 1990s. My friend showed me his new Apple MacBook and how it was so advanced that Apple didn’t even install a floppy disk drive. With the obsoleteness of floppy disks and CDs, how then do we boot our computers nowadays? What if the Windows partition on one of my systems has a freak accident and my partition managing software is on a floppy disk. Well, I could do one of several options.
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