Introducing Windows 11

Written By Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows + Devices
published June 24, 2021 

At a time when the PC is playing a more central role in our lives, Windows 11 is designed to bring you closer to what you love.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH WINDOWS 11 VIDEO

Windows has always existed to be a stage for the world’s innovation. It’s been the backbone of global businesses and where scrappy startups became household names. The web was born and grew up on Windows. It’s the place where many of us wrote our first email, played our first PC game and wrote our first line of code. Windows is the place people go to create, to connect, to learn and to achieve – a platform over a billion people today rely on.

The responsibility of designing for that many people is one we don’t take lightly. The past 18 months brought an incredible shift in how we used our PCs; we went from fitting the PC into our lives to trying to fit our whole lives into the PC. Our devices weren’t just where we went for meetings, classes and to get things done, but where we came to play games with friends, binge watch our favorite shows and, perhaps most meaningfully, connect with one another. In the process we found ourselves recreating the office banter, the hallway chatter, workouts, happy hours and holiday celebrations – digitally.

What was so powerful was the shift in the PC we saw and felt – from something practical and functional to something personal and emotional. This is what inspired us as we were building the next generation of Windows. To build you a place that feels familiar, where you can create, learn, play and most importantly, connect in all new ways.

Available at https://blogs.windows.com. Acceso el 8 de noviembre, 2021

Gigabit Ethernet

 In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant 1000BASE-T is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in 1999, and has replaced Fast Ethernet in wired local networks due to its considerable speed improvement over Fast Ethernet, as well as its use of cables and equipment that are widely available, economical, and similar to previous standards.

History

Ethernet was the result of research conducted at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, and later evolved into a widely implemented physical and link layer protocol. Fast Ethernet increased the speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s). Gigabit Ethernet was the next iteration, increasing the speed to 1000 Mbit/s.

• The initial standard for Gigabit Ethernet was produced by the IEEE in June 1998 as IEEE 802.3z, and required optical fiber. 802.3z is commonly referred to as 1000BASE-X, where -X refers to either -CX, -SX, -LX, or (non-standard) -ZX. (For the history behind the "X" see Fast Ethernet § Nomenclature.)
• IEEE 802.3ab, ratified in 1999, defines Gigabit Ethernet transmission over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) category 5, 5e or 6 cabling, and became known as 1000BASE-T. With the ratification of 802.3ab, Gigabit Ethernet became a desktop technology as organizations could use their existing copper cabling infrastructure.
• IEEE 802.3ah, ratified in 2004, added two more gigabit fiber standards: 1000BASE-LX10 (which was already widely implemented as vendor-specific extension) and 1000BASE-BX10. This was part of a larger group of protocols known as Ethernet in the First Mile.

Initially, Gigabit Ethernet was deployed in high-capacity backbone network links (for instance, on a high-capacity campus network). In 2000, Apple's Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 were the first mass-produced personal computers to feature the 1000BASE-T connection. It quickly became a built-in feature in many other computers.

Half-duplex gigabit links connected through repeater hubs were part of the IEEE specification, but the specification is not updated anymore and full-duplex operation with switches is used exclusively.

                                                                                               Available at https://en.wikipedia.org. Acceso el 8 de noviembre, 2021.