Rob at BBG wrote an excellent little list post describing changes to the tech industry that happened in the past five years. Written as a letter to someone who has been in hypersleep for the last half-decade, Rob points out that Palm is climbing a magical fantasy rainbow made of Linux, piracy is mainstream, and that the much vaunted UMD format is now essentially dead.

6. Netbooks
Those cheap, nasty subnotebooks that HP and NEC occasionally try and flog to vertical markets are now the hottest thing on Earth. They call them “Netbooks” now. Just about everyone makes one except Apple and Sony. For while, they tried to rebadge Handheld PCs as “Ultramobile PCs,” ruining their battery life by having them run full-scale operating systems, but no-one fell for it.