If your SCSI array counts as "Legacy" already, you're probably better off with a SATA drive and maybe an SSD for caching/journaling, but I assume AMD's supporting PCI for a while still.
Most laptops I've seen do include an RJ45 jack, but it's connected to an Ethernet chip, not a UART, so please don't plug it into some piece of RS232 gear expecting successful connections.
Also, the pinout for RS232 support on RJ45 jacks isn't standardized (unlike the pinouts on 25-pin and 9-pin D connectors.) The most common one I encounter is Cisco's, and most other router and firewall equipment makers tend to follow that because everybody's got the 9-pin-to-Cisco-RJ45 adapters, but even then there's the question of whether you need a straight-through or rollover cable.
The VAXen also used MASSBUS, a honking fat parallel cable bus that connected disk and tape drives to the computer. It was also supported on PDP-10s and some PDP-11s. IIRC, it was about 2.2MB/s, much faster than the Unibus.
It was a 8-bit-parallel 1 MB/s bus mainly used for connecting measurement equipment together - sensors, digital oscilloscopes, etc. HP did also use it for connecting disk drives and printers to some of their early PCs. Wikipedia still remembers how it worked.
Yes, I know, my corporate IT department should be supporting something much newer than that, but they don't. So if I were being a good boy and not installing Firefox on my machine (so I can get some actual work done), or Safari and Chrome (to play around with) I'd be using it right now. I think it has CSS, but certainly not HTML5.
If the browser has to display your content, you need to hand it content in a format your user's browser can display. Use whatever language you want on the back end (as long as it's supported on the servers you'll be running on), but you need to be aware that the user isn't necessarily sitting at a desktop with a big screen and the browsers you're supporting.
He's Doing It Wrong. If your application only works when the user is using WhiffleBrowser Version 4.2.1 Patch Level 3, then it's not useful unless the user installs that exact browser. The point of developing web-based applications is that your users don't have to install and maintain *your* software on their desktops, you display your material using a common standard interface, and the user displays it the way they want, whether that's on a desktop just like yours or an iPhone or a 1080p TV screen, and whether they're using the same fonts you've got or using 36 point font because they've got vision problems.
So you need to support the browsers your user base uses, whether that's (arrrgh!) IE6 (which is still the only browser my corporate IT department supports) or Firefox (where you should be able to expect a recent version) or Safari (because almost every company has Mac users even if Corporate IT doesn't support them) or whatever, and it should work on all of those browsers.
If you really need to produce a precise image usable for printing ink marks on dead trees in a particular layout independent of printer resolution, you need to output your image in a language designed for that, which is Postscript; if you don't need to be printer-resolution-independent, you could also do PNG/JPG/etc. HTML isn't designed for that, it's designed for letting the user present the information content any way they want to.
Ah - you're describing British libel law, which lets even non-British people sue other non-British people. Well, your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries....
In this case, they appear to have initially responded to the case, for reasons that amount to "mistake", and couldn't get themselves out of it again. Linford probably isn't personally liable even if he travels to the US for some reason.
No, they botched things at first, then tried to argue jurisdiction. Which was too bad, given that e360 really were slimy spammers, and didn't get spanked by the court.
The problem was that they didn't just say "no thanks, not your jurisdiction, not our problem" - they did something much more complicated, along the lines of saying "These guys really are spammers, you should find for us" and *then* saying "wait, we're British, you don't have jurisdiction", and the court decided that their first actions gave it jurisdiction.
It's also somewhat ironic that a British company is getting into this kind of trouble, given the amazingly broad reach of British libel law.
There have been other RBLs who were very aggressive - SORBS comes to mind - but that's not Spamhaus's approach. They run a much cleaner operation, going for hard evidence of the few big spam-sources, with very very low false positives, and they don't go blacklisting whole ISPs unless they're really in the spam-support business. The tradeoff, of course, is that there's more spam that they miss, but that's a job for SpamAssassin with other RBLs as extra weight. It's very straightforward to get off their list, unless you belong there, which basically everybody on it does.
From the vendor's/provider's perspective, if they're going to spend a lot of money to upgrade their infrastructure, their motivation is to get their existing customers to spend a lot more money, or to steal customers from the other providers - either way there needs to be something cool to do with the bandwidth to get them to move. If the killer app they're really selling is television, there are typically two satellite TV providers in addition to the telco and cable ISPs, but television is IMHO still boring.
For keeping in touch with family, my family mostly uses email (and phones), though my sisters sometimes do video conferencing, which is well under 1Mbps. The amount of bandwidth you need to work from home may vary - you need to be able to experience what people viewing your site will experience, plus upload any content, monitor servers, etc., so that's going to depend a lot on whether your site does video or just text and images. VPNs don't burn a lot of extra bandwidth, and you could always run a remote-screen app like VNC or Citrix to a server at the office for some things.
Other than greed, which I'm not going to argue about (:-), ISPs really really don't want everybody downloading individual copies of TV shows - they want to be able to multicast the channels of TV to your local central office or cable head-end and fan out from there, so they can use 1-2 Gbps to get a few hundred channels as opposed to hundreds of times that much bandwidth.
If you're killing your upstream, you need a router that's better at prioritizing the different traffic streams so you don't do that - or at least you need to limit the upstream bandwidth from your DVD uploading application so it doesn't choke everybody else.
You must have one of those special iPads, then - the ones Steve Jobs is selling have a Dock Connector Port, though you can hang a cable with a USB connector off of that, or plug into a dock. It's not part of the tablet itself, it's an external device, so it's annoying at best if you're trying to connect things to a tablet as opposed to a desktop-mounted thing. Also, I can't tell from the documentation how many of those things you can use simultaneously - obviously you can't use the Dock-to-VGA cable and the Dock-to-USB cable at the same time, but if you've got the Dock or Keyboard Dock, can you use both the VGA and the USB at once? It doesn't look like it.
With USB, if the device only has one port (boring), you can hang a powered hub off it to support keyboard, mouse, Ethernet adapter, etc, but AFAIK there's no equivalent fanout for Dock ports. So your iPad battery had better be charged up before you use it with an external screen, and you'd better have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and Wifi.
It's one thing for Apple to try to use proprietary connectors to keep you locked in to Apple's world. But it's another thing entirely to be Not User Friendly as a result, or to be Ugly and Klunky instead of Insanely Cool-Looking.
IIRC, California passed an anti-animal-cruelty referendum, but it's got a couple of years to phase in.
Most eggs are non-fertile; the main people selling fertile eggs are selling them to random health-fooders, or else they're selling them because it's easier not to check whether your free-range hens have had access to a rooster.
And they're all right there in the Valley, even though they're building the stuff in China or Malaysia. You'll need a few rocket scientists and a bunch of managers, but you're going to farm out most of the construction and setup work and have a smaller staff for ongoing hands-on operations.
Sacramento's two hours away if you avoid rush hour, 1ms by fiber, doesn't have earthquakes, and if you stay out of the flood zones it's pretty safe, and real estate's less outrageously priced. So your engineers and suppliers can be in Silicon Valley, but still go into the data center when you need them to, and your infrastructure's more reliable as long as you consult with a bunch of fiber providers first.
Santa Clara's city council has been pushing heavily to build a ballpark to steal teams from San Francisco and maybe Oakland, and it's looking like the voters will approve it this fall. They're not a big enough town to afford the few hundred million dollars of city money it'll take, so it's going to get squeezed out of something.
PLATO terminals were graphical orange-plasma-screen things, with the best interactive multiplayer Star Trek game *ever* (well, at least for 70s versions of "ever"), and an application called "notesfiles" that was a lot like Usenet or BBSs later became. My university had a few PLATO terminals, and I never had an "author account", so my access was read-only, but it was cool stuff.
The reason to have high bandwidth is to do cool stuff with it. 14kbps was fine for email, then 384 for average web, then 1.5M for Napster and gaming, 3 Mbps seems to be plenty to run YouTube and BitTorrent.
The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.
So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting.
You're shocked that one of the first places in the US to get broadband internet has people who still have slow connections, in a sprawling semi-mountainous geography where the cable TV networks were built a town at a time rather than all at once by a monopoly and the population's grown substantially since the telco offices were built? If you want to buy a fast cable modem connection in most of the flat parts of Silicon Valley, you can, and if you want to buy AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block service that's also pretty fast.
I'm still using 3 Mbps DSL, because it's fast enough for YouTube and BitTorrent, I've got more television than I need already, and the cable modem service won't give me a static IP address to run a home web server (though they're starting to be the cutting edge for IPv6.)
Sure, your cable modem company is implementing download caps and harassing you for running a server at home because of bad PR problems they had 15 years ago, but if they're using modern equipment they're technically faster than that, and either the Verizon FIOS FFTH or AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block technologies get you faster as well. The problem is that anything other than telco ADSL is trying to sell you television (since in most places, DSL is good enough to watch YouTube), and they haven't found any more interesting business model to attract customers.
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If your SCSI array counts as "Legacy" already, you're probably better off with a SATA drive and maybe an SSD for caching/journaling, but I assume AMD's supporting PCI for a while still.
Most laptops I've seen do include an RJ45 jack, but it's connected to an Ethernet chip, not a UART, so please don't plug it into some piece of RS232 gear expecting successful connections.
Also, the pinout for RS232 support on RJ45 jacks isn't standardized (unlike the pinouts on 25-pin and 9-pin D connectors.) The most common one I encounter is Cisco's, and most other router and firewall equipment makers tend to follow that because everybody's got the 9-pin-to-Cisco-RJ45 adapters, but even then there's the question of whether you need a straight-through or rollover cable.
The VAXen also used MASSBUS, a honking fat parallel cable bus that connected disk and tape drives to the computer. It was also supported on PDP-10s and some PDP-11s. IIRC, it was about 2.2MB/s, much faster than the Unibus.
It was a 8-bit-parallel 1 MB/s bus mainly used for connecting measurement equipment together - sensors, digital oscilloscopes, etc. HP did also use it for connecting disk drives and printers to some of their early PCs. Wikipedia still remembers how it worked.
Yes, I know, my corporate IT department should be supporting something much newer than that, but they don't. So if I were being a good boy and not installing Firefox on my machine (so I can get some actual work done), or Safari and Chrome (to play around with) I'd be using it right now. I think it has CSS, but certainly not HTML5.
If the browser has to display your content, you need to hand it content in a format your user's browser can display. Use whatever language you want on the back end (as long as it's supported on the servers you'll be running on), but you need to be aware that the user isn't necessarily sitting at a desktop with a big screen and the browsers you're supporting.
He's Doing It Wrong. If your application only works when the user is using WhiffleBrowser Version 4.2.1 Patch Level 3, then it's not useful unless the user installs that exact browser. The point of developing web-based applications is that your users don't have to install and maintain *your* software on their desktops, you display your material using a common standard interface, and the user displays it the way they want, whether that's on a desktop just like yours or an iPhone or a 1080p TV screen, and whether they're using the same fonts you've got or using 36 point font because they've got vision problems.
So you need to support the browsers your user base uses, whether that's (arrrgh!) IE6 (which is still the only browser my corporate IT department supports) or Firefox (where you should be able to expect a recent version) or Safari (because almost every company has Mac users even if Corporate IT doesn't support them) or whatever, and it should work on all of those browsers.
If you really need to produce a precise image usable for printing ink marks on dead trees in a particular layout independent of printer resolution, you need to output your image in a language designed for that, which is Postscript; if you don't need to be printer-resolution-independent, you could also do PNG/JPG/etc. HTML isn't designed for that, it's designed for letting the user present the information content any way they want to.
Ah - you're describing British libel law, which lets even non-British people sue other non-British people. Well, your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries....
In this case, they appear to have initially responded to the case, for reasons that amount to "mistake", and couldn't get themselves out of it again. Linford probably isn't personally liable even if he travels to the US for some reason.
No, they botched things at first, then tried to argue jurisdiction. Which was too bad, given that e360 really were slimy spammers, and didn't get spanked by the court.
The problem was that they didn't just say "no thanks, not your jurisdiction, not our problem" - they did something much more complicated, along the lines of saying "These guys really are spammers, you should find for us" and *then* saying "wait, we're British, you don't have jurisdiction", and the court decided that their first actions gave it jurisdiction.
It's also somewhat ironic that a British company is getting into this kind of trouble, given the amazingly broad reach of British libel law.
There have been other RBLs who were very aggressive - SORBS comes to mind - but that's not Spamhaus's approach. They run a much cleaner operation, going for hard evidence of the few big spam-sources, with very very low false positives, and they don't go blacklisting whole ISPs unless they're really in the spam-support business. The tradeoff, of course, is that there's more spam that they miss, but that's a job for SpamAssassin with other RBLs as extra weight. It's very straightforward to get off their list, unless you belong there, which basically everybody on it does.
From the vendor's/provider's perspective, if they're going to spend a lot of money to upgrade their infrastructure, their motivation is to get their existing customers to spend a lot more money, or to steal customers from the other providers - either way there needs to be something cool to do with the bandwidth to get them to move. If the killer app they're really selling is television, there are typically two satellite TV providers in addition to the telco and cable ISPs, but television is IMHO still boring.
For keeping in touch with family, my family mostly uses email (and phones), though my sisters sometimes do video conferencing, which is well under 1Mbps. The amount of bandwidth you need to work from home may vary - you need to be able to experience what people viewing your site will experience, plus upload any content, monitor servers, etc., so that's going to depend a lot on whether your site does video or just text and images. VPNs don't burn a lot of extra bandwidth, and you could always run a remote-screen app like VNC or Citrix to a server at the office for some things.
Other than greed, which I'm not going to argue about (:-), ISPs really really don't want everybody downloading individual copies of TV shows - they want to be able to multicast the channels of TV to your local central office or cable head-end and fan out from there, so they can use 1-2 Gbps to get a few hundred channels as opposed to hundreds of times that much bandwidth.
If you're killing your upstream, you need a router that's better at prioritizing the different traffic streams so you don't do that - or at least you need to limit the upstream bandwidth from your DVD uploading application so it doesn't choke everybody else.
You must have one of those special iPads, then - the ones Steve Jobs is selling have a Dock Connector Port, though you can hang a cable with a USB connector off of that, or plug into a dock. It's not part of the tablet itself, it's an external device, so it's annoying at best if you're trying to connect things to a tablet as opposed to a desktop-mounted thing. Also, I can't tell from the documentation how many of those things you can use simultaneously - obviously you can't use the Dock-to-VGA cable and the Dock-to-USB cable at the same time, but if you've got the Dock or Keyboard Dock, can you use both the VGA and the USB at once? It doesn't look like it.
With USB, if the device only has one port (boring), you can hang a powered hub off it to support keyboard, mouse, Ethernet adapter, etc, but AFAIK there's no equivalent fanout for Dock ports. So your iPad battery had better be charged up before you use it with an external screen, and you'd better have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and Wifi.
It's one thing for Apple to try to use proprietary connectors to keep you locked in to Apple's world. But it's another thing entirely to be Not User Friendly as a result, or to be Ugly and Klunky instead of Insanely Cool-Looking.
IIRC, California passed an anti-animal-cruelty referendum, but it's got a couple of years to phase in.
Most eggs are non-fertile; the main people selling fertile eggs are selling them to random health-fooders, or else they're selling them because it's easier not to check whether your free-range hens have had access to a rooster.
Really now, there's really just Sean Connery isn't there? Or at least I hope you're not counting Roger Moore....
And they're all right there in the Valley, even though they're building the stuff in China or Malaysia. You'll need a few rocket scientists and a bunch of managers, but you're going to farm out most of the construction and setup work and have a smaller staff for ongoing hands-on operations.
Sacramento's two hours away if you avoid rush hour, 1ms by fiber, doesn't have earthquakes, and if you stay out of the flood zones it's pretty safe, and real estate's less outrageously priced. So your engineers and suppliers can be in Silicon Valley, but still go into the data center when you need them to, and your infrastructure's more reliable as long as you consult with a bunch of fiber providers first.
Santa Clara's city council has been pushing heavily to build a ballpark to steal teams from San Francisco and maybe Oakland, and it's looking like the voters will approve it this fall. They're not a big enough town to afford the few hundred million dollars of city money it'll take, so it's going to get squeezed out of something.
PLATO terminals were graphical orange-plasma-screen things, with the best interactive multiplayer Star Trek game *ever* (well, at least for 70s versions of "ever"), and an application called "notesfiles" that was a lot like Usenet or BBSs later became. My university had a few PLATO terminals, and I never had an "author account", so my access was read-only, but it was cool stuff.
Web 3.0 is still vaporware.
The reason to have high bandwidth is to do cool stuff with it. 14kbps was fine for email, then 384 for average web, then 1.5M for Napster and gaming, 3 Mbps seems to be plenty to run YouTube and BitTorrent.
The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.
So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting.
You're shocked that one of the first places in the US to get broadband internet has people who still have slow connections, in a sprawling semi-mountainous geography where the cable TV networks were built a town at a time rather than all at once by a monopoly and the population's grown substantially since the telco offices were built? If you want to buy a fast cable modem connection in most of the flat parts of Silicon Valley, you can, and if you want to buy AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block service that's also pretty fast.
I'm still using 3 Mbps DSL, because it's fast enough for YouTube and BitTorrent, I've got more television than I need already, and the cable modem service won't give me a static IP address to run a home web server (though they're starting to be the cutting edge for IPv6.)
Sure, your cable modem company is implementing download caps and harassing you for running a server at home because of bad PR problems they had 15 years ago, but if they're using modern equipment they're technically faster than that, and either the Verizon FIOS FFTH or AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block technologies get you faster as well. The problem is that anything other than telco ADSL is trying to sell you television (since in most places, DSL is good enough to watch YouTube), and they haven't found any more interesting business model to attract customers.