Yes but not just infrastructure to the home: having suffered as little as 300kbit/s peak-rate speeds out of an 8Mbit/s line from BT I'd like them to sort out capacity to the exchange before showboating ever faster technologies.
That was in a city centre - there are some exchanges in the UK which have been oversubscribed continuously since ADSL switch on nearly 10 years ago.

I did too. In 2003.

Not my experience.

That may apply to the 1st year of some courses, but is not the definition of a B.Sc.

I used ipac-ng http://ipac-ng.sourceforge.net/ for many years, until its lack of maintenance caused it drop significantly behind newer Linux kernels. sigh. Worked brilliantly when it did work though.

It means running all data through a linux box, but this is a given for me as I always have a firewall box for iptables, so I can split off my public IPs and home network. But all a bit much for a home ADSL connection really.

Everyone else has already covered everything I can think of, but this is my current 'method':

* Everything older than about 6 years is contained within a few box files. All held together, just ordered by when it was received. The oldest papers would be 15 years old.
* Since then everything is sorted into a few (er, 12?) small "piles" - some in boxes, some in folders, some piled on shelves. I know where something should be and can usually guess at the depth.
* As time goes on, I gradually makes new piles which are more organised but never go back through old documents to re-sort them. I definitely receive more paper per year as time goes on, but thankfully e-invoicing is starting to take a bite out of that.
* Unfortunately I hoard papers so these piles will grow in number forever, though I have half a plan to burn piles once they get to 10 years old.
* I scan stuff that is really important or that I might need at any time (I'm not always at home, but I nearly do always have Internet).
* Generally, I very rarely need to look at a paper copy of something. If it means something, the information has already been extracted into GnuCash, Jira, Confluence (highly, *highly* recommended even just for home use) or a text file.

ADSL2 probably won't change that - it's likely due to oversubscription at the exchange. What's your speed like at 3am?

I have a beautiful ADSL Max connection and can get 7.1MBit/s - the theoretical maximum - but only in the early morning, or at any time when the students leave (I'm in a university town). Around 7pm it drops to 1MBits/s or less. It's been this way for the year and half that I've lived here. BT won't do anything because it's usual over the ADSL Max minimum guaranteed speed, which is just 600KBit/s!

At another property a few miles down the road I can download all day at the maximum speed with not a single blip or wobble, but it is on a different exchange.

I have a similar thing - I got hold of a Dell 130T 32-tape/4-drive library robot (DLT IV, 35GB per tape) many years ago.

Negative: small capacity - even all 32 tapes is only 1.1TB and part of the idea is to rotate the tapes.
Negative: it's a bloody 7U rackmount unit - something like 200x bigger than a 3TB 3.5" HD.
Negative: HV-LVD SCSI controllers are not all that easy to pick up now.
Negative: very slow, had to run for a long time.
Negative: uses more power than all my home computers.
Negative: sounds as if it runs on jet engines.
Negative: heavy even when unloaded: two can just about move it but really a three man job.

Positive: really good backups.
Positive: I own a goddamn robot arm, how cool is that!

One report of some internal untidiness! One!

I've had a couple of MBPs pass through my hands in the last year (one new and one refurb, zero defects) - both came fully charged which I thought was a nice touch.

That's not my experience with the unibody machines. Thermals on the 2009 MBP 15" are really good - yes, full CPU will get the fans up to 6200RPM but I'm really very impressed overall. It takes a lot to get them to spin up and even then they're nice and quiet considering the RPM they're doing.

Contrast that with the plastic bodied ~2007 MacBook - I found that the single fan would spin up high at the slightest provocation and be louder than the two in the MBP for the same RPM.

Because it's yet another link advert for "Network world"

I too was surprised to click the link in a story about iFixit's teardown and find myself on that god-awful website again - and I try my best to avoiding clicking through to them!

I can understand the need to link to websites that can withstand the slashdot effect but these days slashdot itself is really suffering from the quality of story abstracts and the continual linking to the same awful blogs, no doubt paid adverts.

Agree. I started using Spotify to have music to listen to in work, without having to spend time choosing music to go on my iPhone / iPod, find I'm not in the mood for anything I've synced, or the effort of streaming from my home network. Over time I've been using it more and more even to listen to music at home which I already have as MP3.

I've still bought a few of my favourite tracks and albums (through iTunes) but my 14 year old MP3 collection running to hundreds of GB has hardly been touched for a while now. Of course, my CDs just sit taking up space on shelves. I've considered eBaying the lot - which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

As for the format question, I'm not really a fan of flac. I've not really been able to hear the different between it and good quality MP3, and while disk space is cheap it's not free - especially if you want to run RAID and have reliable backups. On top of that, I got sucked into the iTunes world (life is honestly so much better) and iTunes won't play flac.

Sorry, I see what you're getting at. I'm not English so forgive the semantic interpretation I intended for the word 'marvel'.

I meant of course to compare it to current and recent laptop computers, not monumental construction in limestone.

For example, to compare to something new from another manufacturer like http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Motorola-Xoom-Teardown/4989/1

Really? I only opened a MacBook for the first time a couple of months ago. It was a revelation.

But not in this case.

Yes, iFixIt have found problems which should not exist, but there are only two internal, inconsequential assembly errors in an absolute engineering marvel which is cranked out in massive numbers.

These machines are generations ahead of the PowerBooks in terms of sophistication and precision engineering.

Two internal marks that look tiny even in macro photographs! Oh my, we'd better put in a link to Computer World!

Wait, make that two!

These ill researched, amateur summarisations make me fucking sick.