[lug] NIC Speed

[Bear Giles]

> Seriously, there may be some marginal difference in max throughput and/or CPU
> usage.  But in a day and age when your 100Mb NIC has a 1GHz proc on one side
> and an internet connection measured in kbps on the other it hardly matters in
> most cases.
 
A lot of us are running older hardware.  Most of my systems are still
around 200 MHz, and as I mentioned earlier my cable modem can see speeds
as high as 1 Mbps (to say nothing of my internal 100 Mbps network).
You can't really handwave that everyone is running 1GHz processes but
still limited to dialup connections.

I wish CompUSA et al would carry the crypto-NIC cards.  These are cards
with hardware support for IPsec (and variants), and while they're more
expensive than a commodity NICs they also let you set up secure channels
with minimal effort.

But I guess we'll never see that - you don't need IPsec if you're just
surfing at home.... and some ISPes actually have ToS that explicitly
prohibit the use of VPNs.  I guess they're still stuck in the 50s,
when nobody worked from home.

Bear