<p>I’m downloading Apple’s OS X Mavericks in the background over my wireless network. The expected time to completion is under an hour, though it varies as conditions change. </p>
<p>The file is 5.29 GB. That’s not a typo. A few years ago, a file of 100 MB was large and 400 or 600 MB is still big.</p>
<p>But 5.29 GB? For all those Apple users? This is freaking amazing. Think of a) the amount of server space and processing power it’s taking on Apple’s end to deliver all these massive files in bits - not all at one time but to each computer as it goes - and b) the amount of internet throughput they are commanding and pulling to do this. </p>
<p>On the flip side, I read yesterday in a blog post on The Economist by Glenn Fleishman that Denial of Service attacks have also scaled up and may now approach 200 Gps - that’s also not a typo - with 160 million packets per second - not a typo. About 18 months ago, the biggest might be 60 Gps.</p>
<p>BTW, if you upgrade, the only issue I’ve found is when Mail rebuilt its database it blanked on some passwords and I had to copy them. (Opened Keychain Access, found the ones, copied and pasted.) And it enabled an account - a pop account - which I’ve disabled in favor of an imap account. </p>
<p>The install process on the machine took about 35 minutes. It took about the same time to download the entire file. Same on the other house computer. Weirdly fast.</p>
<p>It’s neat: they have Maps as a separate app and iBooks. The fonts render better. Lots of neat stuff. Free.</p>
<p>You should see when new big games get put out on Steam. A few of them have made 5 GB seem reasonable in size. Often times each patch (at times weekly) will eclipse 1 GB. It blows my mind I’m able to download at over 1 MB/sec without the use of torrents. It’s amazing you can now expect downloads faster than 1 3.5" floppy a second. Heck, you can’t even fit most of the songs you’d download off of iTunes nowadays on a single floppy.</p>
<p>It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the future as many other first world nations invest in upgrading their telecom infrastructure while our industry fights tooth and nail saying consumers aren’t interested in cheaper, faster, more reliable internet.</p>
<p>A few years ago, you had to worry about how to do this but now S3, etc. are making it so much easier. When I was dealing with an integration of a website issue, we had to worry about each content provider’s ISP reliability and all the latency inherent in various connections. Now, companies that provide video to places like ESPN are working out how to mirror the master in minutes and then seconds - and then shorter time periods - when before it was weeks or days before changes could sensibly propagate. With S3 and other cloud services, they can deploy servers where demand is project for a single event like a big game - or the Olympics. Remember when the first Olympics was on the net? Now the entire thing could be done with nary a glitch.</p>