Sign of amazing technological change

Lergnom
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 15:36:15 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.