Storm Control

Data Center switch latencies well below 3us. And still the OS network stack takes five times that much to process a packet.

This study from Stanford’s Stephen M. Rumble, Diego Ongaro, Ryan Stutsman, Mendel Rosenblum, and John K. Ousterhout summarizes the need to re-engineer operating systems in order to take advantage of ultra-low latencies. Fiber optics (that introduce 5ns/m of latency) and next-gen NIC silicon integrated into the CPU core will reduce the latency that other components introduce in the total calculation… but the OS is lagging behind, probably due to a lack of need for development in this area.

Now there is a need to improve in this area. Developers, we’re looking right at you.

Windows 8 will not have Flash support.

2011 web data: 60% of WiFi users are on Apple devices

Meraki has published their latest report on usage of the web by WiFi devices, and Apple seems to be taking the majority of the traffic. Other highlights:

• iPad traffic is 400% higher than the average WiFi device.
• The iPhone alone is almost one third of all WiFi traffic.
• Apple iOS traffic is 4.3 times that of Android traffic.
• Android grows from 1% in 2010 to 11% in 2011.
• Windows traffic drops from 43% to 23%, twenty points in one year.
• Mobile platforms now represent more traffic than PCs and Macs. 

OS X + iOS’ profits more than triple Windows’

Horace Dediu’s alternative suggested headline is also sound: The Mac generates half the profits of Windows while iOS devices generate 2.3x Windows profits.

As usual, Asymco brings a fantastic analysis of raw data. See all at http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/03/ios-os-x-3-5-windows/