Last weekend I went to Curry's. I handed over a not-inconsiderable amount of cash and vouchers and left with a brown box. Quite a heavy brown box for it's size. When I got home, the kids were fascinated. "What's in the box?", "Is it a present for me?". No, my dear children, it's a present for ME.

I'm getting an iPad. There is no doubt about this. I may be a self-confessed Mac zealot, but that does not mean I love all things Apple by default. I'm also fairly sceptical of new toys for the sake of it. I reckon you'll be surprised that I don't have an iPhone. In this case it's simply because my last and current employers have given me Blackberry's; why pay for something I don't need then?

In the early days of the Internet data links were slow and lots of traffic was based on single character transactions. For example, the telnet protocol sends a single byte at a time as you type. This isn't great use of the available bandwidth as the overhead of delivery is very large. An IP header is (a minimum of) 20 bytes and a TCP header is another 20 bytes. That means that to deliver one byte of data, cost a minimum of 40 bytes. That's 40:1. Not good. To make this worse, each packet will require an ACK packet to come back from the other end of the connection.