Learn parallel programming and FPGA for $99

It's fairly amazing you can get these dev board now that have some awesome features, like the Parallela from Adapteva - made for people learning massively parallel programming, it even has an FPGA on it - a field programmable array of simple units (gates) that can be strung together using an interconnect, in this case about 28,000 of them!

CH6_Slides courtesy of Charles Roth

in other news I think packet loss can cause your kernel to re-transmit a lot of packets:

Mac os x kernel during heavy packet loss