Hooked on Torrents
Okay, so I’m hooked on bit torrent. I was a bit skeptical at first. It seemed like getting critical mass wouldn’t work very well, but it’s great. I’ve downloaded huge files (500 odd MB per) in record time, without screwing up anyones download servers, even when the site originating the download was slashdotted. And, it’s free and open source. 
Now, if it’s big, my first response is “where’s the torrent?”. Today for example, Gentoo Games announced American Army for linux, on a bootable CD. They had ISOs. They didn’t have a torrent. I tried to download the actual ISO, and it was dragging like a dog with fleas on it’s balls. So, I searched the /. story for a torrent, found one, and downloaded the ISO at an average of 160K/s. That’s 1.3 megabits per second, for those of you who don’t do networking for a living, and the theoretical maximum of my cable modem is only 1.5. Pretty good. And, if you search a bit, you can find a torrent for just about anything you want to download. 
But we all know that none of us would download anything we don’t have absolute rights to use… 
For those who are interested enough in torrents to read this, but not interested enough to follow the link above, let me give you a little background. Bit torrent works somewhat like Napster, Kazaa, or something like that, in that it’s a peer to peer service. However, there the similarity stops. The way it works is that, first, the file is divided into chunks. Then, you join a torrent, by clicking on a link on the web page. This means someone has to be hosting the torrent, ie they set up their computer as a rondevouz point for a given file. The host, then, tracks who has joined the torrent, and which chunks of the file they have. Your client requests chunks that it doesn’t have from other clients that do have them. Other clients request chunks from your client that they don’t have. Since multiple chunks can be transfered at once from multiple sources, the aggregated download speed is huge, while the individual upload speed is not a lot. End result: fast downloads, no-one in particular takes the bandwidth hit. It’s a great system.
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