RoboGeek

I don't get the attraction to bittorrent The other day Mandriva announced their new release, the 2007 version of their distribution.  I've been wanting to try their system out so I went to the download page.  A couple days prior I'd downloaded the RC2 ISO's and those were done with an FTP arrangement, but today the final bits are downloadable only with a bittorrent thingamajob.

Bittorrent is one of those gosh wow technologies that has the geeks glowing and saying it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.  Supposedly bittorrent is a technology that would, if deployed by the media companies etc, revolutionize the distribution of multimedia entertainment.

Well, as a user of this technology I am completely and totally underwhelmed.

The mandriva distribution .torrent file specifies the downloading of four ISO's plus a small number of related meta files.  I started the download yesterday afternoon, and 20 hours later the bittorrent client (qtorrent running on Ubuntu if that makes any difference) says it's only 50% downloaded, and there are 18 hours left to go.

Just a few days earlier when I was able to grab the prior ISO's using FTP they downloaded within an hour, and within two hours after that I had the ISO's burned to CD.

Seems to me that as a user of the two technologies, FTP (or HTTP "get" or the like) is superior over bittorrent, because I get quicker satisfaction.

So can someone explain the superiority of bittorrent?

Oh and to toss a few more worms into the pot ... Last year sometime I was curious what all the rage over the Azureus client was about.  So I installed it, ran it, and to get some .torrent files I found the torrentspy web site.  Good golly what a flashback to the unethical sharing of copyrighted content.  Is that what bittorrent normally used for?  The unethical sharing of copyrighted content?

(2006-10-04 11:10:10.0) Permalink Comments [6]