What Is Bittorrent?
Dean
Our friends at New AIDS Review recently wrote to ask what a torrent is and how one downloads one. To strip it down to its bare bones, bittorrent is a common form of file sharing. When you have a very large file and not a lot of server space or bandwidth to spare to distribute it to a lot of people, you set up a "torrent." Multiple people can act as "seeds" at once to distribute the load, and in fact even as you're downloading the file, you will start automatically, in the background, sharing that part of the file you've already downloaded with others.
Torrents are often used for semi-legal or even illegal file sharing. They're frankly a popular way to swap movies and music. But they can be used for entirely legitimate purposes whenever you have any large amount of data you want to distribute economically.
The torrent software I most recommend is AZEREUS--click here to download. It's the most user-friendly I've found. But if you Google you'll find many others.
Once you have it, to begin participating in a torrent you just click on a link provided for one. Here is the link again for the Duesberg/Bialy torrent, for any who wish to try it.
Related Posts (on one page):
- What Is Bittorrent?
- Duesberg/Bialy Torrent
- There's Something Happening Here - Duesberg CD
I've used Azureus and it's ok. I now use Bit Tornado, which is a single window per torrent client. I like it much better than azureus.
Thanks for making the Duesberg/Bialy torrent available.
If the release time is known, what will happen is that everyone on the planet will hit the server NOW, whereupon the server chokes, and no one can get the file.
Torrents were designed with that issue in mind. In fact, with torrents, more people accessing the file means faster downloads! It sounds counter-intuitive, but that's how it works, since a larger number of downloaders means a larger pool wherein you may find bits you haven't downloaded yet.
Writing this, it occurs to me that torrents are the first true internet-based file-sharing protocol. A torrent is widely distributed, highly redundant, and the loss of any given node has little effect on the network, since one may "re-route" data block requests merely by getting them from another node.
Casey,
You are a perfect example of someone with specialized knowledge in one field that makes a terrific point in another one, and one this exactly related to the contents of the torrent when you write
A torrent is widely distributed, highly redundant, and the loss of any given node has little effect on the network, since one may "re-route" data block requests merely by getting them from another node.
Metabolic networks share exactly the same properties. This is very precisely why a mutation in any gene cannot cause cancer.
Go here and thenif you want the real beef go here
I would really like to carry on this conversation but unfortunately today is one of the few times I need be far away from a terminal all day.
But Casey, I will check much later in the tardes to see if you have written me.
Saludos todos, y un muy buen dia a todos tambien
Harvey
BK
The version I use, Azerus, has a fairly normal interface where you tell it what to download, where to put it, when and where to stop, etc.
It wasn't all that easy to find the Windows exe setup file for Azureus, by the way. It's there if you poke around. Here's the URL:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=84122
This is not a complaint, merely an observation.
Now the hard part. I have to unZip the thing and begin reading. My head hurts already.