Windows Why do people actually use bit-torrent so much?

This is one of my rant threads.

Okay, so what actually drives a person to use bit-torrent, i mean P2P is just wrong in every sense, my ADSL 1/4megabit up 2 down, hopefully it will be 8 down soon. But just think about it, i have to be a total git to use anything like the full amount of my bandwidth.

Now when i want to xfer files to a large number of people, i use binary usenet. to put you in the picture, i'm currently pulling over 2000kbytes/s My laptop HDD can't keep up.

When MS researched showed their paper on their new P2P system i was thinking, "great that fixes so many of the problems torrents have with chunks missing, will really speed up the rate of prophegation" but then i thought.... Wait a second, does this mean their going to cut costs at their DC?

Distro people, please stop using BT to send ISOs around, i like my ISO's like i like my woman, reliable, little waiting, and damn well near me rather than spread accross the globe only giving me little portions rather than the whole pie.

Thank you.

 

I use it because its simple. I've tryed to figure usenet out but still havent got a clue. Maybe you should point us in the right direction.

 

sites like www.newzbin.com index files that are on usenet, these are generally used for both good and evil, some ISPs use them to remove files, some people usethem to download the files.

usenet is a set of servers that talk to each other and make sure they all relay and pass round new content quickly and with minimal errors.

to access usenet you need a usenet server that will let you log on, this can be your ISP or another company (like www.usenetserver.com). Then you just need a client like newsleecher.

If you've got a linux distro DVD thats 5gig because its got every package you could ever want, usenet is a much much faster way, because only ONE peer has to post it, for the backbone servers to relay it to everyone. If thats your ISP, it makes SO much sense.

 

Bit-torrent IS fantastically easy. And the beauty is it never chews up too much of your bandwidth at once, either your internet bandwidth or your HDD bandwidth. You have a lot of up/down control. And, as opposed to usenet, it's completely anonymous.

If speed is at a premium and the content is legal, usenet is absolutely the way to go. But if you just want to be pulling down your favorite videos or something (not that I am condoning such an act, mind you!!) in the background, Bit-torrent allows you to do so and keep on going with your life.

 

No its not, the tracker logs your ip, you can see which ip's are connected to you etc. doesn't take too much effort for 'someone' to track you down if they wanted to

 

Eh, yeah, I suppose I should amend that. It's anonymous in the fact that for someone to actually accuse you of downloading an entire program would be nigh impossible, because they'd have to find every seeder and check that the ISO or whatnot actually came down to your computer in its entirey.

 

Why do people use Bit-torrent?
because its straight forward to use and very accessible, I use newsgroups occasionally, but to be honest i get the same speed from bit-torrent and I find it harder to find what I'm looking for, also I've never had a problem with incomplete files on bit-torrent, unlike the days of old when kazaa was king

 

so pull it off their ftp server and let everyone else torrent it
thing is if everyone pulled it from their ftp server at max speed it'd fall over or at least max out the line its on
you see this all the time when /. links to a site with a even modest sized downloads on it
if that site had a torrent instead it wouldn't fall over and everyone could get the file and it doesnt cost them anything
this is why BT is awesome

theres a reason usenet providers charge you, it costs a fortune to provide that much bandwidth/storage

 

I use bit torrent because it works.

 

I, like others, use bittorrent because it's easy and it works. And if it's a popular or new torrent, it's just as fast as a normal download.

Distributers use it because they don't need to host several gigs worth of ISO's to be downloaded thousands of times. They host littke 5k .torrent files with the same amount of downloads. So you're talking five megs worth of bandwidth versus five terabytes. Yeah we all love free bandwidth, but I don't know anyone that has unliminted upload for free.

And guess what, by not wasting their bandwidth downloading the same distro a dozen times beause you want the most up-to-date one or you keep losing the DVD of it, you save them a ton of money. and saved money supports them. It's not quite the same for paid software like it is with free, but then again you're not supposed to be downloading paid software unless the company is smart enough to still store the key seperately but have a "it won't install without a personalized key" full version for download (which some places have)

 

Usenet or any high end binary news server is WAAY WAY WAAAAAAY faster than ANY p2p out there.
Verizon news groups have unlimited downlimit (theoritcally it's like 16mbit??). Try hitting 16mbit with a torrent application.

However, torrents are more "available" to the public than on a news group. Like I can find some files on bit torrent that i cannot find on verizons news group.

 

Well - with a torrent there is no limit* to the amount of peers, and as the peers increase the available distribution bandwidth also increases to cater for the load. With usenet which revolves around central servers, bandwidth does not increase with load, so ultimately usenet cannot cope with load as well as the bittorrent protocol can.

Given enough peers and a fast enough connection it is entirely possible. However yes, it is unlikely that you would achieve such speeds with any given random torrent. But certainly not impossible to reach these speeds

*assuming that connection/peer limits are not placed on the tracker

 

practically yes, theoretically no
the speed you can get from a torrent is only limited by the number of peers and their connections
so there is no limit to the maximum speed you can pull from a torrent

 

wtf I got through one of TheAnimus' posts in less than 3 hours...I was almost disapointed.

 

I don't use either atm (dial up does things to people...) but here's my take, and I'll keep it short.

torrents: easy, simple....free....
usenet: fast, not so simple, not so free.

What gets people is the cost and what they are doing. To your average 14 year old looking to have a bigger porn and/or mp3 collection than his friend down the street, usenet isn't of much use. On the other side of the token, to a person seeking specific types of files at a high speed, usenet looks like solid gold. You could probably find, easily enough, a torrent for just about anything. After that, getting a good, clean file can be an iffy process. On the other hand, you could find a usenet that has the file your after and snatch it up as fast as you please.....after the fee.

Honetly, I kinda like the split world there. Usenet is great for serious users that know what they are after. The fees act as kind of a filter to like minded/interested people. BT offers a fast, easy, carefree solution to people that just want thier file and don't really care much about how it gets to them.

 

people are saying usenet costs mony, and BT isn't *that* slow.

i have a upstream 1/8th the size of my downstream.

how can i not leach?

Most broadband users have more down than up, so assuming you want the whole file, on a torrent your pretty well screwed, you have to wait. MS's new one is much more cunning, in the fact it uses a secure (until P=np is cracked) way of allowing people to make hashes of it (somewhat like parity, .par2 files) so that you can re-build with missing parts, trading CPU time for bandwidth. Really clever yes, but it still can't contend 100 users who all want to download AT LEAST twice as fast as they download.

Now this is my point about usenet cost, my isp (plus.net) have a free server which just has slightly poor retention in certain groups. But as the servers are at my ISPs connection center, its cheap to get transit there, so in turn costs me less (in the grand scheme of things). Were as if we all use p2p, we will need 1:1 ratio up down connection to work. I really do hope torrent just dies off in the mainstream sector (pirates can use it still thou, do that anti-piracy movement a favour). It dosen't make sense to be having peers all over the world, on differen't routes, which will have different peering agreements to get a file. Sure it kinda makes sense when you've got 35 computers all on a switch, to get it off all 35 (spread the load a bit). But torrents never happen like that, well not for me at least.

 

The whole basis behind bit-torrent is seeding. Everyone has broadband and like you everyone has a bad up/down ratio. In order to get past that, users of trackers should seed, just as anyone else should. Certain private trackers are going about enforcing the seeding guidlines, if you have a bad ratio (ie. you've downloaded way more than you've uploaded) the tracker will limit your download speed (but your upload will say the same).

If you find a good community to nestle yourself into, bittorrent can be a great thing, though once you find yourself outside of such groups it can be quite frustrating trying to find files. Newsgroups (or whatever you please to call them) have much more security about them but they cost money as opposed to bandwidth and even then they limit how much you can download.

I'm just tackling the first paragraph. I see that you have a free usenet server at your access but not all people have that.

 

But i want to get my full downstream, say i get a 5gig DVD file, i don't want to be using all my upstream for hte next week because of it.

And they never will with that attitude!

 

Ok, do anyone of us seed a torrent file? or do we just close bit tech after we are done downloading. *Raises hand*

Animus as I said, bit torrent has way more file availability than a usernet server might but that also depends on what you are searching for. So in the end, all it comes down to is personal preference and for me, bit torrent wins.

 

Guess what... I've seeded something to 10900% or so (109 full uploads equivalent). I NEVER cancel before seeding to at least 100% unless it's one of those really old ones that nobody ever connects to (sits with 0 peers for days on end). On my current formatting my overall is only like 1.15:1 but considering that's about 150 gigs down, not bad (and a previous formatting had about the same download, don't remember the ratio though)

What I wanna know is whether Azureus reads from other Azureus users' OVERALL seed ratios (and perhaps other clients, Azur is the only one I really use and I know it tracks overall upload/download ratios) for determining who to upload to. I hope it does so I won't upload to people like you, because it's people like you that ruin the system. I could understand if you stopped as soon as it hit 1.000:1 but I REALLY hope that new versions of clients make it so you simply can't download anymore until you seed for a while if you've cancelled more than 5 or so torrents below 1:1 (or the up after stopping overall is more than 500 megs below down) unless it does a peer check for inactivity.

imo bit-torrent, or something similar, is THE future for file transfer. no more waiting in line for seventeen hours to download an 8kb file from fileshack or something, etc. When it really becomes the "standard" net transfer protocol (other than http of course, just file downloads), I would imagine ISPs giving their users as much up as down, even if it's less down. Like I'd have 2Mbit/2Mbit instead of my 4Mbit/384Kbit or something. That way, assuming you limit your up and down to about 90% and 95% of your overall bandwidth respectively for browsing and whatnot, you'll only have to seed files for a few minutes to get to 1:1, and going to 1.5:1 or 2:1 would be much faster.