On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 4:41 AM, Leo Mauler [email protected] wrote:
Bittorrent suffers from the requirement that someone with 100% of the original file has to sit there for days uploading the file if someone else doesn't have all the bittorrent parts.
Well, that's really not how it works. If there's 1 seed and 10 peers, all of those peers will eventually become seeds, so that situation really isn't that common.
Also, those peers are sharing what _they have_ with other peers as well, so the seed doesn't really have to share all of what it has. In practice it works very well.
Bittorrent works less like a "library" of stuff than USENET News can. People have to be interested in a torrent to keep it up, so torrents tend to be shorter lived and more topical.
But anyway, USENET News was never designed to be a porn/warez/stolen media warehouse. The fact that it's been hijacked into one shows how far gone this tech is. :)
OTOH, he does have a news server, and their phone service is actually regular phone service, as opposed to "bandwidth-sucking digital phone service that goes out when the power goes out".
That's an interesting observation. I've had TWC before and after cable phone service, and I haven't seen my bandwidth go down at all. 800kB/s consistently. Perhaps it drops when someone's on the phone, but that rarely happens here for long.
As far as the power going out, the phone box they provide has a built-in UPS. Does your regular phone have one? I doubt it. I haven't owned a regular phone that can handle a power outage since the 80s. I don't think they even sell phones nowadays that don't require wall power.
Jeffrey.