The Glade 4.0

Ok, I'm tech geeky, but I guess not enough.

What is a torrent? How is it different from any other download?

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29

Basically, a large file is broken up into a number of small pieces. Let's say 1000 pieces. When you, the guy who wants to download the file, start, you have 0 pieces. So you query the tracker for people who have pieces. Other people sharing the file (seeding) will offer you random pieces to download from them. Let's say 5 seeders. You get pieces 5, 200, 430, 500, and 600. After that's done, you ask for more pieces and start downloading them. Meanwhile, some other new person comes on and asks for pieces of the file. Since you have 5, 200, 430, 500, and 600, you can share what you have while downloading from others. It's faster because you can download multiple pieces of the file concurrently. Of course, unless you ask for sequential pieces, you can't really use the file (watch the video for example) since you most likely have random pieces of the file until you're done.

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As a consequence of this, downloading by torrent "scales" very well. If you manually download a file from a single server, the download gets slower with every person who tries to get it, until it's unusuable. With Bittorrent, the more people who download, the faster it gets as they're all sharing with each other as they download. What started off as a peer-to-peer sharing protocol is now used by a few software companies to speed up patch downloads.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

An illustration of how it can be faster, even at very small scales:

Consider a server with a 10Mb/s symmetrical connection to the Internet, and two home users with 10Mb/s down, 5Mb/s up. The two home users (A and B) are trying to fetch the same large file, located on the server. The best case scenario for A and B with a conventional download is that the server will dedicate 5Mb/s to each.

With a torrent, A and B can collude for better results. They each download at 5Mb/s from the server, but they download different halves of the file. Meanwhile, they are also sending each other their respective missing half at 5Mb/s. Effectively, A and B are able to download the file from the server at 10Mb/s each, simultaneously, even though the server only has 10Mb/s total upload bandwidth.

Torrents don't work exactly like that (things are less directly coordinated), but the end result is more or less the same.

Edit:

Specifically, I know that Blizzard definitely does this for WoW. Back when I was playing WoW, I was doing it under WINE on Linux. The game itself ran great, but their patch client was always a little clunky at best and iffy at worse under WINE. So I found a utility that could extract a .torrent file from the patcher .exe, and then I could download the patches with Transmission or whatever.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

In addition, several Free to Play games use a peer-assisted patching program called Pando Media Booster. I'm not certain it uses a torrent scheme, but it's similar in any case.

It should be pointed out that if one has restrictions, caps, throttling, etc. associated with their internet connection, you want to take care in monitoring your bandwidth usage (and whether or not you leave the torrent/P2P program active when you're done downloading, as it will continue to upload to other clients) while using torrent or other Peer to Peer clients.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That's part of what makes utorrent so cool; it's smart enough to organize the pieces that it actually has the option to start "streaming" video while you're downloading it still. Usually I'm watching within a few seconds after starting a torrent download.

Too bad current editions of μtorrent suck so much compared to previous versions.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Seems like you're complaining just to complain. I still download at my max speed, with more features than ever.

Meh. I'm not the only one. μtorrent has been weak since was bought out by Bittorrent. It's getting bigger (the file size more than doubled between version 2 and 3.1, getting rid of the "OMG this app is only 300k!" wow factor, and it's approaching 1MB, without adding more functionality), buggier, and they rabidly stamp out people talking about older versions of their software to make things even worse.

The biggest problem is the errors i get when downloading to network hard drives on anything version 3 or more. Version 2 μtorrent actually works downloading to network hard drives. 3? Not so much. Support for this problem? mention it works fine on Version 2, so it can't be a problem with your network setup, and they'll ban you from the forums.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Big deal. You're complaining about free software that you use to steal. I'm sorry that your biggest problem is that you can't download to network-attached pirate storage.

uTorrent is not "weak". It's still an amazing light-weight (big LOL to your complaint that it's a whole 800kb now) client that works better than any of its peers with great features to boot.

Surely if you're not the only one, the solution is simply to torrent version 2, right?

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

(1) Piracy isn't stealing, and you don't use it for anything different, so don't pretend to lecture me.
(2) The thing is, previous versions worked fine, and still work fine. You might have to work harder to find it (oh, the irony - BitTorrent is trying to use copyright to stamp out old versions of its torrent software), but there's absolutely no reason to use anything newer than μTorrent 2.2.1. My complaint is that older versions of μTorrent are better than current ones.



μTorrent 3.0.1 and newer are weak compared to μTorrent 2.2.1. The software is getting worse with version updates, not better.



That's exactly the solution I've been advocating here. If you're going to use μTorrent, use an older version of the software. There were initially a lot of people saying this on the μTorrent forums, as well. They're not allowed to post there anymore.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No flame wars please.

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Thank you.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is no flame war.

I never said I used it for anything different, and I'm not trying to convince anyone whether downloading is stealing or not. Those are completely beside the point. I was only finding humor in you complaining about a company that gives you something for free, that you use to acquire other things for free.

It's obvious that what you want to do with their program is not a concern to them as a company/product, and they're under no obligation to help you or fix the issue. What they are concerned with, however, is people like yourself scaring off new-comers with talk about how the program "used to be great" but "sucks now" because it had features [the majority of users don't care about] removed or changed. Something they're completely within their rights to do.

Oh, it's not a feature they removed. It's one bug among a host of others they introduced (http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1824881 just as an example). And it's not like they made the software better in some other way.

And you think most people don't care about it? I bet the majority of people who make heavy use of torrents these days have large amounts of network storage.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

People who make heavy use of torrents are not the majority of torrent users. I make very heavy use of torrents and I certainly don't download straight to my NAS. I don't personally know anyone that does, honestly.

This thread is 10x funnier when read Lenas' posts in Pam's voice.

...

Actually, that's probably true of every thread.

It feels like I should put this here somewhere:

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.