D programming language conference

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Tue Jun 24 11:57:10 PDT 2008


"Mike Parker" <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:g3qs94$18nt$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Anders Bergh wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 3:47 AM, Mike Parker <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Speak for yourself! Embedded flash videos are a great deal more 
>>> convenient
>>> than regular downloads and a great deal better than torrents.
>>> I refuse to install a torrent client.
>>>
>>
>> Why do you refuse to install a torrent client? Is it because it's
>> often associated with piracy? BitTorrent is quite popular and works
>> great for what it was designed for. Especially when you have a fast
>> connection, whenever I download things like OpenOffice it's miles
>> faster than the http mirrors.
>>
>> Even Opera comes with a built-in BitTorrent client.
>>
>> Anders
>
> I know BitTorrent is popular, what it is and what it does. But it's not 
> just torrents. Anything that requires me to install one more client to 
> download it isn't getting the time of day from me. I have a fantastic 
> transfer rate and a perfectly good download manager that works through a 
> Firefox plugin. If I can't download something through that, I don't want 
> it.
>
> Besides, I've used BitTorrent in the past on my old box and didn't see any 
> benefit to using it.

 Why do people have problems with *real* clients? Personally, I absolutely 
can't stand web applications (and that's coming from someone who's written 
some.) They're a necessary evil if you *absolutely must* access something 
from, say, a public terminal, for instance. But other than that, I'd *much* 
rather use a REAL program written on and for a REAL platform that was 
actually designed for such things. Distributed state isn't an insurmountable 
problem. There just isn't much attention getting paid to it 
(development-wise) just because eveyone's on that damnned "web application" 
bandwagon these days.

Even if you're lucky enough to have such a great conection, there are other 
benefits to torrents:

1. You're insulated from network performance from the server of the person 
who's sharing the file. Ie, without torrent, if the server is having 
trouble, you're stuck. With torrent, everything's fine.

2. From the perspective of the person hosting the torrent: You might not 
have the bandwidth and/or storage space to host a large file. If that's the 
case, you can either say "sorry, I can't host this", or just put up a 
torrent and seed it only until there's other seeds.

Also, if you don't like the torrent clients you've seen (I don't like most 
of the ones I've seen) try Azureus 2.5 (*NOT* Azureus Vuze 3.0: That's a 
steaming pile of shit). 




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