BitTorrent

BitTorrent has delivered over 13,000 copies of the Red Hat Linux 9 ISOs. I got my ISOs through BitTorrent and it was a pretty cool experience. I thought BitTorrent worked like the other file sharing apps, you run the client in the background and anything you have downloaded is available for sharing. That’s not how it works, though. You fire up BitTorrent for a particular download and, as soon as it starts transferring, the data you’ve downloaded is available for upload. The downstream rate you are allowed is proportional to the rate at which you are uploading to other BitTorrent users. I got download rates of 60-80 KB/S, which is about the max for my DSL connection.