I read the bittorrent mini faq and I was trying to avoid a holy war as much as possible. I actually used to be a fan of napster until it turned into a music pirates dream house.
You have your reasons for using bittorent and I have my reasons for avoiding it. I severely doubt we are ever going to change each other's minds but since you felt inclined to share your opinion at rather length I feel it would be appropriate to share mine but then I suggest we leave it as is as we are going to stray horrendously off topic away from plucker and probably say lots of not nice things about each other or atleast our opposing views. (I do try to keep such fights impersonal, love the person hate the perspective is my view. We can both not like the other persons perspective and still co-exist reasonably well.) I liken non-registered distributed file systems to lockpicking: In the real world, anyone can technically get a lockpick. The general person doesn't know about them, knows very little about them, or doesn't want to mess with them. They are perfectly content with not accessing anything that requires a lock pick and will gladly pay good money to not have to bother with them. You know, actually pay for the key? In the real world, thankfully, in most cases you have to be registered somewhow in order to legally own and operate a lock pick set. That is, someone has to check the validity of your 'reputation' with respect to using it. The alternative? Bittorrent, napster in its prime and any of the other major file distribution systems are equivalent to handing out free lockpick sets, free instructions, detailed seminars and a free moving van to every person within a 20 mile radious of your home or place of business. I am sure that looks very altruistic and 'honorable' on the outside. But do you honestly want the countless number of people who get arrested for breaking and entering in most major city and surburban areas to have that kind of power freely and openly? You know, I view your software as a respectable piece of software. And I have no doubt that you feel you are being completely and totally respectable and honorable in supporting something such as bittorrent. But have you taken a look recently at the kind of company you are keeping on BOTH of the file lists that are easily found for bittorent links? I went through 20 or 30 files on each list and didn't find a single file that wasn't someone stealing someone elses intellectually property. Music, movies, software, even porn. Roughly speaking, I view using bittorent with your site as having to wade through a crack house district to get to that really nice book shop that for whatever reason feels its best location is right next door to a crack house. >From a personal perspective you may try to argue how this analogy is not accurate because they would really be 'copying' the stero or tv and that for them to get a copy of your files you have to put them up yourself. Intellectual property is a cascading effect on our economy. You may not own the intellectual rights to that piece of music or that piece of software or movie or even if you wanna get detailed, porn, but the person that DOES own those rights has decided that they want to make their living off of that piece of property. And every time that someone copies that piece of property without paying them their due respect, that is one less chunk of money that that person cannot spend on the stocks or on the research that goes into producing your nice stereo, home theater system, or computer hardware. Opensource doesn't pay your hardware manufacturer's bills or sony's development projects. Open source may be a great idea, and I agree with it when its voluntary. But open source does not mean steal everything in sight, and that is what bittorrent and napster and so forth are used for. I REALLY wish it wasn't so because I would whole heartedly support them for their efforts. But until we have systems such as the registered music downloading systems (Which was the respectable solution to balance free flow of information and intellectual property rights.) Bittorrent and such are just feeding more crack to the crack houses. Then you could argue "Oh well if you don't believe in bittorrent then don't use it." Since there is no law against it, you have as much right as to only offer your software via bittorrent as I have as using bittorrent as merely a software downloader and immediately killing it as soon as I get the software. Just because you decided to put your very respectiable establishment right next a crack house and even support that crack house's business doesn't mean I have to visit that crack house on my way out. Like I said, I doubt we'll change each other's views and Ive done my best to place mine in view in a respectable form without making it personal. We can continue the discussion or we can just drop it, agree to disagree, and move on. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David A. Desrosiers Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 8:08 AM To: Plucker General List Subject: RE: torrent files dead? > Those were both for the desktop. These two links to the desktop (found on the download page) are 100% functional, and return a 200 response code, as they should. Looking at their activity level on the tracker, I see 165 downloads for the .zip and 14 for the rpm, currently. Not an enormous amount, but enough to know that the links are valid, and people are downloading the files using them. http://torrents.plkr.org/plucker_desktop-1.4.0.2.zip.torrent http://torrents.plkr.org/plucker-desktop-1.4.0.0-1.4.i386.rpm.torrent > Also, neither of the win32 executables on the left hand side of the page > for bittorrent installers end in exe. So IE has no clue what to do with > them. Might I suggest a more current browser, one that understands common URI constructs? Those links don't have to end in .exe to download them. The text after the filename is a parameter to the server itself (sourceforge, not our servers) to instruct it to use the 'umn' (University of Minnesota) mirror by default. If IE can't handle that, it seriously needs to be upgraded. You might want to try the Mozilla browser (mozilla.orga), if you want something much more current, standards-compliant, and secure. > I guessed and renamed them to .exe and they worked but not everyone is > going to think of that, especially people who are windows native and > rarely, if ever, use unix. Nor do they have to "rename" it, unless IE did the right thing anyway and saved the file to disk, but added the param in the URI to the saved-as filename, which would be pretty braindead. > And finally. I happened to revisit the bittorent page and found the > upgrade to 3.3. The link on the download page points directly to the version 3.3 BitTorrent client. Did you get something different when you clicked on it? > So I have no clue what to do next. I guess bittorrent is screwed up. When you click on a file with a .torrent extension, BitTorrent (your client application) is supposed to begin downloading it, using the location and hash information in the .torrent file itself. If it didn't do that, your BitTorrent client installation may have not been complete. > So how long until you put the file up normally? I am not too keen on > trying to learn and debug an entirely new and unrelated piece of software > just to download your software. I have enough headaches in my life > already. BitTorrent is not a "file downloader". It is a peer-to-peer application that spreads out the load of bandwidth on heavily-hit servers (such as those running the Plucker website). If you use it to download the file, and then disconnect the client, you are not doing anybody else any good. BitTorrent works on the premise that as you are downloading, you are ALSO uploading pieces of the file(s) you're downloading, to other clients who are trying to download the same file as well. It scales exponentially, based on the number of clients using it. With ftp and http, for example, the more people request one specific file (plucker_desktop in this case), given a server-bandwith that doesn't increase dynamically, each new user that wants to download that file, will take longer, and will be slower to download, which impacts everyone else who wants to download that same file. Using BitTorrent, the more people request one particular file, the FASTER the download goes, in a linearly-increasing fashion, because all of the parts of the file are spread out across all peers, who actively are sending and receiving between each other, to spread out the load. When it works, it works amazingly well. We're getting close to 400k/sec. on downloads now. In fact, it keeps increasing faster and faster, but the Plucker downloads aren't large enough in size to see what the top-speed actually is. > If its like a couple of days, I can wait. If it's a month, then it might > be worth figuring out. I think if you want to help contribute by using BitTorrent, it would be worthwhile to learn how to use it. It will not only speed up your ability to get these files, but it will continue to help everyone else who wants to download the Plucker files as well... if you leave your BitTorrent client running, of course. There is talk about incorporating this into a browser at some point, to speed standard internet browsing experiences as well. It very well may be a technology that will become "standardized" in the future. > All these problems aside I do look forward to using your software and it > seems to be the best solution to my problems at hand. But I have to weigh > hassle/time to utility just like the next guy. We also have to weigh the hassles of the load we're under. With each new release, Plucker becomes more and more popular, and is adopted by more and more users, which means we still have to find ways to supply the releases to those users. Since we are a completely 100% community-run project, with no "commercial" ties, budgets, or responsibilities, we pay for all of this on our own (bandwidth, servers, power, backups, disks, etc). As a point of metric, in the last 13 days, we have seen a total of 43,355,578,128 bytes of Plucker downloaded from the main file links (not the torrents or the cvs checkouts or web hits or the snapshot downloads, JUST the release files from the download page). That's roughly 3.3 gigabytes a day of just Plucker. When we do releases, it generally peaks around 10gb per day. That's a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of downloads. We needed to find a way to spread it out, and BitTorrent provided that solution for us. With that in mind, would you rather download the files you want at 1-2k/sec, shared with 300 other users downloading them at exactly the same time, or 400k/sec. by learning a new technology that will make it easier for you, and for others, to download and use the software? > Thanks in advance none the less for any help. No problem. I wrote up a quick mini-FAQ on BitTorrent, which may help answer some of your questions, if you'd like to read it. It has been linked from the download page for awhile now. http://www.plkr.org/plkr-bt-minifaq.html Good luck! d. _______________________________________________ plucker-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-list _______________________________________________ plucker-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-list
