Ugh, what a Monday.
Woke up today feeling dizzy and groggy, but I figured it was just a case of the Monday blahs until I discovered I was having a hard time staying upright. Last time I tried to blow off a dizzy spell like this, I ended up with a sprained ankle, so this time I was a bit more careful. As it turns out, though, it's not my anemia acting up again - I just have a nasty fever. (So...um...yay?) Since I'm stuck at home for the day, I guess this means I have plenty of time to get caught up on my Learning 2.0 checklist, so let's get started.
Today's blog is dedicated to technology - so I'll do a little spiel on one of my favorite time-wasters: bittorrent. Bittorrent is a P2P file sharing program that has grown steadily in popularity over the years. It works like this: first off, you have to download a bittorent client. (I use ABC, but Azureus is probably the most popular right now) Once you have a client, you have to find torrents; the easiest way to do that is type the word "torrent" into Google and see what sorts of sites come up. Once you have found a torrent for the file you want, you download it, then plug it into your bittorent client and start downloading the file itself. What makes bittorrent different from other P2P file-share clients is that the moment you start downloading a file, you automatically also start uploading. While there is usually one main source that does nothing but upload, or "seed" a file, all users who download the file are also uploading parts of it as well, which is what makes bittorrent so fast. Bittorrent breaks a file down into pieces for faster uploading/downloading, and when you download a file, it draws file pieces from as many different sources as are available; the more people there are uploading a file, the faster the download.
For example, let's say a new Charlotte band wants to make their new single available to their fans over the internet, but their main site doesn't have great bandwidth. Instead of having it available for direct download, they create a torrent for it, and post the torrent on the site instead of the file itself. Their fans then download the torrent and plug it into their clients. At first, there are 200 fans uploading/downloading the file - this means that when bittorrent downloads the file for an individual, it is pulling file pieces from 200 different sources and the download only takes a few minutes. A few months later, though, only a the band and a few hardcore fans are still seeding the file. That means when a person goes to download that file, their bittorent client is only receiving file pieces from a few sources - thus the download takes longer. If the band decides to stop hosting the file altogether, and the fans stop seeding it, then bittorrent is unable to retrieve file pieces from any source, and the torrent is dead, meaning that if even if you download it and plug it into your client, there are no file pieces available for it to find, so it won't download anything.
The upside to bittorrent is that it's generally faster than other P2P clients, and there's a huge community for it, so it's easy to find whatever file you're looking for. The downside is that it relies on individuals seeding a file, so if you're halfway through a download and everyone who was seeding it suddenly stops, chances are that you're never going to get the rest of that file. However, unlike other P2P clients, bittorrent relies on a community of seeders, so if you can convince even one person to start uploading again, you can finish downloading your file.
That's it in a nutshell - for a clearer explanation, and/or to get started using bittorrent for yourself, head over to the main bittorrent site.