Forenoon watch, 3 bells (9:35 am)
I like BitTorrent—it makes sense: the more popular a downloaded file is, the more available it becomes. Pure brilliance. Until you have bits that are unavailable.
Last night I queued up a copy of the openSUSE 10.2 DVD iso image on my BitTorrent client. It did a great job over the evening, and downloaded 99.9% of the file. There was one little sliver unavailable to me about a third of the way through the file. So what can you do? Well, if you’re downloading something illegal, probably nothing but get laughed at.
Fortunately, there are a lot of mirrors for things like this that support rsync. So I am not thwarted. I am currently 30% of the way through the process of syncing to the full DVD iso.
In summary, I like BitTorrent, but I love rsync.