Usenet NEWS vs. Bittorrent

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 4:41 AM, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Bittorrent suffers from the requirement that someone with 100% of the original file has to sit there for days uploading the file if someone else doesn't have all the bittorrent parts.

Well, that's really not how it works.  If there's 1 seed and 10 peers,
all of those peers will eventually become seeds, so that situation
really isn't that common.

Also, those peers are sharing what _they have_ with other peers as
well, so the seed doesn't really have to share all of what it has.  In
practice it works very well.

Bittorrent works less like a "library" of stuff than USENET News can.
People have to be interested in a torrent to keep it up, so torrents
tend to be shorter lived and more topical.

But anyway, USENET News was never designed to be a porn/warez/stolen
media warehouse.  The fact that it's been hijacked into one shows how
far gone this tech is.  :)

> OTOH, he does have a news server, and their phone service is actually regular phone service, as opposed to "bandwidth-sucking digital phone service that goes out when the power goes out".

That's an interesting observation.  I've had TWC before and after
cable phone service, and I haven't seen my bandwidth go down at all.
800kB/s consistently.  Perhaps it drops when someone's on the phone,
but that rarely happens here for long.

As far as the power going out, the phone box they provide has a
built-in UPS.  Does your regular phone have one?  I doubt it.  I
haven't owned a regular phone that can handle a power outage since the
80s.  I don't think they even sell phones nowadays that don't require
wall power.

Jeffrey.

-- 

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a
precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine