"West" wrote in message
news:TfSTj.15646$qW.10935@trnddc06...
What are you downloading, Joel? I tried and clicked on Oppie's link and it
was only a 6k transfer. How can I get it? Thanks.

Install a BitTorrent client (program), e.g., uTorrent: www.utorrent.com. The
6k file just directs the BitTorrent client where to start looking for the
"real" file; once uTorrent or a similar program is installed opening Oppie's
link will automatically file up the client and begin downloading the real file
(or ask you where to download to or whatever).

The way BitTorrent works is that, instead of pulling a file from one
centralized web server, you get "trickles" of data from multiple computers and
then your computer, in turn, starts providing trickles to other computers once
it actually has some bits to send. The idea is that finding a single web
server with lots of bandwidth and fast connections worldwide is a lot harder
(spendier) than just using the machines people want to download files to as
one of a "swarm" of machines that can all share the load.

These "peer to peer" (P2P) networking programs have become quite popular in
the past few years -- some people have even managed to get IEEE papers out of
studying and improving their designs, since if you think about it it's clear
that it's not an entirely trivial problem to try to optimize a P2P network.
While many of the earlier P2P programs were developed by folks looking to
pirate software and share porn, the basic idea makes so much sense that these
days there's plenty of completely above-board usage of such tools, especially
with folks developing large free software projects. For instance, last week
Ubuntu 8.04 (a popular implementation of Linux) was released (~700MB), and it
immediately found its way to many thousands of people via BitTorrent, much
more quickly than traditional methods would have allowed.

---Joel