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Ask Bram Cohen about BitTorrent
It's a clever P2P 'information broadcasting' concept, as the simple diagram on the BitTorrent home page shows. It's gotten a fair amount of notice, especially here on Slashdot. And reader Ignorant Aardvark wrote to us about BitTorrent sites disappearing, possibly because of RIAA/MPAA intervention, so this technology is now generating some controversy as well. The person behind BitTorrent is Bram Cohen, and he's agreed to answer 10 of the highest-moderated questions about BitTorrent you post here. So ask away (after reading the project FAQ and other info about BitTorrent and Bram, of course). We'll run Bram's answers as soon as he emails them back to us.
read his resume. I think you will find that your question is answered there.
He seems to like JavaSCRIPT, Python, and not much C/C++.
Restricting upload speeds restricts download speeds. This is an absolute must-have feature for those of us on ADSL or other asymetric connection. I don't care if I stick my upload at 9 (rather than a full 12/13) and thus limit my download speed to about the same. Uploading at full speed throttles my whole connection, and that 3-4 left over lets me use the internet at almost full speed.
The mistake you made was trying to use BitTorrent to download an oldish file. The way BT works best is when there is a /. effect occurring. When a new ISO of RH9 comes out, there is a bullrush to get it which overwhelms mirrors. BT solves this by having users DL from other users and the mirrors at the same time. Once the majority of users have DL'd the ISO's, they are going to close their BT client. It's been weeks since the RH9 ISO's came out, so most everyone has closed their client. This means you are mostly DL'ing from the seeding servers and not the users. The seeders aren't really built to handle massive bandwidth.
BT is a temporary solution for getting high demand files. It works in an inverse supply-demand curve: the higher the demand, the higher the supply of bandwidth.
IANAL, but I play one on
You could do that right now, if the browser supported it. BitTorrent can already automatically ship around a .zip file and unpack it.
I absolutely hate it when people do this. BitTorrent works fine on directories without any help. Don't zip media files! Zip's compression does little for the filesize and, more importantly, you the downloader is unfortunate to only get part of the file, the Zip file remains corrupt. If you use Tar, at least, you can recover the portion of the files that you have downloaded.
No it was originally developed as a "regular" P2P application... a highly scalable way to download stuff.
.mp3s where Brian presented on bittorrent
The first slashdot story on it was in March 2002, where its was used to distribute CodeCon 2002
This is for CodeCon 2003:
"CodeCon 2.0 is the premier event in 2003 for the P2P, Cypherpunk, and network/security application developer community.
It is a workshop for developers of real-world applications with working code and active development projects."
you get the idea...
peek-a-booty (top 10 vaporware of 2001) was also presented at CodeCon 2002.
Actually the site is down because we're in the process of moving to a new server. Our wimpy 1.1GHz Celeron cannot handle being /.ed every other day.