What is bittorrent? Does it essentially provide the same service as a gnutella client would? Is there some reason (for an end user) why it is better? Or is it a different category of program altogether.
It's purpose is to speed downloads of large files (like Linux ISOs) through cooperative serving. At a -very- basic level, any download is broken into chunks, and clients offer themselves as alternate servers for the chunks they already have.
They probably describe themselves better than I do.
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduction.html
