> > Can anyone explain, in ordinary language, what possible > advantage it would give me over, say, wget? > The article Alexander mentioned is very good. However. Consider the following. The new Fedora comes out and all the mirrors begin getting hammered. Bittorrent logically breaks the big file(s) into a bunch of little pieces. Your first piece is not block one, but a random block. The same goes for everyone else. Now you go to get the next piece which was the piece someone else got first. You can get that piece faster from the other person than from the hammered original mirror. This decreases the load on the original mirror. This is also handy for the purveyor of the original mirror since some ISP's charge a premium if your download goes over a certain amount. There are a bunch of checksums and tit for tat rules which balance the load across the peers. These are discussed very well in the article. Hope this answers the question. Bob Styma
