On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 22:18 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Monday 31 May 2010, Máirín Duffy wrote: > >On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 20:49 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote: > >> On Mon, 31 May 2010 20:42:34 -0400 > >> > >> Máirín Duffy wrote: > >> > Would a completely new user ask "where are the torrents?" > >> > >> That is the first question I always ask when I want to download > >> a new linux distro for testing. I always get better download > >> performance with torrents. > > > >How many new users download new linux distros on a regular basis? > > I know of one potential user who probably has the iso's for the latest > releases of the top 4 or 5 distros on his drives right now. He wants to > make the jump, but can't seem to loosen his grip on windows. And I nag him > steadily about that. And yes, he pulls most of them with a torrent client. You are responding to quantitative data with yet more anecdotes. Do you understand why you are not very convincing? > >For how many new users would torrent be a performance increase? > > > Waves hand frantically. I can pull a torrent in about half the time I could > get it from a NC server. I have a 3Mbit connection now. There is no way > that your servers could handle 647 leechers at that bandwidth level, but > since there were 500+ seeders at most of the times I looked, it was a piece > of cake. Look at that as being 500+ other servers sharing the load on > yours. Whats not to like? - You need to understand an obscure technology that in many circles (unfair as it is) is considered illegal, likened to napster, etc. Three students in my graduating class at my university were sued by the RIAA and in the aftermath a lot of the less technical students at the school were completed scared to use torrents. - You need torrent client installed. - You need to have an ISP that doesn't block or rate-limit torrents. I have Comcast in the Boston MA area. Whenever I use torrents, my bandwidth is capped significantly. I believe there is actually a class-action lawsuit against Comcast about this right now. I also think some universities (see RIAA incident above) likely block torrent traffic as well. I think university students are an important target audience for Fedora. - You need to have internet access from a personal connection fast enough for the download. There are quite a few Fedora users whose primary bandwidth is that which they can pull at work because their home connections are either too slow or non-existant. You also assume that someone who is a distro-flavor-of-the-week would go to Fedora's webpage to get a tracker for obtaining Fedora via torrent rather than use a general torrent search site (pirate bay, mini nova, whatever) as they would to download any other content via torrent. I asked a handful of my friends last week (8) how they got their Fedora torrents and about half of them said they used a tracker site and not the Fedora website. ~m -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
