I have DSL and have been playing with BitTorrent, and I can't say that I'm entirely sold on it. It has its advantages, but it's far from Jack Valenti's worst nightmare.
The download-chunks-from-multiple-sources thing is nice, but it's not innovative; eDonkey does it that way, and I think Gnucleus (front-end for Gnutella) does it too. It's highly dependent on the trackers being advertised, which means that big clearinghouse pages like suprnova.org are somewhat vulnerable to the same thing that brought Napster down; take down the central server that acts as a file directory, and the distributed users can't find each other and trade anymore.
Download speeds vary extremely wildly for me, no matter how many people are online. I've had plenty of times where my full upload capacity was available (or being used) and my downloads still went drip drip drip. Async really does make a difference for high-demand files; when dozens of people are downloading at 768kb or 1.5mb but uploading at 128kb, it cuts the available bandwidth considerably. Yeah, it beats 56K, but it still takes days to download 700MB files sometimes. DSL people often feel like they might as well be on dialup when their downloads are pinned in single digits...
Frankly, USENET is more efficient for the downloader, though it obviously removes all pretenses of anonymity for the uploader.
The article did get one point right -- DVD-R drives (and better yet, DVD+/-R drives) are getting very close to the price point that'll make them common items. I'm toying with the notion of getting one myself once I can get a sense of the competing standards and whether I should wait for the next wave of drives or not.
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The download-chunks-from-multiple-sources thing is nice, but it's not innovative; eDonkey does it that way, and I think Gnucleus (front-end for Gnutella) does it too. It's highly dependent on the trackers being advertised, which means that big clearinghouse pages like suprnova.org are somewhat vulnerable to the same thing that brought Napster down; take down the central server that acts as a file directory, and the distributed users can't find each other and trade anymore.
Download speeds vary extremely wildly for me, no matter how many people are online. I've had plenty of times where my full upload capacity was available (or being used) and my downloads still went drip drip drip. Async really does make a difference for high-demand files; when dozens of people are downloading at 768kb or 1.5mb but uploading at 128kb, it cuts the available bandwidth considerably. Yeah, it beats 56K, but it still takes days to download 700MB files sometimes. DSL people often feel like they might as well be on dialup when their downloads are pinned in single digits...
Frankly, USENET is more efficient for the downloader, though it obviously removes all pretenses of anonymity for the uploader.
The article did get one point right -- DVD-R drives (and better yet, DVD+/-R drives) are getting very close to the price point that'll make them common items. I'm toying with the notion of getting one myself once I can get a sense of the competing standards and whether I should wait for the next wave of drives or not.