Essentially the title. I was trying to download a file and my colleagues told me that I should use uTorrent. I did some research and figured that this was very popular a while ago, but since then has decreased in popularity. How does it work and why did it decrease in popularity?
In: Technology
Imagine that there’s some cool written work someone wants to share with the world and everyone interested in it has a copier at home that can be used to copy pages of it and also can send pages to other people.
The normal way of doing it would be to have some big place respond to requests from people by sending them copies of all the pages in sequence. But suppose this someone doesn’t have the means to afford a big place.
So the trick is that this someone finds a large bunch of interested people and starts by sending a copy of a different page to each of them. Then each of these interested people has a page they can start copying and sending to other interested people. This way, they distribute the labor and given some time they’ll all end up with a copy of the work – throughout this process, the original someone is still copying and sending pages at some rate, but it builds up. In this entire analogy, the messages contain coordination information – people being able to communicate which pages they’re still missing.
And, when all that is done, then at a later date a newcomer can show up and send out a call into the aether and it’ll be responded to by multiple people each sending some pages that total to the full work.
…that is, assuming there are people left that don’t just opt to say “I’ve got mine, go away” and stop copying and sending out pages once they have the full work themselves.
Latest Answers