[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Paul Sutton wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > jon.davey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> Tom Potts writes: >> >>> On Wednesday 04 March 2009 09:15, Gordon Henderson wrote: >>> >>>> On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Rob Beard wrote: >>>> >>>>> Hi folks, >>>>> >>>> This came up on the Ubuntu-UK mailing list... >>>> >>>>> http://www.tuxradar.com/content/linux-format-free-download-24-hours-only >>>>> >>>> It seems that at midnight you'll be able to download a free PDF of the >>>> >>>>> current issue* of Linux Format for free. >>>>> >>>> Does anyone else here find it a bit weird that it's supplied as a ZIP file >>>> rather than tar.gz (or tar.bz2?) >>>> >>> PDF,ZIP, very expensive mag about free software... >>> doesn't sound inaproprietary to me... >>> Tom te tom te tom >>> >>> >> ..I just downloaded it and apparently it's a torrent file? >> Jon >> >> >> > i dragged / dropped it into ktorrent, however despite the good > intentions of linux format people not to have people copy it, once > downloaded it auto seeds. > > perhaps they should have simply had a pdf download. > > Paul > > Yes that's exactly how Bit Torrent works. The idea is you seed as much as you have downloaded (or if you're nice, more than you have downloaded). For something like this I could see it would save them a whole load of money on bandwidth. At the moment there appears to be 1820 seeds, so that's about 220GB transferred (that's the hi-res 124MB PDF). That's a whole lotta bandwidth which ain't cheap. Sure Google and Microsoft etc might be able to handle that amount of traffic but I doubt a publisher such as Future Publishing could spare the resources to give that away for free. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html