Caltrops - Rants





	[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="jeep"]This happened back in the BBS days, it happens with ftp servers, and it happens with torrents. The only place it doesn't happen is usenet, probably due to a combination of noone having any idea what everyone else's ratios are and everyone's speed actually being determined by how much they pay for usenet access (the private ones are faster). I know of very few places where they explicitly refuse download ratios on torrents, and I don't have the bandwidth to fix that (yet). [/quote] When I ran a dial-up BBS I had a download section that you could grab files from freely -- I never understood those sites with 250,000 apps and shareware games that required you to upload first or maintain a ratio. They already had a good portion of what was out there anyway, the hell more did they want? Here you go, I've added the tenth DOS word processing program that required 639K of XMS to run properly, now lemme get #1-KEEN.ARJ please. The place I ran was dominated by posters rather than file guys, so between the hours of around 5:00pm -- 11:00pm I think I had a limit where people could only download files for a half hour at a time (the bunch of us were home from work or school and posted then) but otherwise it was file-sucking time for as long as possible for anyone who logged on. Fussbett said all the reasonable things regarding leechers and Bit Torrent, but it absolutely perplexes me that people smart enough to figure out how to set all this stuff up properly are so fundamentally stupid when it comes to the realization that leechers help and the more of them out there the better. I was tasked with grabbing a new Mandrake ISO sometime last year and if I recall correctly they had set things up so that those who had registered with the MandrakeStore (C) (R) had first crack at it ... through a torrent. Thanks, dummies -- thanks for going out of your way to exclude people that would <i>speed the fucking process up</i> for people like me who gave you money, or had our companies give you money. And these guys were involved with people smart enough to make a nice OS. The desire in geeks for cliques is just as bad, if not worse, than that of the jocks'n'cheerleaders that excluded them so well in high school. Sad. ICJ[/quote]