Mozilla ate my original post. That and the Labtam with only 16meg of ram and a 256 color display.

BitTorrent

I tried out the Mandrake 9.1 torrent, and was suitably impressed. Speeds of up to 350kb/s, it finished in a few hours. It'd be nice if BitTorrent told you the total time taken and average speed when the download finished. I'll use BT to get RedHat 9 early, in an attempt to stop the steady trickle of posts saying "Has anyone mirrored RedHat locally" that follow after every release.

On a related note, Stewart Fist believes that domestic phone calls should be free in Australia. He cites an unreleased report that claims the cost of running the actual network is less than the cost of tracking all the calls, sending out bills, and all the other billing-associated costs. The one time I've set up a network to do billing, it was a right PITA, and dramatically complicated the configuration. So perhaps tjansen, the trend will be towards flat-rate charging in the future (although this is voice calls, not data). Also, many people can't afford/don't have the expertise to colocate a server for cheap bandwidth. Which leads into the other reason to use BitTorrent on ADSL (or cable) - every little bit helps, and far more people have ADSL (or cable) than colocate servers on fast pipes.