Even now I do the same. In india direct downloads are slightly slower. I guess it's to do with the mirror location or something else. Torrent makes it much faster
Same in China. The Chinese firewall throttles TCP connections making direct downloads very slow. Not uncommon to have an unbearable slow connection while browsing web pages and then when starting a torrent download, you immediately get 2 Megabytes per second download speeds here.
>My name is Eriberto and I am not a C developer. I imported Axel from its old repository[1] to GitHub (the original homepage and developers are inactive)
Uh oh. Thanks to the repo owner for updating the README, but that's not a good situation.
Oh, I know that programmers and hackers and whatnot knew torrents were cool; I'm talking about non-technical people.
For example, until fairly recently, if I mentioned a "torrent" to my non-technical mom, she would assume I meant ThePirateBay or something like that. Nowadays, she knows it as just another means to download files.
That's a fair point; I guess what I was trying to get at is that when I worked for NYU, I think it would have been an incredibly tough sell to use torrents in any capacity, because of the stigma of piracy. However, I think if I were to pitch it now, there would be serious consideration.
A huge number of games used torrents for patching since around that time, notably in the MMO scene. WoW and every Nexon game come to mind. AFAIK the Battle.net launcher still downloads updates via torrent.
The Blizzard updater is actually a very cool download utility, worth hacking/poking at.
AFAIK it pioneered the concept of "web seeds", using HTTP GETs with a Range: header to download specific chunks from a CDN that were not healthy/available in the swarm.
