How peer to peer will change

The Future of Peer to Peer

By XXpiratexxon





P2P -- which essentially abandons the networking notions of separate "clients" and "servers" and instead allows every networked machine to connect to another machine -- will not only be huge, they said, it will be revolutionary.





How peer to peer works

BitTorrent: .torrent files are used to store information about the file being shared. Once a torrent file is opened, the client connects to the tracker which tells the client where the file is located and what other peers/seeders there are. BitTorrent works by chunks of small files being transferred (even through multiple connections), while you are downloading. The files are checked for corruption as the download continues. Leechers are people who download and don't upload, and are highly frowned upon on some sites, disallowing them from downloading any further.
Advantages: Very fast for popular, new files.
Disadvantages: Trackers are unreliable and if it goes down, the file is lost.
Clients include: Azureus (www.azureus.com), Shareaza (www.shareaza.com).



BitTorrent is a protocol that enables fast downloading of large files using minimum Internet bandwidth. It costs nothing to use and includes no spyware or pop-up advertising.

Unlike other download methods, BitTorrent maximizes transfer speed by gathering pieces of the file you want and downloading these pieces simultaneously from people who already have them. This process makes popular and very large files, such as videos and television programs, download much faster than is possible with other protocols.

In this article, we'll examine how BitTorrent works and how it is different from other file-distribution methods. In addition, you'll learn how to use BitTorrent and what the future might hold for this innovative approach to serving files over the Internet.

Traditional Client-Server Downloading
To understand how BitTorrent works and why it is different from other file-serving methods, let's examine what happens when you download a file from a Web site. It works something like this:

* You open a Web page and click a link to download a file to your computer.
* The Web browser software on your computer (the client) tells the server (a central computer that holds the Web page and the file you want to download) to transfer a copy of the file to your computer.
* The transfer is handled by a protocol (a set of rules), such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).


Client-server download process


Now this is just a brief summary of all this works. If you really want to know how everything works just Google it. This article is about how Peer to Peer might change in the future. Now the future of peer to peer networking might look something like Onlive. Basically on here as long as you have a good connection you can play any game no matter what graphics card you have. Go check it out. Also go http://www.onlive.com/service/hot_new_games.html thy have a list of games online. Now this site is not up yet but this will revolutionize peer to peer as well. Because as devices are getting smaller and everything is going more portable and many of us don't have to much money to keep up with the technology, then streaming movies and being able to play games without the latest graphics card is probably the way to go. Just like now Google has google documents. Or maybe direct downloading will take over, depending on how much money someone has. But my guess is that streaming and and things like onlive or Google documents will be the future of the way we use computers, and or handhelds. NOw peer to peer may still be around for a while. But not to much longer. Just like everything else peer to peer will change, but the traditional way of sharing files might still be around.



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thanks for the share, now i have a better understanding of this!