fractalnavel

i normally get my binaries from bt, but a couple of things have been taking their time showing up, so i checked the binary newsgroups.  now, i never do this, so i have no idea what i'm doing.  first i had to find a news server that i had access to. luckily, local roadrunner has one, albeit with low retention times (3 days for binaries).  then i tried to use outlook express, which was quickly apparent to be a losing proposition.  so i went ahead and downloaded a trial binary grabber; i should look around for something open source, but i'm not planning (for now) to be doing a lot of this, so any old thing would do.  works real well, and the nice part is that because i'm using the rr news server, i can saturate my bandwidth.  beats the crap out of tweaking bt to try and get max throughput, and still rarely getting to the edge.  ftp from someone's personal server would be even worse, with the asymmetric broadband speeds we have (5mbps in / 384kbps out).  next i had to learn about incomplete files and parity / repair files.  that takes yet another program.  again, it worked pretty slick, and i ended up with workable file sets.  next step is to unpack / combine them, which is something i do have the program for.  of course, the last step is to clean up all the excess intermediate files that get tracked through all this. 

this is only the consumer side of things; good thing i don't have to deal with the production end.

no, i don't think i'll create torrents.  or will i ?  hmm...