h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's gone midnight by GMT and I'm still here.

All I can think of is that one part of Orange hasn't told another part to cut me off.

I wonder if I'll still be here in the morning.



* wanders off to set about 3Gb of bits and bobs to torrent *

I bet they'll still charge you for all this "post cut-off" surfing.

I'm paid up until the 11th. Maybe that will be when they cut me off.

What's torrenting?

Are you serious? You don't know what a torrent file and torrenting is?

Ok, well it's a distributed file sharing method. It's main advantge over the moe traditional P2P methods is that the copy of the file that you're downloading does not have to be complete before you start sharing it out with others. This makes the sharing of files faster and the chances of eventually picking up a complete file much higher provided that there is at least one whole copy out there available for copy.

Oh, and I'm still here

Yeah, I'm serious. I don't download stuff like that, so had no idea. I've heard of things called 'bittorrent' cos an old boyfriend used to download movies, but didn't realise the 'torrent' part was important. I download a bit of music every now and then, but mostly the pc is used for studying and writing, h2g2 and other communities and GameFaqs cos we're both useless! And online games in J's case.

A huge wasted resource I know, but we're happy with what we've got.

Glad to see you still here, although I know someone who was kicked off Freeserve many moons ago for downloading albums.

I think it's shortened to "torrent" because calling it "bit" would be confusing.

Good call Bagpuss!

Traveller in Time searching for a sign of online
" . . . . ? "

GD's still got his eyes on

Eye-eye

Traveller in Time keeping track
"And closed again (some minutes ago they were there.)"

And up again

I may or may not have my eyes on here, TiT. But you can rest assured that I will not be breaking my connection to Orange for days and days unless I really have to in fear that I might not be able to get it back again.

Current status - connected for 32 hours, 8 minutes
Received - 3.545Gb
Sent - 0.998Gb

Traveller in Time on his head
"I have no idea why keeping a connection would hinder then in disconnecting you, it will merely show you when they allowed the last packet to pass.

The routing elements like they have to reconfigure to disconnect are only aware of the IP packets all less then 1500 bytes in size. The switch will finishe the last packet and then you are off.
'Connections' over the channel exist only on user level, on the wire or in switches they are non existant. "

Don't let yourself get cut off before the Fantasy Football season is finished, GD! I reckon I've almost caught Demon Drawer!

I've still got the ultra slow Tesco.net link if I do get cut off from here. But I'm not too keen on doing any marking just at the moment after the disappointing results this afternoon and evening

Hey, at least your team isn't down already! I need the Fantasy League to cheer me up!

Think of us poor bereaved lot!

We started getting emails asking us to cut back when I was adventuring in SecondLife for a while.

I'm much better now, thanks for asking

(And watch the Rotherham quips, GD )