Hey , that ’s fine . The Eddy Awards are about as immanent as it fetch . As we like to say , they ’re a “ sight of editorial predilection . ” essentially , the editors pick what they care . Everyone with an opinion , an interest group , or a blog is free to disagree . ( One blog , for instance , took us to task for award QuarkXPress 6.5 but not InDesign , not understand that the Eddy Awards is limited to products eject in a unmarried year — and InDesign CS did n’t come out last year , but the yr before . )
The biggest surprisal to me this year , though , was the complete lack of brouhaha over one product we gave an Eddy Award to : BitTorrent . Created by Bram Cohen and stylishly take to the Mac by Andrew Loewenstern , BitTorrentwas recently in the word , and not in a ripe way . That ’s because BitTorrent is , at the moment , the top method for pirates to illicitly partake movies , medicine , and software program on the Internet .
So why didMacworldgive an Eddy award to a mathematical product championed by pirates ? Not because we endorse piracy , but because we certify innovative engineering . And BitTorrent is one of the most clever technologies we ’ve run across in recent years .
BitTorrent work by making a waiter out of everyone who ’s downloading a filing cabinet . The death result is that citizenry who are distributing files do n’t get crushed under massive server lading or high bandwidth charges from their inspection and repair providers , and exploiter get relatively rapid downloads because they ’re transferring information from several of their fellow users simultaneously .
Everyone who offers downloads of large files should propose BitTorrent as a file cabinet - transfer choice . secret plan company already use it for distribution of mammoth plot files to beta testers ; software developer really should look into it as a way to distribute large update file far and wide-cut . Hollywood could even take vantage of the construct behind BitTorrent to enable logical dispersion of flick and TV shows on the net .
Yes , right now BitTorrent is largely being used for illicit purposes . But that did n’t block off us from recognizing it as not only a fantastic technology with plenty of logical use , but as an easy to use Mac OS X programme . Here ’s hoping that BitTorrent lives a long living , and grows into a dick that ’s used mostly by the mainstream , and not by the shadowed Hell of moving picture , medicine , and software pirates .
