Quote Originally Posted by mami_hacky
This is unfortunately the problem of our entire country.
I still don't understand what type of service this is that you speak of. Are you saying that even with your own Internet account that you pay a service provider for, you have ports blocked that keep you from doing much other than just use a browser, and this is true no matter which Internet Service Provider you use? Can you use Skype? Or IRC? Or Net meeting? I've seen statistics that indicate that more than half of all internet traffic, by volume, is now BitTorrent traffic. It's just amazing to me that people paying for Internet accounts would be willing to miss most of the Internet.

I had not heard of the term rapidshare, but a Google search tells me that you are talking about a free Gerrman website for posting files. Because they limit the size of any one file uploaded, huge files must be split into many parts. So this explains why people use rar files to split large files there. But in general the rest of the world can use BitTorrent, or they can download by FTP or HTML and if needed they can stop and resume their downloads. In such a case, making a rar archive only adds an extra step of complexity to the download process, one that, unfortunately but true, would confuse a lot of people and add increase the support requests for anyone offering downloads and offering support, and is not justified by the bandwidth savings that a compressed rar file set would offer. Cleary someone could post a rar set of the Knoppix DVD, or even the CD, if they felt there was the need, but I don't see this being done by anyone for Knoppix, and I still don't see RARs used by anyone posting their own files, just by people posting in news groups or now on this rapidshare website that restricts upload size.