Now before I start, I'd like to say that I know almost nothing about torrents, how they work or how they're structured. All the torrents I've ever downloaded have taken an incredibly long time, and in all cases, it would have been much faster to download it directly from a site. Why do people use torrents? Why are they so popular?
You get the best torrent experience from private sites such as demonoid and oink, where people are required to seed torrents they download in order to stay members (usually having to keep a 1:1 ratio at least of amount uploaded: amount downloaded). Public trackers are generally shitty because not as many people seed.
Speaking of which could somebody please invite me to demonoid or oink. I've been trying to find someone who's a member for aaaages. But anyway, in answer to your question mcpancakes, there are advantages and disadvantages to torrents. Possibly the biggest advantage being the ability to pause a torrent and start it again later. Unless you use a download manager (most of which are crap) there's just no way you're going to be able to download a 7GB file from a direct download. It would take too long to do it in one go. But with a torrent, I can have that 7GB file, and yes, it'll take a billion times longer to download but it means I don't have to leave my computer on for days at a time. Torrents have become evermore popular due to copyright law as well. A website hosting episodes of Heroes for example will probably get shut down before too long. With a torrent however it's a completely different story. Especially with sites like The Pirate Bay telling every company that contacts them with a warning to essentially shove it up their ass. That reason alone is why torrents are so popular. Personally, I love the things, and I don't think they're unbearably slow. I can get a full episode of Heroes in a couple hours. That's fine by me.
With a torrent, you download from multiple peers, and in pieces of a file. So you could be downloading one piece from someone who's uploading to you at 50kbps and another piece from someone who's uploading to you at 300kbps, etc etc. Unlike with websites, you don't rely on a single source. A website doesn't have infinite bandwidth and speed to upload to you. So if hundreds of people are downloading from that website, your speed will be diluted to a mere 50kbps, if you're lucky. Torrents are generally better, depending on how many seeders there are. I wish you luck if you're trying to download a really popular file off a shitty web server.
It should also be noted that torrents as far as I know have no protection or encryption whatsoever. If your downloading copyrighted material, and the torrent is being watched by the powers that be, you will be caught plain and simple. Anyone on a torrent can see the IPs of anyone else on the torrent. That's all it takes. It's typically very insecure. Nonetheless, torrents are a much more efficient way to download typically.
there are programs you can get, one in particular that works EXTREMELY well it updates almost everyday with new government IP's and other IP's that could be dangerous to you whilst Torrenting. its called Peer Guardian 2 here is link http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ Read more on the website for more info
Does that option you've taken a screen capture of Tomi allow people to toggle whether or not their IP is displayed?
You cannot hide your IP address from other BitTorrent users. It is impossible. Unless you use something like a proxy or Tor, both of which can be pretty slow
Your IP address is display wherever you go. It's transmitted on ALL protocols. Chatting on MSN, updating on Windows Update, browsing any website, connecting to a torrent -- they all get your IP address. The only way to hide your true IP address is to go through a 3rd party - a proxy. But that's going to be slow like Todd said considering you first have to connect to the [usually slow] proxy then the proxy serves you the content in question. [btw, before you ask: Tor is a networks of proxies which you connect to giving you a random proxy in intervals.]
For speed, direct is always the best, but bittorrent has much more to offer.. Oh.. and Tor is completely saturated with authorities gathering evidence.. just so you know
I'll hafta say that torrents kick so much more ass. There's a lot of content that can be found out there if you're looking to use torrents, whereas direct download sites...well, they usually get shut down for copyright violation, since they're actually hosting the file. Torrent sites aren't hosting the file itself...they're just trackers...so while companies can threaten, etc, they can't really do as much as they can if you actually have the damn thing on your server. torrents ftw.
Well, if you're downloading from a good server aka Microsoft's servers/Apple's servers then it'll probably max out your bandwidth, giving you pretty good speeds . If you torrent, you can probably get pretty good speeds if you use a good tracker like Demonoid's ones. Just like JNudda said, public trackers suck. Also, many hackers lurk on public trackers which is one of the disadvantages of torrenting, that it may reveal your IP to a potential hacker (believe me, it's happened to me twice). I think torrent websites like Demonoid, Oink and Blackcats ban hackers IPs though. But overall, I'd say torrenting is much better.