BitTorrent

While downloading the Halo gameplace demo, I came across BitTorrent. Talk about a cool P2P program! I think MSDN really needs to do something like this with their download manager.

For those who don't know what bittorrent is, it is a P2P download app. Basically, you just click to download a file like normal, but then bittorent manages the download and finds other people downloading the same file at the same time and all the peers communicate, downloading random chunks of the file and relaying them to each other, so that you get a significantly higher transfer rate than if you were just downloading from the server. The best part about it is that it only runs for the duration of the download (unlike Kazaa, Napster, etc.) and doesn't install anything but this little download manager (basically just a dialog with a progress bar). Its open source too, so the price is right.