Hoary Download?

[tom scott]

On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 10:53, jfdill_2 wrote:
> I found a link to a mirror site in another post that works and appears
> to have the release version since it's called "ubuntu-5.04" and not
> "hoary-X."  I'm going to see if I can upload the torrents as
> attachments or something, forum admins feel free to do whatever it
> that's not kosher...
> 
> http://ubuntu.mirrors.tds.net/releases/5.04/

I'm feel like the last person at the party to know what's going on. Can someone explains the difference between the mirror downloads and the bitorrents? I downloaded the whole 615307264 bytes from a US mirror at about 500 kbps (about 1/3 DS1 or 8xDS0, which is pretty good for my DSL). Is there an advantage to bitorrent, or maybe better netizen policy so as not to take bandwidth from the mirrors? 

(Background: I tried jigdo once or twice with debian but failed miserably. I never could figure it out. Is bitorrent any easier?)

-- TT