Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages 186
CWmike writes "Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet paid subscribers were supposed to find the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 RC available for download today. But in a snafu reminiscent of the problems Microsoft had in January when it tried to launch Windows 7 Beta, the download pages for the release candidate were inaccessible, despite numerous attempts over an hour-long span up until about noon Eastern. TechNet and MSDN subscribers were not happy. 'Man, this stinks,' said a user identified as Lyle Pratt, on a TechNet message forum at 10 a.m. ET. 'I can't believe we can still bring MSDN to its knees!' said John Butler, a Microsoft partner. 'Surely, they should be able to deal with this? Not a good advert for Microsoft.' The Windows 7 RC is slated to be available for public download next Tuesday, May 5. Meanwhile, Microsoft said today that the RC would operate until June 2010, for 13 months of free use — a significantly longer time than it did with Vista's previews."
Not thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft releases Vista/2008 SP2 AND Windows 7 RC AND Windows 2008 R2 RC AND Virtual PC RC AND the Windows 7 SDK on the same day and they don't expect to have bandwidth problems?
Geez, what were they thinking? SP2 should have come out on RTM day, that would at least cut a few hundred mb downloads out of the picture.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's what 80% of the world will be running in about a year?
Re:ITS A TRAP!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Does your XP disc dissolve at some point in the next 13 months?
If you're smart enough to get the RC running, you know how to re-install XP.
They should have provided a torrent (Score:5, Insightful)
No joke. They should have provided a torrent. This type of distribution is what bittorrent excels at. It would have provided everyone with a better experience and saved MS some bandwidth.
Patience is a virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called Content Delivery Network, and in this case, Microsoft are using Akamai. Bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. I'm downloading Win 7 right now. People need to get a life... so what if they can't download at this very moment an RC of an unreleased OS? This isn't story isn't news; move on.
Funny way to turn the pirates over to their side. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems Microsoft might be trying to make the best of a bad situation when it comes to people pirating their software, but turning them into beta testers. Sure you have to give them something for free but in the end you'll get a whole lot of people who would just pirate your software anyway doing a whole lot of free QA for you. Pretty smart move if you ask me.
Funnily enough I didn't hear anything about Microsoft pursuing the Pirate Bay for hosting the torrent of their latest builds, which seems to support this theory. Anyone seen anything?
Re:Not thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
In "consumer alpha" slashdotting issue, people found the file and posted its link, directly from Akamai. Sorry for forgetting it in my post. The link worked perfectly and they downloaded it very good speed.
You know what was the issue? Their Windows server processing, the "key generation" part and the "passport sign in" part. It could be similar issue today and if you ask me, if it is the issue, people trusting their scalability issues (win 2008 downloaders) should think again.
Re:They should have provided a torrent (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably have CONTRACTS with Akamai.
You know, CONTRACTS that state something along th elines of "You gotta give us ur moneys all teh time you do major content delivery.".
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
But that was the point of Vista: to make whatever came next look revolutionary.
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yet, Vista's market share is still growing. GNU/Linux? Comatose, like always.
Good God, the Microsoft astroturfers are out in force today, aren't they?
Re:Surprise Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Torrent? (Score:1, Insightful)
What happens if I'm updating an old box and there's like, one seed running at microsoft or apple.com and I get 2kbytes/second because I'm in the middle of nowhere?!
I don't see how this is any different from having one server at microsoft.com or apple.com handling your file request. Actually, the difference is that BitTorrent gives you the possibility of more bandwidth than microsoft or apple can provide alone.
Torrenting also has implications to their EULAs, many of which state you're not allowed to redistribute. Torrenting, imho, implies that you are granted a redistribution right, which is something that I suspect they'd prefer to avoid.
That's easily handled with a single line to their EULA: "Updates are distributed via the tracker.microsoft.com BitTorrent network, and you are granted a license to redistribute updates via tracker.microsoft.com. You are not granted any other distribution rights not explicitly granted elsewhere in this document"
A lawyer can deal with the specifics of the language, but the clear point is that they can license distribution via a specific channel -- via torrents downloaded from their tracker -- without granting a full distribution license.
Typical /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the FOSS community.