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Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay
Z80xxc! writes "The Windows 7 Beta release is now available for download by the general public, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Microsoft had previously announced availability around 3 PM PST on Friday, but after unexpected numbers of people proved to be interested in the download, had to postpone it to add more servers."
Microsoft exec Bill Veghte confirms here that Windows 7 is just a service pack for Vista: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10112149-56.html
Here is a link to the download of the much improved operating system.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Perhaps they are distributing the same five keys to 2.5 million people?
But the more interesting part of this situation is the question "why are they doing this?" I think they originally meant to grant individual keys but their infrastructure (webservers, keygen systems, database, fileservers, ??) couldn't keep up. So they basically started serving a cached set of ten static HTML pages to incoming requests.
Even more troublesome, their engineering/support groups couldn't respond quickly enough to solve the issues so they kept pushing the "release" date/time back further and further before apparently giving up and going with the cached keys.
This is nothing short of a debacle -- a failure in planning and execution and a breakdown in communication, probably internally, but certainly to the userbase.
I wonder how many potential customers they just lost from this experience? How many folks will decide "I'm tired of this nonsense" and go buy a Mac?
I feel bad for the chairs in Steve Balmer's office -- they're in for a beating.
WTF are you on about? Virtual desktops have been in Windows since Win95.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
How das Vista take control from you? Assuming you did the reasonable thing and created a non-admin user on your XP machine you'll actually have less problems with "control" than before - UAC is a change for the better if you're used to XP's rights management.
Care to stop being a Microsoft troll? There are things like download managers that have workable pause/resume features as long as the source site isn't completely full of fail (which might be the problem here), and have you ever heard of MD5sum files?
Take your head out of Steve Ballmer's ass and smell the fresh scent of the rest of the computer world that does things in a sane, reasonable way. We're not all retarded sheep that have to do things fucking backward.
Yes, I'm pissed off at you fucking Microsoft users that insist that everything MS shits out is gold. Course, most of you are fucking viral marketers/professional trolls hired by Microsoft to save their fucking sinking ship by trying to convince everyone 7 is anything but what it really is, Vista with a new fucking skin.
Call me a troll, I don't care. If it's trollish to tell the fucking truth, then fine, I'm a goddamn troll.
It didn't declare anything about non-Microsoft devices or invade/bomb a foreign country, but it did attempt to exterminate the Jews.