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Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages
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."
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.
Because it's what 80% of the world will be running in about a year?
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.
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East Coast developer tries to download the ISO during his lunch break. It ain't gonna happen.
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?
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But that was the point of Vista: to make whatever came next look revolutionary.
Of course, if this had happened during an RC release of a major Linux distro, the comments would be more along the lines of "zomgwtfbbq, Linux is so popular now the masses can't get hold of it fast enough" whereas since it's a Windows RC being released, people are taking the opportunity to flame like idiots instead.
Doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the FOSS community.
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