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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."
I suspected the end user alpha release being "slashdotted" was a lame marketing game but if MSDN goes down, MS can't really maintain it, for real. For obvious reasons, they won't do the logical choice of running light httpd (Unix, God forbid) or similar on download server, they won't even bother calling Akamai.
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though. Thanks to MPAA/RIAA and various ISPs, P2P, especially torrent is an issue for large companies. If Apple used P2P to distribute very large OS updates (e.g. combo ones, XCode), we could blame MS for not using the option. Ask Apple why they don't use.
BTW lets say you find a torrent from 3rd party, did the MS post its checksum (whatever system they use) to the download page or somewhere at site? I mean it doesn't look very right to "pirate" an operating system which has a huge industry abusing it. People torrenting it should either get MD5 from a trusted friend or MS. There are several "trojaned" Windows out there. It is the easiest way to have your own zombie army.
Apple could embed libtorrent and use its functionality (just like rtorrent) in Software Update which is a dedicated GUI application. Perhaps they know all kinds of junk will happen to their customers such as throttling, letters and even "cable modem freeze" the day they use that system for such general purpose operating system updates.
It is not simplicity, we have a company which can pack Mach/NeXT/FreeBSD and Carbon, get Unix 03 certificate and sell it as "World's easiest operating system". They sure know how to make things look simple.
How is this a screw up on their part again? They release a preview of the next os and there is so much interest in it that they can't keep up with demand. That sounds like they did something right to get that kind of attention. Also Vista was released 2 years ago. I know it's fashionable to complain about MS but a 2 year cycle doesn't sound like rushing it out.
Forget everything, can you believe the lemmings download it from Pirate sites? An operating system?
I downloaded a copy of Vista 64 from a demonoid.com torrent. Already had a legit key from MSDNAA, just didn't have a copy of the x64 version. Microsoft puts the SHA1 sum for the ISO file on their MSDN site, so you can verify that it's an untampered copy. A bit like that cheesy scene (one of many) from the movie Swordfish, where Travolta barks to one of his cronies "Verify this!" and, after a pause, the computer dude says "Verified!". Fuck, that movie was fucking awful.
Or are you suggesting that you can slip in a trojan and still get the SHA1 sum to match, using some collision that nobody else knows about?