cobolhacker.com

Because I am so nice, I thought I’d post a link to PodTech to help them along with their Scoble-powered server stress test. Mind you, it doesn’t look good for a webcaster if their servers can’t take a beating like that, but hey, what do I know? Someone referred to the whole affair as the ‘Scoble-effect’, but I think ‘Scoblized‘ sounds so much hipper. Better check the load distribution on that router before yer totally Scobleized. I like that. It’s interesting that the PodTech site couldn’t take it and yet Scoble’s own blog, hosted over on Wordpress.com, continues to truck merrily along.

Well… now I’m just rambling. Anyway, this reminds me of another experience I had with a busy site the other day.

Like many in the trenches of the IT industry, I figured that I too should get me a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 so I can poke at it (I want to see if it will run on a Pentium 3 800). I personally don’t plan to run Vista, but I imagine I’ll be installing it on plenty of customer machines (smiling the whole time — I’m going to make a stupid amount of money selling RAM and video cards, hehe).

Downloading Vista from Microsoft is not as easy as you might think at first. Microsoft has this dreadfully complicated procedure for getting the download. You have to sign up at a website, give it some personal information, feed it your email address, respond to an email, get a product key (for a beta?!) and then you get to download it. Well, except that last part didn’t work for me. The website told me plainly that the servers are too busy. I’m a little bit surprised that a single beta download has broken Microsoft. Are there that many people downloading it? It doesn’t look good for a technology company if they can’t keep up with a beta download, but hey, what do I know?

One might wonder why they don’t just use Bittorrent to distribute the thing like the open source folks do with Linux. Apparently blogger Chris Pirillo had this very same thought:

When I asked why they couldn’t just seed it as a torrent (BitTorrent), Aaron responded:

There are legal and privacy issues which unfortunately make that not an option for Microsoft to officially sponsor a BitTorrent. I really wish we could do it, but we can’t. If someone [seeds or downloads a torrent] we can’t guarantee that they’ve got an unaltered copy, etc.

Apparently they’ve never heard of MD5sum, SHA-1, or any of the various checksum systems which you can get for free. I can’t speak for other people, but I for one would pick a torrent called “Windows Vista Beta 2 – Microsoft Official” over something called “VISTA.BETA2.corp.WGAcrackd.[DVD].L33tH/\X0rs.POOKi.rar”. I guess they figured that the legions of nerds downloading it were too stupid to figure all this out. So instead, they force everyone into direct downloading, overloading their servers and bandwidth, and ultimately leaving me with no copy of Vista to play with.

So how does one fix this? Simple. You download the torrent. Someone was bound to put it up anyway. Someone with a MSDN account, I’ll bet. They got their DVDs mailed to them a while back. We sparked up Bittorrent at the shop and had all 2.7GB of it in a few hours. We probably had it before most of the suckers downloading directly did.