Oh, Intertubes. How you provide endless, endless hours of information, stimulation, frustration and, yes, humour!
If you’re a geek and you don’t already, you really need to check out Lifehacker, an invaluable source of tips, trends and other, wired-world ephemera. An intriguing post yesterday tipped us to AreMySitesUp?, a website in which you can enter site addresses and monitor them for possible downtimes. This would be useful for this here place and, perhaps more importantly, the sites at which I work. Eager to check out AreMySitesUp?, I clicked on the link and…
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Oooh, ouch.
In other related news, if you’re a geek — and, seriously, if you’re not? I can’t imagine you’ve read this far — you’re no doubt aware of Microsoft’s new operating system offering, Windows 7, the highly-touted replacement for (the unfairly-maligned) Vista. It’s getting rave early reviews and a much-hyped βeta release was to have been made available with activation keys for the first 2.5 million inquiries last Friday afternoon.
So how’d that go? Not so good (like you didn’t see that coming). Roughly eleventy billion people tried to get both the download and an activation key before the 2.5 mil cutoff and, well, let’s just say that Microsoft’s understanding of the web — and the contempt for Vista which fueled the great interest in Win7 — still, after all these years, leaves much to be desired:
Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.
Sure, hosting a multi-gigabyte download on the web is an enormously expensive undertaking, but Microsoft has more money than God. Plus, while the download itself is large, it’s only of interest to a relatively small portion of the population. If lack of infrastructure to handle an insane traffic spike over a few hours was truly the problem (even though these were conditions Microsoft created), there are lots of alternatives they could’ve used that would have kept their servers up. In fact, users have been happily downloading and distributing the Windows 7 beta build 7000 now for weeks using an efficient file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent.
It’s all good now, for the record. Microsoft shored up their servers, threw those responsible for the woeful underestimation of demand into vats of boiling muriatic acid, extended the offering from 2.5 million keys to anyone who asks and most of us who wanted the download and keys probably already have them by now.
And, really, the problem wasn’t really the multigig download of the product itself — that’s been around for a couple of weeks in TorrentWorld — it was the cherished, limited-in-number, activation keys. So imagine our delight, after wasting considerable time on Friday afternoon and evening, on discovering that…
Well, below is a list of every single activation key for the Windows 7 βeta release:
32Bit W7 Beta Keys:
GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC
QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7
64bit W7 Beta Keys:
RFFTV-J6K7W-MHBQJ-XYMMJ-Q8DCH
482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9
7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
Bet you’re glad you spent the entirety of your Friday P.M. clicking REFRESH on your browser, huh? Even if you were using Check4Change with FireFox, man, what a pain.
ADDENDUM: AreMySitesUp? is… back up. As of 1500EST, 11 January 2009, I mean.
9 comments
Thank you for providing an authentic example of irony, as opposed to the deluded notion that irony is simply ‘rain on your wedding day,’ which makes me cringe every time I hear it.
All of that hoohah for 10 activation keys???
Sheer genius.
I use Vista (Ultimate), mostly because it came with it and all the nifty features the laptop has work seamlessly with it, a matter on which I have much less faith were I to switch to another OS.
It’s definitely unfairly-maligned, and I suspect Windows 7 will be widely perceived to be much worse than it actually is. It’s kind of the default state for Microsoft products – and I have a persistent suspicion that a lot of people’s problems come from not knowing how to use them, or something, because they’re always reputed to be unstable and broken, and I have found 95, ME, XP and Vista alike to be perfectly stable and reliable.
And the various incarnations of Windows are certainly no less stable than the — you knew this was coming — ridiculously overpraised Mac OSes. Don’t get me wrong, I have three Macs at work and they’re lovely machines which get the job done.
But they crash every bit as often as the Winboxes do and, frankly, the much-vaunted “intuitive user interface” gives me gas, as I’ll never understand how anyone can defend, with a straight face, that clicking on a “+” button does not maximize a window but merely makes it a little bigger. “Oh, if you want to maximize the window you just grab the corner and drag it to the size you want.”
Right. Intuitive!
If I had to choose an OS I really enjoy, Ubuntu gets my vote (fast, compact, smart and flexible), but this is the real world and I need to use a wide array of real-world applications that everyone else uses, and that means I need to use Windows. The fact that it does a good job while being needed, too, is icing.
A friend of mine switched to Ubuntu on her PC when her Windows installation got horribly corrupt – she seems to like it a lot, but it probably helps that a lot of her computer use is done on a Macbook, so program incompatibility can be resolved by using a different machine, and her work computer is a PC. (She used to be a PC girl at home, but then she started dating – and eventually married – a severe Mac geek.) I haven’t tried it myself.
I agree with you about the MacOS UI. I found it completely opaque the first times I tried to use it for classes. I eventually got the hang of it when the above friend’s then-boyfriend lent me a Macbook for a while.
I concluded that the problem with the “intuitive” claim is that it’s designed by Mac people, largely for Mac people, and as such, it’s totally intuitive to *them*; to people without Mac experience, it’s really not, and it’s less explicit and open than Windows is about a) telling you how to do things b) letting you know how to fix things when they break c) letting you know about shortcuts to do things. The Windows help system is really quite good, and easy to find. The icons are getting steadily more abstract, it’s true (ironically enough, in ways that seem to be heavily Mac-influenced), but I can still look at the little line, big box, and X on a red background and make conclusions about what they’ll do to my window. (And yes, I DO want one button to maximise, thanks.)
Having said that, though, OS X is a lot less opaque than previous versions were, in ways that seem influenced by… Windows. So it kind of seems that the concept of the Operating System is gradually evolving, and I use that word with care, and finding the forms that are best adapted to surviving in the wild. With cross-platform compatibility getting steadily more widespread and emulation picking up where it leaves off, it’s getting less relevant (to anyone but you) which one you choose anyway.
Oh, also:
My pet peeve about the corner thing?
Why, for the love of all that is good and noble in this world, must it only work with ONE DAMN CORNER? On my PC I can stretch my window at any edge or corner I choose. Not on any Mac I’ve used, oh no. Resize at the bottom right and then move the window, even if all the other edges were exactly where you wanted them to be.
If OSes were religions, I swear MacOS would be Catholicism. It’s all kind of arcane and incomprehensible until you’re properly initiatd, even though it makes perfect sense to you if you grew up with it, and you have to do penance for your sins – in the form of awkward window movements and software incompatibility.
Meanwhile PCs are Protestantism. More mellow, for the most part, but prone to causing problems trying to keep everybody happy that end up with it kind of breaking itself every so often.
*nix is a loose collection of fringe religions and spiritual movements awkwardly sharing the New Age bookshops.
Ubuntu is atheism. Sleek, stylish, appealing to intellectuals, but people who favour the other systems tend to find it a bit lacking.
I am totally stealing your OS-as-religion analogies, Sami. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but if you catch yourself muttering “hey, that’s MINE!” some day, you’ll know who to blame.
Go wild. Analogies want to be free!
I’m okay with yet another Microsoft FAIL