30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft representative said.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That’s 500 percent more than what was expected,” the representative said. “The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Although Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the “technical refresh,” or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the representative said.

In related news, the rest of the world’s population asked, “Wait, is the world’s richest man asking me to help pay his bandwidth bill??”

In other related news, some anonymous “representative” was later reamed out for causing even more people to download the beta, install it, and think “Huh, weird” and then never both to launch it again.

The article went on to say:

Those who want to test drive Beta 2 to see how it works can access the software for free, but if they want to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required.

If that sentence (ahem) left you bumfuzzled, what the author meant to say is: “If you want to check out how Office works when running inside Internet Explorer on Windows 98, 2000, or XP, you can checkout the online test drive of Office 2007 but if you want to be able to use it offline or without loading up an overly bloated software suite on an overly bloated browser, you’ll be wanting the download vesion.”

Finally, said Microsoft Lackey:

The fee marks the first time Microsoft has charged for a download version of an Office beta, the representative said, noting that customers have long had to pay the shipping and handling costs for CD versions of betas.

Well golly gee Captain Non Sequitor, could that be because you were actually sticking a real live CD into a real live envelope and putting it in the real live mail?

So Microsoft is suffering from the success of a huge download, eh? Gee it’s too bad no one has invented some sort of a distributed system for downloading large files so no one person gets socked with the bandwidth charges . And gee, wouldn’t it be great if, oh I don’t know, maybe some browser supported said “hypothetical” protocol so you could download this enormous just like any other?

Well, maybe someday, until then we can only dream.

UPDATE 2006-09-18: Gee, maybe the reason that their bandwidth charges are so high is that they don’t allow restarting of transfers! I was trying to download Vista RC1 last night and it stopped after 2307866624 bytes of 2709782528 bytes (2.2GB out of 2.6GB). I was downloading it from their webpage http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm which I provide for you to verify what I am about to tell you.

On that page you are offered the choice of downloading the 32-bit version of Vista either via “Your Browser” or via this:

Microsoft has partnered with Akamai Technologies to provide a Download Manager to help you get the ISO file for Windows Vista RC1. This Akamai Download Manager lets you pause, resume, and stop the download of the file. It will also automatically restart the download if the process is temporarily interrupted. Due to the size of the download we strongly recommend you use the Akamai Download Manager.

You may be prompted to accept a signed ActiveX control or Java™ applet in your browser. These have been signed by "Akamai Technologies, Inc." and verified by VeriSign, Inc. Please accept to install the Download Manager. (Additional details are included below.)

Ok, so as any Mac user will tell you, we don’t do ActiveX. So anyone downloading this on a Mac is probably going to choose the “Use Your Browser” links.

I assumed (incorrectly) that the Akamai Technologies Download Manager “Now with ActiveX!” would be some special link, and therefore did not try it.

When my “Use Your Download” version failed, I tried to restart it using my browser, but the option was not available. I tried wget (a commandline tool to download files which has a -c flag which lets you “continue” your download). I included the proper “referer” field (yes I can spell, see below) . It did not work.

In desperation not to have to download 2+GB if I don’t have to, I went back and looked at the “Akamai Technologies Download Manager” version.

Here’s what I learned: The “Download Manager” version is a slightly different path to the same file. “How slightly?” you ask. Go ahead, ask... 3 characters!

Here is the original URL that I had tried (NOTE: I replaced each / with a new line break for readability):
http://download.windowsvista.com
dl
preview
rc1
en
x86
iso
vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso

Here is the special “Download Manager” url, formatted the same way:
http://download.windowsvista.com
preview
rc1
en
x86
iso
vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso

You could be forgiven for missing the difference between the two, which is that first line after the http:// where the “Download with your browser” link has “dl”. Other than that, the two paths are identical.

With one technical difference in implementation.

If you, with your browser, download from the “regular” link, and the download fails, you will not be able to continue that download.

However, if you, with your browser download from “special” link, and the download fails, you will be able to continue that download.

“Well wait” you protest... Go ahead, protest... “Microsoft TOLD YOU to use the “Special” link if you wanted to be able to pause and restart! They are just doing what they said they would!”

As Obi-Wan said “That was true...from a certain point of view.” # . Actually what they said was that if I wanted to use the download manager I’d need ActiveX, which I don’t. And there is no technical reason why the “Download with your Browser” can’t offer the “Restart” function.

Hrm. Unless the site is running Microsoft’s IIS and it can’t handle it? Who knows.

Anyway, I was able to continue my download which I started from the “regular” link by using the “special” link and wget. The details follow for the wget virgins among us:

wget -c http://download.windowsvista.com/ preview/ rc1/ en /x86 /iso / vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso --referer=http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm

NOTE: The spaces after the / in the previous paragraph were inserted for readability.

What does it say? Well, it says that “Using wget I want to continue (-c) to download the file at (insert really long Microsoft URL here, or use http://tinyurl.com/odwvn instead) and you should tell the server that I am coming from the page http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm”

Here’s the really ironic part. When I used “wget” it told me that the file had been moved (HTTP response 302 Moved Temporarily) to.... the other URL which doesn’t support restarting downloads. (See wget’s output for details).

So all they have done, somehow, is made it impossible to continue downloading file “X” unless you use their special link, for no particular reason that I can understand. All I can say is that my attempts at doing the same wget command failed repeatedly when I tried the “regular” link.

Do note that if your browser obfuscates the downloaded filename before it is completed, you should have used Opera. It downloads the file in place (no random temporary file stuffed somewhere else on your filesystem). I was able to continue my Opera-initiated download using 'wget' and only had to download 383MB instead of 2.5GB.

Restarting http transfers has been around for how many years? Oh Microsoft, you continue to innovate new ways to baffle me. Can it be that perhaps your own browser doesn’t support restarting downloads and that is why you claim to need this special ActiveX functionality?

Now I realize the original part of this article was about Microsoft charging people to download Office not Vista, but the reasoning given was that the downloads had been taxing their servers (and presumably bandwidth). One cannot help but wonder how many failed downloads contributed to that bill.

Footnotes:

1. Note that I corrected the grammar of the sentence for you, Constant Reader, because I love you so...and also because it annoys me when people break up sentences when they don’t have to. Or shouldn’t. ↩
2. Yes that was intentional.
3. Footnote: Yes “referer” is a misspelling of “referrer” and no I was not wrong to spell it that way. See Wikipedia on Referer for the geeky boring reason why. ↩
4. Yes I succumbed to the Dark Side of George Lucas’s need to squeeze every last dime from Star Wars fans and bought the new DVDs with the “old” (read: original) version of the Star Wars trilogy (read: “The Original Trilogy... You know, the one that didn’t suck”?). Having watched the originals, you know what I learned? They didn’t need changing. Sure add your special sound effects and graphics to the explosions if you will, but the dialog did not need to be changed, the extra scenes did not need to be added, and history did not need to be revised. Han shot Greedo. Why is that bad? Greedo had a gun pointed at him and was trying to extort him. (Note: Speaking of the Dark Side... Wal-Mart has special edition comic books that come free with the DVDs. I figured as long as I was giving over my soul and my money to George Lucas, I might as well give a little to the new evil empire that is Wal-Mart too.) ↩