Three 90-day trials from Microsoft for Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 R2, and MS Exchange Server 2010.

Just in case this is of use to anyone

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Now playing: Metallica – Breadfan
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I’m still happy with the capabilities of torrent-for-business models – with many downloads now weighing in at multi-gigabyte levels, it makes sense, even for World of Warcraft updates / installs, which have long used the technology. But things are changing with the relative need for even centralized “trackers” :

The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.

By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:

• With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
• With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don’t need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

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I can even imagine this extended a bit to house educational video clips, distributed. Perhaps not as easily streamed, but certainly viable as a file-based video download approach. c.f. http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/word-camp.aspx for an example; not sure how much they captured, but as I’ve said there is little reason these days not to capture the vast majority of it these days, given low space costs and the huge userbase of WordPress.

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Now playing: Monty Python – Interlude 2
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