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With Microsoft struggling to keep up with the demand for Windows Vista Beta 2, tech personality Chris Pirillo has taken the initiative to publish the 3.2-gigabite download using BitTorent. But Microsoft recommends against using a third party to obtain Vista code.

Those eager to try out the first public release of Microsoft's next generation operating system have been met with slow download speeds and timeouts. The Redmond company has even recommended that users place an order for a DVD copy rather than deal with the download wait times.

In turn, Pirillo and Jake Ludington have setup VistaTorrent.com to serve a torrent of Beta 2. Users can take advantage of the decentralized peer-to-peer technology to download at much faster speeds than Microsoft is currently able to offer.

An MD5 hash is also provided to enable users to verify their ISO after it finishes downloading. "This is not a crack, this is not a hack, this is not software piracy - it's unofficial mirroring with official validation," the site says.

"We were told, in a certain amount of words, that they had considered BitTorrent to distribute the ISO, did not, and were likely not going to stop it from happening. Their current situation seems dire from anybody's perspective," Pirillo told BetaNews. "It's been on BitTorrent networks from the beginning."

But Microsoft is wary about Vista coming from any unofficial source. The company did not say, however, whether it would ask Pirillo to take the torrent file offline or cease using its trademarks.

"We are excited by the high demand for Windows Vista beta 2 code. While we understand people may be looking for faster ways to download it due to the high demand, we continue to encourage anyone interested in receiving the code to visit the Web site to either download the beta or order the DVD," Mike Burk, product manager for Windows Client, responded to BetaNews inquiries.

Microsoft product manager Aaron Coldiron said that if the company pushed out the Vista Beta 2 downloads any faster, users would see a measurable impact on Internet performance worldwide, which could affect World Cup viewing and more.

"Every member of the Windows community thought it was an oversight that Microsoft didn't use BitTorrent to distribute such a large file - a belief that was only reinforced after they asked users to get the DVD instead of trying to download it," added Pirillo. "The situation won't get better for them if they ask us to stop trying to help. We'd much rather work with them on this than abandon the idea altogether."

Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips. Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in. Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions. Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings. Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations.

Changes @ v4.0: New user interface

Download Google Earth

A new proof of concept bug was outlined this week, something in javascript called an "'OnKeyDown" event", that can be found in the popular Mozilla based browsers and also in Internet Explorer, windows and linux. Although not rated all that critical, because it requires user interaction to trigger the exploit, the vendors are supposedly working on a patch. The findings came on the full disclosure mailing list.

You can benchmark Apache, IIS and other web server with apache benchmarking tool called ab.

To benchmark a web server the time it takes to serve a page is not important: you don’t care if a user can have his page in 0.1 ms or in 0.05 ms as nobody can have such delays on the Internet.

What is important is the average time it will take when you have a maximum number of users on your site simultaneously. Another important thing is how much more time it will take when there are twice as many users: a server that take 2 times more for 2 times more users is better than another that take 4 times more for the same number of users.

Are you puzzled by strange blogging terms and unusual blog abbreviations and blogging acronyms? Then this post will get the Blargon Demystified. This article attempts to simplify some common blogging terms organized into a simple blogging glossary. Only common and popular blog tools and services have been included.

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