BitTorrent-Style Updates Revealed in Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent-Style Updates Revealed in Windows 10

torrentfreak.com

67 pointsevo_947 comments

Windows 10 is looking like the Windows 8 that should have been. I'm especially interested in the OneGet module of PS 5 and package management that they'll be working on for it. A Linuxified Windows would be pretty interesting.

Why exactly do I see "leaked" in front of Windows 10 so often when one can download the tech preview relatively easily?

There are still leaked builds that are newer than the public Windows 10 builds.

I remember repeating the already-common joke around the time of Windows XP to my middle school Computer Hardware teacher that "Every OTHER Windows release is good." Vista/Windows 7 appeared to cement that, and Windows 8 / Windows 10 just seems like further proof.

To me, it seems like a marketing strategy on MS's part. They know people expect good things from even releases and bad things from odd releases. I think they capitalize on that.

I think you may be attributing to malice what could be better explained by stupidity :-)

It is actually Windows 8/8.1/10

Windows 8.1 is better than plain 8, I run it and it still needs work and I use the Classic Start program to get the Start Menu back, but 8.1 works better than 8.

I suspect there will also be a 10.1 to replace 10.

Are we considering 8.1 actually distinct from 8, or merely the equivalent of the old service packs? Because even on MS's "good" releases, it wasn't until Windows 98 SE that '98 got good. And it took Windows XP until Service Pack 2 before it was good enough to upgrade from '98.

It is like Windows 8.1 is both a service pack and new OS version. You can call it a service pack if you wish but Microsoft stopped using service packs with Windows 8 and made 8.1 instead which is a free upgrade for 8.

And Windows 7 was what Vista was supposed to be - or in other words, it actually takes Microsoft 6+ years to come out with a proper "next version" of Windows, not just 3.

Windows 10 is still pushing the metro shit pretty heavily. The new control panels are a real annoyance. Even something as simple as connecting or viewing WiFi status is more involved than Win7.

And worse, they are pushing that shitty rendering, where pixels are ignored and you get blurry small text. Like the number 1 might be rendered with a 2-pixel width body, with one side sightly darker, because the layout system decided the glyph was to be rendered right between two pixels. Great on high DPI, terrible on normal machines.

But yes, just having the start menu back and non-full-screen metro is a huge advance over Win8. Especially on the server side. FFS, using win2012 server over RDP is so moronically frustrating. I'd pay $100 to get the inside stories, because I can't believe any actual engineers felt OK shipping a tablet UI on servers. It's just so obviously wrong.

The interesting thing about the screenshot is that it says "Local PCs", as in PCs on the LAN. This would be incredible and I wish everyone would do the same thing. Especially Steam. Imagine what a problem it is when you want to play a ten player game of TF2 at the office and nobody has it installed.

Getting updates from local PCs is something much easier to program than the general case of P2P traffic over the Internet. A simple UDP broadcast packet can find other peers, and wifi or the LAN will work great for transfer.

A long time ago we had to put an HTTP proxy in for debian updates so that when we updated all of our virtual machines it wouldn't saturate the T1.

I agree, it is like when Microsoft made KMS activation servers for companies that had volume licenses and no Internet connection to Microsoft to activate systems. Only now it can download Windows 10 updates and then have each machine on the LAN connect to it to download updates.

Every time I reformat a Windows machine, I have to go through the downloading updates process to get it back to speed. It would be easier if I had all of the updates on a local machine I could connect to and download them.

Steam too, every reformat means the games have to be downloaded again unless you can back them up to a USB drive or something.

> I agree, it is like when Microsoft made KMS activation servers for companies that had volume licenses and no Internet connection to Microsoft to activate systems. Only now it can download Windows 10 updates and then have each machine on the LAN connect to it to download updates.

Microsoft has had WSUS for quite some time now, which lets you get all your office PCs downloading from one server. IIRC, you can even do offline updating of your WSUS server (download the updates elsewhere, transfer to WSUS via USB, install on all your clients via the network)

Steam has supported libraries on arbitrary drives for a long time now. I have 3 main drives: SSD for OS and programs, and 2 hybrid drives: 1 for user files and the other for a steam Library.

Imagine what a problem it is when you want to play a ten player game of TF2 at the office and nobody has it installed.

This is where you create a network drive and share it with everyone's Steam client as a Steam Library.

(Catch: you can't use iSCSI unless you use a cluster FS, and circa 2012 using a Samba share required some text file editing)

Actually, Steam is using P2P for content delivery, and have been for quite some time now. I'm not sure about the underlying technology, but the kids at the local data party get all ecstatic when they see download speeds of >100MB/s.

Bram Cohen, the guy behind the Bittorrent protocol, worked for Valve for a short time.

Is it possible to install Steam on a nas? that way games can be downloaded while the pc is off?

would ipfs.io be able to do that for all applications?

Will those torrents be encrypted too? If they are actual torrents, hopefully that means ISPs like Comcast won't throttle torrents anymore - or maybe they'll just get Microsoft to pay extra for the privilege.

> In 2013, Microsoft bought Pando Networks, a company developing BitTorrent-like P2P software that included dedicated servers and smart bandwidth throttling. This would feel like a natural fit for Windows patch distribution. [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/window...

I'm quite excited for this! I have a monthly data-cap at my residence and updates will often reach in to the several hundred megabytes range (sometimes even reaching 1GB!)

This would allow me to download the updates once and then spread them out, saving me a bunch of data for other things! Good on you, Microsoft.

Why are these reports always from "leaked" versions? MS publishes new builds like biweekly through MSDN. Is it only "clikbait"? Because I'm sure the writers didn't find how updates (or anything) work, rather someone who has legit access to those builds.

> MS publishes new builds like biweekly through MSDN.

While this is supposed to be true, there hasn't been a new public build in 50-something days. Most of the new information is coming from leaked internal builds.

"leaked"...?

... as-in posted by some Microsoft Employee under direction of Microsoft Management in a "we don't want to write-up a change doc or support info, nor answer questions about this build, and/or test the waters for a possibly controversial feature without officially claiming the build."

"Leaked", in the same sense as anonymous Government Officials "leak" important news to the press to test waters before the administration officially backs an issue, or big manufacturers "leak" pictures of new products to the press to create buzz before they do an unveiling... one would think the world was made of holes.

Why do we call all these things "leaks" when they so-definitely are not. They are "clickbait", plain and simple.

Without evidence to suggest that is the case, it's probably best not to make wild claims.

They have proper release notes of course. Maybe talking about a feature violates some NDA, I'm not sure, but they are not leaked in the sense that the build itself leaked from Microsoft.

You mean public previews, which are meant for end users and press, but the development builds are being released much more often. Latest is less than a week old.

It's from Build 10036, and this feature is not present in any MSDN builds.

And 10041 is out... they are available through EEAP.

This is going to cost me - uploads are counted as well as downloads on most plans in Australia.

Did you read past the first sentence? The second one says "in the settings is the option". The screenshot shows a toggle switch. It won't cost you a dime.

Sorry, what I should have said was "I'd like to use this, but it'd cost me". I'd hope Microsoft is also offering to let ISPs cache updates for faster/cheaper delivery.

Basically, this is an admission that Windows Update on a low-bandwidth connection chokes your bandwidth to a crawl.

If only iOS updates worked the same way.

edit: over wifi is fine, was more referring to the incredibly slow downloads I experience the moment and iOS update comes out vs a few days later.

Oh god no. Mobile networks ARE NOT designed to handle torrent type traffic. You will destroy RF bandwidth at towers, as well as backhauls. The best iOS update methods are still "push notify update available to client, fetch over wifi when plugged in and screen locked" and if after a significant amount of time the download doesn't occur, only then fallback to a cellular download directly from the CDN, still at night when usage is extremely low.

Why couldn't "fetch over wifi" use torrent type traffic from other wifi based users?

You could, but between how inexpensive CDN bandwidth is when purchased in bulk, along with Apple's desire to control a user's experience so its always positive, a torrent swarm doesn't make sense.

Isn't this why frequency bands that equipped citizens cannot legally forward information among a mesh network?

Plus, as far as phones uploading to other phones, regardless of package signing and other security, no one would appreciate unsolicited battery life depletion.

I remember this discussion coming up with GoTenna [1] here, where they admitted it would be a nice feature to communicate beyond single point to point transceivers like a mesh network but the FCC stipulates these open bands cannot be used like that.

[1]: http://www.gotenna.com/

no. this is a limitation specific to MURS, from their explaination[0]. MURS band is cooler for them though because of longer lamdba. but the longer lambda = further propagation / power (a general rule anyway). so, FCC would rather not have long propagation (at least that is what it looks like.. don't know when the rules were put into place, the process, etc to say for sure).

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054336

Practically speaking, iOS devices don't keep the update around after install.

Yet a million feedbacks go unanswered...

I'm getting the "old Microsoft feeling again" i.e. prescriptive features rather than what the end user wants.

Edit: please back your down votes with some kind of discussion.

I'm getting the "old Microsoft feeling again"

Why? What are some specific examples you see?

Personally, I think they got slapped so hard by Windows 8 that I expect Windows 10 to be pretty great. They had me at "console window" (though likely I'll still be using ConEmu).

(I upvoted to offset unsubstantiated downvotes.)

I'm curious what your point is. Do you have any examples of things they are ignoring?

This change is good for both Microsoft and its' users since it reduces bandwidth used on both ends, and and could be especially useful in multiple-computer households. It probably comes specifically from the Windows Update team, where they are working on that product alone, and as such the fact that they weren't (for example) fixing some user interface glitch in the new start menu is quite unsurprising.

> i.e. prescriptive features rather than what the end user wants.

This isn't a prescriptive feature, it's an implementation detail on how patches are downloaded.

Go unanswered as of yet. Every week there's some new feature of Windows 10 being talked about. It almost seems like it hasn't been officially released yet, and they're still actively working on it...

Hard to criticize a company for not including features in software they haven't put out yet.

You're asking down-voters to explain their reasoning.

But you didn't provide yours? Three (two, really) lines.

The first one is .. vague/useless/devoid of content.

The second is a general stab at Microsoft for falling back into old habits of 'knowing it better' (nevermind that this is something I regularly read about Apple or the Gnome project guys..), without any details.

The third line is only added as an edit after people expressed that your comment lacks content, and is asking down-voters for explanations.

Again: You didn't explain your point. I can summarize that post as

sigh M$ suxxorz

and while that might be even more useless/use offensive language for hyperbole, it contains all the facts and pieces of information that you listed in your post.

So what is the real problem? Maybe you have a great point. What isn't answered? What features do you think are useless? What features do you think/know/believe are wanted by users?

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