When I talk to people about P2P content distribution, there's a common misperception. They assume that the more people there are downloading that file, the faster download goes. This isn't usually true, as I'll explain below. What is true is that a peer...

MSCD has a front-page story on research.microsoft.com . A friend of mine asked me about a quote in the article which could perhaps be misunderstood: “It is as much as eight times faster than our original managed prototype, and it’s great that customers...

If you're interested in using Microsoft Secure Content Distribution to download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, just click here , install and run the downloader, and you'll be off and running! This version of MSCD will be available for four weeks, so you have...

A few years ago, Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis applied Network Coding to Peer-to-Peer file swarming, calling their system 'Avalanche' . I was lucky enough to be involved in their project. Over time, Cambridge Incubation at Microsoft Research...

Earlier I commented about the disparity in numbers quoted for Second Life's population. It's not that any of the numbers are wrong - for what's being expressed, they're no doubt correct. Rather, it's a question of what's being measured. For my money,...