|
Re: 2008 Documentation
Ditto on the torrent idea. Posting a tracker link prominently here on CD would certainly lessen the load on FIRST. We should see what Brandon thinks about doing this and making it an Announcement on the portal. Probably with a lot of caveats about it being an unofficial thing, use at your own risk, double check with FRC when the load dies down, etc. I imagine FIRST's concerns about mirrors are copyright and security driven. Security meaning paranoia about someone purposefully or accidentally corrupting the manual in a way that could mislead teams. Of course, FIRST corporate could solve all these problems by seeding their own torrent of the file and providing a link on the FIRST webpage to MD5 hashes of the official manuals. They could even give out TinyURL direct links to both files in the kickoff presentation to further lighten the load.
Honestly, I hope FIRST looks into this sort of solution some time soon here. The problem's only going to get worse as time goes on, and even with pre-released encrypted files, teams still want to grab unencrypted versions. If you don't start looking for distributed solutions like this, you'll just end up renting more and more bandwidth to handle the brief spurt of kick-off mania.
__________________
The difficult we do today; the impossible we do tomorrow. Miracles by appointment only.
Lone Star Regional Troubleshooter
|