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Comment by ojii | Hacker News Reader

My issue is that it's a single file. If you have a network hiccup during that 5G download, have fun re-downloading it. I wish they offered torrents...

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Unless Microsoft doesn't allow range requests, any half-decent client will happily resume an interrupted download. This includes browsers and command-line utilities like curl and wget.

Edit: Just tried one of the files with curl. They resume just fine, and the download URLs aren't even tied to a session or IP. I copied the URL from my local browser and used curl on a remote server. No problem. :)

Browsers don't resume downloads afaik.

Browsers certainly do resume downloads. Many sites don't honor range requests, though, typically due to passing the file data through some script. And some expire URLs.

Okay, I didn't know that. I made that assumption because I've never seen a web browser resume a download that was interrupted.

Odd, I could've sworn I used curl when I had this issue a while back. Maybe they changed something or I did something terribly wrong. Thanks for testing though.

Remember that when resuming with curl, you need to explicitly tell it that you are resuming.

They used to have a series of separate <2GB zipfiles. That was a hassle, I emailed them asking for a single file. Pretty sure they resume.

I guess a torrent might be tricky if they want to keep a "no redistribution" licensing clause.

I know the chances of MSFT distributing these as torrents is basically zero due to their legal department, but it feels like this would be an ideal candidate (from a technical standpoint) for a torrent. Would also mean that if I download it, if our clients are set up correctly, my coworkers can download it faster by loading it from me than the internet.

If you're concerned about that, use DownloadThemAll! or some other download manager.

> I wish they offered torrents

Check out http://burnbit.com/

wget --continue http://blah

This specific site does support Range requests, therefore resuming - and most browsers can resume these days as well.

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