A customer service representative at Microsoft got back to me again. How funny that it would be 10 days after I began to de-facto work for Microsoft, and now hold 3 accounts to log onto Microsoft computers in some way! At the largest data-center in the world, too.
Hum.
Text of the reply follows:
>>
Hello,
This is regarding the Service Request SRX1109907523ID.
Thanks you for letting us know about the spelling error and we are correcting it.
We have received a reply from our colleagues that generally the ISO image supported by MSFT is a single flat file – the underlying network transport layer ensures that the ISO is copied correctly. We have also posted the hash values next to the downloads for RTM.
I hope the above information is helpful.
Thank you,
(name removed)
Microsoft Customer Service Representative
>>
So, my impressions:
a.) Huh, this guy referred to themselves as MSFT. Interesting.
b.) Just because an ISO is a flat file means freaking squat if it gets corrupted on-disk! The point was, I want to know should it get corrupted before I get to burn a copy (or burn more copies).
c.) “the underlying network transport layer ensures that the ISO is copied correctly”? Aha..ahahahaha. Unless they were basically using BitTorrent or at least some sort of file verification hash (which, based on the downloader, I highly doubt), the ‘underlying network transport layer’ don’t do squat but try to get some bits to you, especially when using multiple download connections at once.
d.) I’m not really going to bother looking for the hash values posted right now, since it was about 9 days too late to matter, as the downloads went offline the 31st of August. If they did actually post them, maybe a link to such a page would have been a good idea if they didn’t want me to brush it off.
e.) Somebody at Microsoft actually entered the link to my blog from the first contact, or else they wouldn’t have known there was a spelling mistake! I never got to submit the original text to them that said it was misspelled.