Do you honestly believe ms.co.uk is served from one box? The IP was to a load balancer or possibly used dns round robin.

the live to code website was recently promoted on a set of postcards available at the UK MSDN Roadshows.

A series of postcards had different URLs pointing to various MS developer evangelists blogs e.g. livetocode.com/miket is Mike Taulty, /mikeo is Mike Ormond

Care to explain how you dns round robin an IP address? As opposed to a hostname?

Use MS Load Balancer and assign same IP to several boxes...

... Much more appropriate.

You don't, it would be on a load distributor like a BIG-IP or Cisco GSS which would present a single (but realistically multiple) IP address and route traffic into a server farm. I know MS used to have a load distributor version of IIS, don't know if they do now.

Jeebus, will you hapless geeks please stop arguing about stupid semantic nitpicks for just one minute? Read for comprehension, try to get the big view instead of dealing with each word or sentence completely independently as if you could understand it without any context: for the purposes of the story, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference whether it's a single box or a whole load-balanced cluster behind that IP address, the point is that whatever it is, IT'S THE SAME ONE FOR BOTH SITES. Duh!

It boggles my mind how very very clever people can be so amazingly stupid.

AC, you must be a manager, or other form of PHB.

Real IT pros (programmers, sys admins, etc.) know that small details are important, and can have an asymmetrical effect.

Maybe if the person at MS had been a bit more pedantic, they wouldn't have foobared the .co.uk site...

i think this is what you were referring to...

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ilivetocode

Fuck, I code to live (as in "make a living"), not the oposite.

What kind of marketing fuckwit (pleonastic, I know) came up with that?

"Real IT pros (programmers, sys admins, etc.) know that small details are important, and can have an asymmetrical effect."

Besides, nitpicking can be very interesting for the bystanders. I didn't know you could do this so I just learned something. What's wrong with that?

>"AC, you must be a manager, or other form of PHB."

Nope, I'm a coder. I just have a life and a sense of perspective.

>"Real IT pros (programmers, sys admins, etc.) know that small details are important, and can have an asymmetrical effect."

[Pardon. I wrote this before checking back in the thread history for your name, and see that you aren't one of the earlier posters, at least as far as I can tell. Please understand what follows as directed at the posters whose posts I was addressing originally; I can't explain myself to anyone else, because I wasn't having a beef at anyone else.]:-

Well, yes, but that's not what you're posting about. You're just trying to show how you're very clever and they're very stupid for using ever-so-slightly loose terminology, by pointing out some minor detail about how what they said could be seen as wrong if you look at it from just the right angle...

See, this is why you're a pedant: you missed the actual *point* of the story because of your obsessional focus on tiny details. The story, since you need reminding, is about how Microsoft have some interesting kind of project or launch or marketing scheme that they've inadvertently leaked details of the existence of, and what it could mean or imply for them, us, their future strategy and the development of the software industry, and all you want to do is quibble about the relation between hostnames, IP addresses, and actual machines.

[Uh. Now, this bit *is* about you, because it refers to your "must be a PHB" comment, and the smug and contemptuous attitude that comment implies.]:-

You also totally missed the point about why I was picking up on this, and in that geeky-autistic-Aspergers-y sort of way so typical of pedants everywhere, assumed that I must just not be as clever as you and not understand the technical detail of what you were talking about, rather than for one second consider the possibility that I did understand what you were obsessing about but thought it was irrelevant!