[michaelw]

Sigh.

What I wrote about the Google i/o fail applies just fine here. http://www.michaelw.net/google-io-fail/

This is a classic case of optimizing the wrong problem.

The notion of first-come first-served makes almost no sense in an oversubscribed internet queue. It’s one thing to serve the first person standing in line outside a store, it’s another thing to pretend that this is meaningful when the queue is 100,000 people around the world all of whom were all in line at 10:00:00am.

It would have been more fair, less annoying and generally less embarrassing to formally recognize that this is effectively a random lottery. As such, have everyone pre-register over a period of days or weeks and then on the magic day, randomly select winners.

My rant appeared to help. I received an invite a month later.