Re: [Sheflug] I hate Windoze, Samba and RAID.

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

> >>>>> "Al" == Alex Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:
>
>     Al> Autodetecting doesn't always work, and command line ftp
>     Al> commands often default to ascii. The difference is bigger than
>     Al> you would think, if you ever wondered why the options were
>     Al> there.
> I don't know a Unix program that autodetects, and I can't imagine a
> Wintel program that would.  Some will guess based on file extension,
> but that is _not_ autodetection.

Of course it is autodetection. How does it matter how it does it? It may get
the answer wrong sometimes, but if that was the case it's likely to be
indicative of a user with other problems ;) I'd rather have the client work
it out for itself based on a set of matched options than have to change type
myself, especially with a number of files.

> It would be rather easy and very efficient to autodetect the kind of
> corruption you're talking about:  just XOR the high bit and puke on
> TRUE.  I don't know why servers don't do that.  It's certainly

They don't do it 'cos it's time-consuming, I guess. And they don't want the
possibility of the user spending minutes ftping something only to be told
"work done thus far is useless, change to binary please". Unless you check
the whole file beforehand, which again is time consuming. Enough to bring an
ftp server to it's knees. I would prefer some system with Huffman encoding,
or some sort of Viterbi encoder, so that it can cope with 'mostly ascii'
decently. However, that's probably very inefficient for the large majority
of files: I'd imagine that the concept of 'more reguarly occuring bytes'
doesn't really exist in this case..

>     Al> P.S. I *did* warn you of the consequences of making a pact
>     Al> with UNIX satan, didn't I? Not that I'm sayng it's related, of
>     Al> course, but I suspect your machine of working against you ;))
>
> Not likely.  The decision to use an ASCII or binary transfer is made
> by the client.  Every Unix FTP client I know of defaults to binary
> (safe), all DOS/Windows clients I know of default to ASCII.  AFAIK
> Windows doesn't supply a server, therefore Barrie was using a Windose
> client, and caught one.

What does the spec. say? I don't recall reading a 'default to binary', so
you can't really assume anything (if that is the case - as I said, I don't
remember ;). I don't know off hand of a UNIX ftp client defaulting to ascii,
but that may be more to do with many of them forking off each other / wuftp
/ a small number of other codebases. Dunno, debatable.

> With the exception of things like LILO, which is NOT part of Unix
> anyway (it's a BIOS app),

Which bit of it? After updating lilo.conf, I run 'lilo'. These seems to me
to be a Unix app.... ?

> I have always found Unix much safer.

Heh ;) I wasn't implying that things go wrong more often under Unix than
other OSes - quite the opposite, in fact. It was more, when things *do* go
wrong, you know about it


> _I_ make far more mistakes than even DOS does, but far fewer under
> Unix than DOS.  "There is no such thing as a dangerous OS, only
> dangerous users."  :)

Mmmmmm. I sort of agree with that.. but for any given user, if they make
more mistakes in one OS than another, there has to be a reason. Experience
may be one, understanding may be another. But the OS sure has a big part to
play in it too. Which kind of puts it at the door of the designers - some
software designers, particularly under Unix than other OSes, have no
interest in stopping the user making obvious misakes, which is quite sad. I
can't think of an example off the top of my head, and I certainly don't
claim they are anything but a small minority, but there are people who take
the attitude "Well, if they do that, it's the user's fault" which is one of
the crappest excuses I've ever heard.

>     Al> it's just that you're fairly twisted if you do ;)))
>
> I talk SMTP all the time, it's often the only why to convince f**khead
> postmasters at Microsoft subsidiaries that it's their machine that is
> doing evil things.

Mmm, I see no contradiction here ;))

>     Al> so you'd have to be running it on a private network
>     Al> preferably behind a firewall.
>
> You mean, "connected to Internet via floppy disk."

Heh. A 'high latency' 'fixed bandwidth' link, you mean? :)

Cheers,

Alex.

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