11 Aug
2004
11 Aug
'04
11:35 p.m.
Am 11 Aug 2004 14:24 meinte Vintage Computer Festival:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
> > I still don't like it. As Roger M. pointed out, what will the binary data
> > look like after it's been paraded through several different platforms?
> Well going back to the image example, it's
like trying to ftp a TIFF
> image to a remote server in ASCII mode. It's going to mess up, but
> anyone with any smarts either knows not to transfer in that way because
> it's going to mess up, or they inspect the data and realise that it
> can't be transferred as ASCII. If people didn't learn by being told
> something, common sense, or from their mistakes, then we probably all
> wouldn't still be here :-)
Hmmm. Ok, stupid me. Several years back, I
transferred all my stored
e-mails (both received and sent) from the ISP I used to use to my own
server. I gzipped the files so they would be smaller and then used FTP to
transfer them over. I then deleted the original files and went on my
merry business.
Sometime later, when I wanted to access those files,
they would not
unzip. It was then that I realized I ftp'd them in ASCII mode. DOH!
DOH! DOH!
So I'm not terribly smart, but I'm no George
Bush either. I forgot that I
had to put FTP into binary mode before transferring those files.
This sort of error can propagate quite easily.
I'd rather not rely on
people to remember to switch to binary mode when they transfer large
archives of imaged media. And I'd hate for an archive that was
transferred this way to become a defacto archive of a specific set of
important imaged data, only to find out years or decades down the road
that they are completely useless because the binary data is missing its
eight bit.
I vey much like that reasoining. Ok, your argument might be considered
weak by a lot of people, since Zips, Exes and such are quite common
offered over the web nowadays, but still, it shows exactly my concern
with binary data on the way between machines ...
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/