19 Mar
2007
19 Mar
'07
3:55 p.m.
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
It's courteous to encourage people to download everything off a site, whether
they need it or not, in the name of "backup"?
Yes!! That is the entire point of making the files available, is it
not? We are in the hobby of preserving history. You would want
everything to go away from single locations, one by one, as people perish?
I host a Tandy archive. I used to be the mirror, but the original owner
decided to abandon it so now I'm the primary maintainer. Until two days
ago there was no known mirror. So if I had perished before that time,
all of that work and information would have been completely gone (there
were several files unique to the site, and countless hours gathering,
researching, and organizing). I used to BEG for mirrors; I stopped a
few years ago after hearing nothing by crickets. Thankfully someone
here has mirrored the archive (and corrected the name, so that it will
be picked up by search engines properly).
I don't think I've ever seen such a sense of
entitlement displayed as
Jim & Hexxie are putting forward.
It's not entitlement, it's courtesy.
I contribute to the community as
best I can, and I would assume that others would do the same. I *want*
many different mirrors of my work in case I perish tomorrow. It's courteous to cost people tons of money in
bandwidth, or time trying to
outwit script kiddies with downloaders?
See previous posts regarding QoS. We are not living in the 1990s any
more. It does not cost people tons of money in bandwidth, and even if
it does, you have a single line in a config file for either the server
app, or the OS, or your hardware router to control the traffic. If you
upgrade your FTP server software to, oh, five years ago or newer, you
also have kiddie/downloader protection. So the cost argument is a
non-argument.
Your definition of courtesy is obscene.
Your definition of generosity is stingy and parsimonious. Do you
complain about your web server bandwidth as well?
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/