On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 12:36:12PM +0200, Lars Nood??n wrote:
| Paul de Weerd wrote:
| > ... ((SMTP != NFS) && (HTTP == NFS)) ?
|
| This: ( SMTP != ( NFS || AFS || SMB || DAVFS ) )
The point was that you were saying that SMTP was not suitable for
networked file storage but HTTP is. Both systems are used to transfer
files (yes an e-mail is simply a file, just like an HTML document),
why are you battling one and not the other ?
| > E-mail may not be an acceptable surrogate for a networked filesystem,
| > but you sure can easily transfer files with it.
|
| It's a kludge that has started to become permanent as people start to
| mistake it for a solution, either for lack of knowledge, lack of
| thought, lack of planning, lack of infrastructure, etc. Plaintext
| attachments are less of a disadvantage, binaries are just stupid.
No they're not. Take the ports@ mailinglist for example. Lack of
knowledge ? Lack of thought ? Planning ? I don't think so. Maybe, just
maybe, lack of infrastructure .. but guess what, the infrastructure
that is in place now (sending your port tarball to the list) works
just fine. There is no proper alternative and no one is creating one,
presumably because what we have now is fine. You are complaining, but
do not offer a solution that is not utterly ridiculous.
Your name doesn't strike me as very 'plaintext', I see "Lars Nood??n"
in my mail client. Is your name just stupid ? What is binary garbage
to me, may be a simple text-only e-mail for someone from Korea, Kuwait
or India. You're trying to make a distinction that isn't there. Text
to you may be binary data to someone else. Not all the worlds text
fits in the ASCII character set.
Taking this to another level, had I sent my previous mail compressed
and uuencoded, it would have *REDUCED SIZE BY ~25%* (I measured it,
the original was 2030 bytes, the gzipped and uuencoded version is 1508
bytes in size). If (as you claim below) space and bandwidth are such a
great concern, we should all be sending binary attachments !
| > ...Now it's wrong to do so because Lars tells us ?
|
| No. It's always been wrong. Why it's become common to do so would be
| an interesting study. But the bottom line is that, among other
| problems, it wastes space, bandwidth and makes version tracking
| difficult.
It's always been wrong because Lars says so ? I don't see it wasting
space or bandwidth (see above) and I don't see your argument in making
version tracking difficult: there's solutions to version tracking, but
those are not in NFS or SMB either so I don't see the relevance to
this discussion.
Sure, I've seen people sending 100+mb powerpoint presentations from
their work e-mail to their private e-mail address, work on the
presentation at home, and send the thing back. Yes, people do
"strange" things with e-mail and I'm not a big fan of most of these.
But your unfounded arguments hold very little water and make you look
like a Don Quixote chasing windmills (thanks Brian, for that
metaphor) and definitely do not convince me.
Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd
--
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