trying to combine off-topic messages into one: responses to chuck grimes and matt cramer below:
Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> Anyway, I looked through your webpage. How come you like Matisse and
> Vermeer--seriously?
>
i really dont know much about art, so the real answer is just that i like these artists because their pictures are nice to look at! i like matisse's colours and shapes and i love the texture of vermeer's work. usually i don't understand what art critics and theorists talk about, but i kind of get what they mean when they call some of the dutch painters "masters of light", when i look at vermeer's paintings. the vermeer show was also at the NGA, wasnt it?
Matt Cramer wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, ravi wrote:
>
>>adopt. email file transfer is a problem not because of SMTP (HTTP or FTP
>>or SCP are built on TCP which provides the same guaranteed delivery
>>mechanism at the transport layer),
>
> I was talking about the app layer;
>
yes, i agree, but i was making a point about the concept of guaranteed delivery. in the same sense that SMTP can be considered wasteful for guaranteed delivery at the application layer, one might critique TCP's guaranteed delivery at the transport layer. further, SMTP is only a protocol, and it provides the applications, built on top of it, such as MTAs like sendmail, flexibility to implement usage policies. one can tweak this software to refuse attachments larger than a particular size. intermediate SMTP gateways can tweak them to bounce or drop messages without retries. SMTP gateways can also be tweaked to not bounce the entire message (causing waste of bandwidth) but only certain headers and a small part of the text back to the sender. in the modern internet of ubiquitous DNS, even the notion of intermediate gateways is fairly dated, so if the initial SMTP to MX gateway connect fails or the SMTP negotiation fails (due to invalid user, etc) hardly any transfer even takes place.
again, i agree with the general point you make, but i think the particular criticism of MIME or SMTP is misplaced. as with most things about the internet (starting with TCP/IP to HTTP/1.0 and HTML <= 3.0), it was a flawed step forward but i believe the simplicity of solving a particular problem with a particular tool, designed with extensibility in mind, contributed significantly to the growth and success of the internet, than would have more formal approaches. i would further hold that the architects of these protocols and technologies were not ignorant of this trade-off, and they were/are to be respected for their technical achievement(s).
>
>>user perspective. as these technologies mature and provide easier user
>>interfaces (and what i argue here is already a 1 year old view, so my
>>point might be outdated, i admit)
>
> There are point and drool scp apps for Wintendos.
>
absolutely... iXplorer does a decent job... but along with a point and click application one also needs a broader mechanism for "peer to peer" (for want of a better term) sharing of documents (perhaps a publishing point that remains constant while an individual moves around, etc).
--ravi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- man is said to be a rational animal. i do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. more often i have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the 2nd degree. -- alasdair macintyre.