Re: random question of the hour

[Mark J Cox <ma...@ukweb.com>]

> Why do companies which should be doing all they can to promote HTTP and
> HTML and stuff use FTP to distribute applications?

Remember when Netscape used to only let you download the Netscape servers
by HTTP after completing a survey form and being returned a username and
password?  For me the download would always timeout after about an hour
(and about 30% completed).  Make four attempts to download and your
password was expired.

Then there are the sites that HUP their Web server nightly, just when
people not in their timezone are 98% the way though a 2 hour download :)
This is why I like the byte-range proposals; not for the ability to return
part of a document (for PDF or whatever), but for the ability to continue
a download that has been interrupted.

Things would be different if sites ran a separate Web server for their
large file downloads, set appropriate timeouts, never restart the server
and have some way of limiting the number of simulaneous
connections/downloads.

Mark