They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
The main place I see FTP used is on modded video game consoles. 3DS, Switch, PS3, basically all of them get some FTP program early on so you don't need to move a flash drive or SD card back and forth anymore. On PCs and my phone I use sftp or rsync since ssh is pretty much everywhere and becomes very comfortable with a config file with aliases and keys set up.
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this
Absolutely. Windows, macOS, and major FLOSS desktop environments support it. Nemo (Cinnamon) and Dolphin (KDE) open WebDAV URLs as directories. Total Commander for Android has a WebDAV plugin.
You can set up a server easily with Apache, including an FTP-style inbox. Here is my config: https://github.com/dbohdan/apache-2.4-webdav. I don't recommend nginx for WebDAV. My main HTTP server, Caddy, has gained WebDAV support since I published this configuration, but I haven't used it in anger.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
It’s way more of a hassle than that. Things like per-user chroot, managing permissions, restricting access to port 22… all much more difficult with SFTP. With an FTP server like vsftpd, you can just create virtual users and assign them home directories, then everything is just owned by the user running the ftp daemon process.
Those things don't require noticeably more code to automate with SFTP than with FTP, or need a more complicated interface. Maybe nobody has written that code to make the management easy? Someone that cares about security should then.
Google suggests that some servers can do SFTP with virtual users.
FTP is perfectly secure though when run over SSL (FTPS), so why not use the protocol that’s already designed for file transfer with the server that makes it easy?
It seems like over the years Braid has gone through alternating periods of being praised as an absolute masterpiece and being derided as pretentious self-gratification by an arrogant and particularly insufferable developer.
In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.
I programmed alongside Blow back in the halcyon 1990s, and even briefly knew him in-person, and my soul swelled with admiration and respect for the guy’s skill, talent and wit. He was clearly a standout in the TinyMU* hackers gang, and it’s no surprise that he has made a name for himself after choosing such a thankless, competitive career. My own wouldn’t have been the same without guys like him.
Braid is a very good game that stands the test of time; Jon Blow is a kind of acerbic guy with some anti-progressive political opinions which makes him a figure a lot of people like to hate, and I think this drives (unprincipled) sentiment against Braid.
It can be both. Said developer can be arrogant and insufferable and also brilliant and insightful, with some deplorable opinions and some admirable ones. The world would be a better place if people as a whole were more able to embrace dialectical thinking.
+1 to Baba is You, fwiw. In my own humble opinion it's the best puzzle game ever made, full stop.
The cool thing about programming languages like Ruby is that they’re very conducive to one-liners. You can use them to generate bash statements that you can then pipe back to bash. `ls | ruby -nle 'puts "mv #{$_} #{$_.gsub(/_/, ".")}"' | bash` is a pattern I use all the time, for example. Easy way of generating complex bash statements without having to bother with the bash man page.
Running it through the pipe lets you preview the command first and make sure it actually looks correct. Then you just re-run the command and append the bash pipe.
ls | while read filename; do mv "$filename" "$(echo "$filename" | sed "s/_/./g")" || break; done
I think there's a variable expansion syntax that does replacement, but I haven't learned it so I use sed.
I find that piping to a while loop is often simpler and more flexible than something like you've written, but maybe not in this specific case with the weird string replacement syntax. However, mine doesn't have a command injection vulnerability (that I know of).
A real scripting language can also do this easily:
for f in os.listdir("."): os.rename(f, f.replace("_","."))
Sometimes I'm tempted to make Python my shell. The fewer different syntaxes you need to learn for the same basic operations, the better!
As a primarily FreeBSD user who feels like I have to relearn the idiosyncrasies of practically the entire system every I install a new Linux distro, the mess of configuration options somehow actually seems entirely on-brand to me.
Doesn’t even apply unless someone says that (1) there are too many “standards”, and (2) so we are making this standard (neither apply here). Someone made something.
We should really consider eventually retiring memes because they just end up as thought-terminating cliches.
This is of course referring to xkcd #927. How do I know that?
Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.
This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.
If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.
But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).
I think they're going for more of a 'monkeys will eventually produce shakespeare' thing here. Which you can apply the same argument to - monkeys do not know english, don't know what they're typing, and theoretically english could devolve to a state where every sentence could be qualified as shakespeare, right? Your argument just seems unnecessarily pedantic.
