Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!dalcs!silvert From: silvert@dalcs.UUCP (Bill Silvert) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Thanks, I'd rather ... Part 2 Message-ID: <2835@dalcs.UUCP> Date: 14 Apr 88 11:30:37 GMT References: Reply-To: bill@biomel.UUCP, biomel@cs.dal.CDN Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography Lines: 36 Keywords: arc, unix ?modem Summary: Let's stay in the world In article W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) writes: >If you are still using ascii downloads from your host you are wasting >a lot of time. Far better to download the ARCs than the individual >member files. DSZ and rz/sz outperform Kermit by a wide margin. Keith misses the point of the posting to which he is replying. Many of us choose to examine files on none-MS-DOS machines, regardless of whether these are Unix systems or not. For example, I normally extract the documentation and print it on the good printer at work rather than on the small printers attached to the MS-DOS machines I use. I can also delete any uninteresting files (such as unwanted source code) before downloading to micros. This in no way prevents me from using x/y/zmodem for the next step of the transfer. The use of non-standard packaging methods is creating a lot of headaches for many users. One obvious problem is that programs that cannot be extracted on a mainframe cannot be inspected for Trojans. Another is that sysop's (such as myself) cannot easily see what is being posted. Until now I've normally extracted arc files on an Atari ST, which easily emulates the PC, but the extraction process is a lot faster and more efficient if I don't have to do it DOS emulation mode -- loosing that facility is a pain. By the way, has anyone in this group ever considered the Dumas encoding package? Developed for the ST, it is in vanilla C and runs on anything -- I use it on the ST and several Unix engines. It is fully compatible with the old style encode used in this group, but far more robust and it doesn't require combining files in the editor to decode multiple part postings. I have the source code (although a new version is due out later this month), but no MS-DOS C compiler, so I can't post it. -- Bill Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division. Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, NS, Canada B2Y 4A2 UUCP: ...!{uunet,utai,watmath}!dalcs!biomel!bill CDN or BITNET: biomel@cs.dal.cdn