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- The Lone Wolf Development Team
Corrupt import file
- Thread starter asvaldson
- Start date
I'm surprised by how often this response comes up.
<rhetorical_question>
How is it possible for the files to be corrupted?
After all, TCP guarantees reliable delivery of packets from point A to point B: they will arrive in the proper order, and intact. Each packet has a sequence number and a checksum, so TCP (not the application) knows that the data is correct and it wouldn't propagate it up the network stack if there is a problem.
So how do files get corrupted? (To be fair, I rarely see anyone post about this other than Windows users. Maybe it's a Windows thing? Some day I should try updating my iPad and closing the durn thing in the middle of the download, then opening it up later just to see if it works!
)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Error_detection
I guess the 16-bit checksum could be wrong one time in 65,536 packets and it would be expected, but lower layers on the network stack have their own checks as well (such as CRCs for Ethernet). I've got to believe that it's a software issue in the network stack of the OS. What else could it be?
</rhetorical_question>
<rhetorical_question>
How is it possible for the files to be corrupted?
After all, TCP guarantees reliable delivery of packets from point A to point B: they will arrive in the proper order, and intact. Each packet has a sequence number and a checksum, so TCP (not the application) knows that the data is correct and it wouldn't propagate it up the network stack if there is a problem.
So how do files get corrupted? (To be fair, I rarely see anyone post about this other than Windows users. Maybe it's a Windows thing? Some day I should try updating my iPad and closing the durn thing in the middle of the download, then opening it up later just to see if it works!
)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Error_detection
I guess the 16-bit checksum could be wrong one time in 65,536 packets and it would be expected, but lower layers on the network stack have their own checks as well (such as CRCs for Ethernet). I've got to believe that it's a software issue in the network stack of the OS. What else could it be?
</rhetorical_question>
Obviously you have angered the Internet gods. Sacrifice a cyberchicken to appease them or suffer their file corrupting wrath!
That's understandable. But I wouldn't call a "failed" download a "corrupted file". To me, corruption is when the contents of the file have been, as Aaron puts it, "modified by angry Internet gods." If those same gods choose to interrupt a download instead, that's just a partially angry god -- oops, I mean "a partially downloaded file."
I suppose some people may use the term loosely, just like I see people say computer networks are insecure -- they're not, they're unsecure. The former is an emotional state and the latter is a security concern.
. (Of course, colloquial use has rendered the first equivalent to the second, just like hacker = cracker. Those terms were not interchangeable originally.)
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I would like to know the answer to this too! I'd also like to know why Windows caches the bad download when we tell it not to! With all the Windows internet functions we call, we specifically say "Don't give me any cached responses, just download the file again, I don't care that you think the file hasn't changed". And yet if you get a bad download in Hero Lab, you seem to be "stuck" with that bad download until we release a new update for those data files.
It's very frustrating and I don't know why it happens. It doesn't seem to be a problem on the Mac, only on Windows. You can get around the issue by downloading and importing the data files from our download site:
http://www.wolflair.com/index.php?context=hero_lab&page=downloads