949: File Transfer
| File Transfer |
 Title text: Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear. |
Explanation
Cueball, whom I presume is on the phone with Cutie (Black Hat shouldn't have a hard time with any of this stuff), is trying to help a friend help their cousin send them a 25 MB file. This exceeds most email programs' 20 MB attachment limit (note: Gmail increased their attachment limit to 25 MB in 2009, though many email programs still top out at 20 MB. If anybody knows a reason behind that number, let me know in the comments), and so simply attaching the file to an email is out of the question.
The next option is to upload the file to an FTP server (file transfer protocol, as opposed to HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol), used to transfer files between computers on a shared network, such as the internet. However, FTP servers are a touch more esoteric than a mere email attachment, and many internet users (myself included) don't have one of their own. Indeed, I've only even used FTPs a handful of times (unless FTP is automatically used every time you download a file. This is honestly much more of a Jeff "I do computers for a living and can afford to have my hemorrhoids removed" Roman field than an Alex "Barely making a living as a comedian so thankfully I don't have any hemorrhoids which I would have to pay to have removed like Jeff does" Berg field).
Web hosting is simply the ability to create a website and store all the data for said website on a server which is connected to the internet. If Cutie's cousin (CC?) had the ability to do that, sharing the file would be as easy as making a website for it, then having Cutie visit said website and download said file. But no, the adventure continues.
MegaUpload is one of many, many sites on the internet that recognizes most users' inability to host large files on their own, and so offers to host large files, sometimes for free, sometimes for a small fee. The payoff is that in order to make such a service profitable, many of these sites are cluttered with banner and pop up ads in a mad effort to squeeze as much ad revenue out of every page view as possible. It's not a dealbreaker for some, but Cueball seems to think it'll be too much for CC to handle.
AIM direct connect was a file sharing system on AOL Instant Messenger that I think was dying out in popularity even by the time I got to college in the fall of 2000. Clearly, Cueball is grasping at straws here- anybody desperate enough to invoke the name of AOL as a solution instead of a problem must be at their wits' end.
But then- the perfect solution arises: Dropbox. A simple, easy to use program with an intuitive GUI that will automate file sharing between two computers using the internet, just like the internet was designed to do. But alas, by the time Cueball arrives at a solution, CC has used a mix of old and new technology, namely the car and the USB drive, to physically transport the file to Cutie's house, thus circumventing the internet all together. It's not an elegant solution, but sometimes brute force is the easiest way to get something done.
...and this, this inability to use the internet for its intended purpose, is why Tim Berners-Lee, the arguable inventor of the internet (take a hike, Al Gore), sheds a tear: His creation cannot be appreciated by the masses it was intended.
