Love Songs

Last night, I had to transfer some photos from my phone to one of my computers. Easy? No.

My Android phone can of course send emails, but the photos totalled over 50MB, and GMail reported the maximum attachment size is 25MB. However, it also has an FTP client installed, so without too much fuss, I was able to transfer the files onto my Stora NAS. Now of course I had to get the files from my NAS onto another computer not on my local network. I attempted to send the files from my Chromebook, but the attachment system only allows selection of single files. I’m too lazy to individually selected 30 files or whatever it was, so I dug up my Windows laptop. This mounted the Stora with ease, and I was soon attaching files into emails. However GMail then responds with “Problem attaching file, maybe a problem with firewall or proxy”. Clicking “retry” apparently solved any firewall or proxy problem I had, but I had to do this on every file that failed, and it only failed right at the end of attaching. The job got done eventually, but it got me thinking, as I often do, that computing has got dramatically worse in recent decades.

According to Wikipedia, the FTP specification was developed in the 1971. It was changed to the current spec in 1985. So before I was born, the problem of transferring data between computers had been resolved. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and their like have been reinventing the wheel for year, and always with some absurdly flawed system. It’s always got a file size limit, or it’s just for photos and music, or it only works if you’ve got Windows, or a Mac, or a Google account. Or it can’t restart failed uploads, or it can only do one file at a time, or the only interface is a crappy website, or a crappy application. It seems that computing at large corporations is not about creating an idea which makes sense, it’s about creating a product which can be marketed.

Imagine how much better it could be if we said, “Look, the spec is SFTP, deal with it.”. We’d teach how to use simple ideas not a million different flawed paradigms. 

We’d have SFTP for file upload/management and HTTP (note: HTTP, not the web) for simple downloads. Services can compete on merit, not proprietary lock in.