by Sam Morris on July 20, 2010
I’ve always heard stories about restaurants that throw challenges at their patrons claiming, “if you eat the whole thing, you don’t have to pay for it.”

I’ve most recently heard about the “World Famous” 72-ounce (about 2 kilograms) steak dinner that one can get for free (if eaten in 1 hour). This feast is offered by the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas.
To quote their web site, “Many have tried. Many have failed.”
Just as 72-ounce steaks will provide a significant challenge to the gastro-intestinal systems of the average human being, so too do large files when one attempts to transfer them via legacy file transfer systems.
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by Sam Morris on June 18, 2010
One of my favorite tales by Hans Christian Andersen is titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In this story, a couple of swindling weavers offer to make a suit of clothes for a gullible emperor, invisible to anyone not sufficiently intelligent or capable. The suit of clothes wasn’t real, of course, but since the emperor and his ministers couldn’t see it, they wouldn’t risk pointing out that fact and being exposed as stupid and incompetent.
Over the years, there have been many times when I’ve found myself nodding my head in pretend understanding when various technical acronyms, jargon and concepts are thrown around in a meeting or during a presentation. I feel like one of those advisors, pretending to know something that I do not, and I kind of feel like everyone else in the room is either like the advisor, or like the swindlers.
No invisible clothes here…
Since we use the acronyms SSL and SSH frequently in these blog posts, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to provide some fundamental description of what they are and what they do.
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