My contribution to XKCD’s #949

Post by slazaro » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 2:56 PM UTC

galaktor wrote: post #16

biesnecker wrote: post #6

Didn't Dropbox's share links more or less solve this problem? Maybe not for 100% of the population, but I've managed to walk my mom through the process, and isn't that generally the success metric for things like this?

I recently had to sign up with Dropbox just to download a file somebody was sharing with me. The way UbuntuOne (and maybe other providers) just give you a link anybody can use is much better imho.

Post by onosendai » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:02 PM UTC

Post by mseebach » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

slazaro wrote: post #21

galaktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had to sign up with Dropbox just to download a file somebody was sharing with me. The way UbuntuOne (and maybe other providers) just give you a link anybody can use is much better imho.

I'm pretty sure they did it wrong then. You can share a link to any file inside of your dropbox, and anyone can download it regardless of whether they have an account.

Post by secstate » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:09 PM UTC

Post by secstate » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

tOkeshu wrote: post #26

onosendai wrote: post #23

As far as quick 'n dirty solutions go, if you're not overly concerned with security, you can always use "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" to serve all the files on the current directory over HTTP. I also recall that KDE had a panel applet that pretty much did the same thing on the 3.x days (not sure it's been ported to 4.x)

Do not forget that this solution is inherently mono-threaded and does not benefits from a proper concurrency model like node.js for example (which is also mono-threaded by "design" but provide non blocking IO). So for big files with multiple downloaders, it can be sometimes not as good as you want it to be.