I guess we live in a world where sending CDs is sometimes the least inconvenient way
Someone is sick. My mother wants to help. She makes a phone call and then drives to the X-ray practice to pick up a quickly burned CD with the X-ray images. She packs the CD in a sturdy, padded package and sends it by express mail to Sweden, where the pictures are to be viewed. Shipping costs 69 euros.
When I find out about this, I’m a little annoyed because it seems so absurd to me to transport data, especially when it’s in a hurry, over such a long distance on a physical storage medium. Apart from the fact that this takes a relatively long time and is complicated and expensive, it is also prone to errors: I hope the CD arrives safely.
On the other hand, if I understand correctly, the X-ray practice probably can’t or shouldn’t or doesn’t want to release the images other than on CD. USB sticks are banned in practice, probably for security reasons and fear of viruses. And the use of cloud providers does not seem to be possible in practice for similar reasons – plus of course data protection.
I, on the other hand, would have had a hard time getting the data from the CD into the cloud (due to the lack of a CD reader). I probably would have managed it, but then again I would have had to provide the clinic in Sweden with a download address. But my mother only knows a postal address for the clinic. And it is again unclear whether the computer that can read the images can also access the Internet.
So maybe we really still live in a world where sometimes sending CDs is the least inconvenient way.
(Molinarius)