Steve has always been obsessed about not allowing people to copy huge data files over the network in cases where you tend to use those files pretty often since it traffics the network pipe. So we want to test with some alternatives for it. Ben has just had a new laptop and looking to migrate all the stuff from his old to new machine. We were eager to utilize cross over ethernet cable to transfer data files. Its a bit tchi stuff but cost effective.
You join the machines in parallel using an ethernet cable and create a sort of LAN between them with static IP addresses. It allows you to access the shared stuff on the other machines and because systems are connected together it doesn't bother the network at all.