Let's upgrade, folks

I received this shell script via email last week, asking if "there was a way to improve it". I just about fell out of my seat laughing so hard. The command was used to copy a file to a remote location:

tar cf - file_name|gzip|ssh -T remote.host "(cd /path/to/destination/dir; tar xzf -)"

Are you serious? Did you find this in an archealogical dig while searching for T-Rex? I used to type this nonsense when I was thirteen, hacking on daddy's mainframe at the Los Alamos project. Except we didn't have gzip back then. And we didn't have ssh, either. We had to open a TCP socket with a C program on both ends. And we liked it!

I know that we don't want to jump into the 21st century all at once. We want to ease the transition. I know that we don't want to go through a painful upgrade from 1982 technology to 2007 technology. But let's please upgrade to at least 1999 technology. Please?