🚀 go-pugleaf

Visual information is no more or less catagorically rejectable than
anything else on-line but it is a good point that while I might take
only one of a 700k archive and then take a week to digest it, .GIF's
are likely to be downloaded in large numbers and consumed in an
instant.  The only hope I've seen so far is to store on-line images
as very low-quality JPEG files and make those interested in obtaining
the real image arrange the transfer themselves.

While JPEG might save upwards of 80% on the image bandwidth (and
provide images suitable for 90% of the requests), the downside is most
prohibitive: the only vendor to date only supplies shareware decoders
($US20 and a whopping $US65 for the deluxe encoder) and it is
unreasonable to expect EVERYONE to buy one.  As with .ZIP files, which
previously saved us the bandwidth of pure shar/tar files, JPEG will
probably never take off until the decoders become public domain.




















--
 Gary Murphy - Cognos Incorporated  | "You think you're human.
       P.O.Box 9707 Ottawa K1G 3N3  |  But what if you've made a mistake,
              (613) 738-1338 x5537  |  As humans sometimes do,
 garym%cognos.uucp@ccs.carleton.ca  |  And you is an Angel, instead?"
                uucp: cognos!garym  |                     -- Sun Ra