🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <GARYM.91Jun6093906@cognos.uucp@uunet.uu.net>, garym@cognos.uucp@uunet.uu.net (Gary Murphy) writes:
>
>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.

That's an interesting idea.  I don't know anything about JPEG, but I
think Jef Poskanzer's PBM toolkit could be used to provide scaled-down
or reduced-number-of-colors versions of large GIF's.  Most people
gobbling up the girlie pictures would be happy to preview them first,
I think.  (I have no first-hand knowledge, of course :-)

>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.

Of course, PBM is free, and the preview versions would still be GIF or
whatever the original was.

-- 
Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov)	  Tug on anything in nature and you will find
Martin Marietta Energy Systems    it connected to everything else.
Workstation Support                                             --John Muir