Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

WC>  I did a buffered streaming video last night and the quality  was 
WC> remarkable. If they get the DSL lines up to spec to what is now 
WC> technically possible we'll be able to watch HDTV unbuffered on a 
WC> monitor!!!

RJT> Wow.  Sorta puts a new meaning on the medium,  what with the 'net
RJT> becoming an alternate distribution method as compared to broadcast.

WC> Yeah it is incredible. Technical reports I've looked at claim DSL 
WC> can by using new techniques be increased in bandwidth from 5 - 50 
WC> times though it does require you be within n thousand feet of the 
WC> phone company or an optical fiber substation. I believe the 
WC> articles said the last three thousand feet could be copper.

I wonder how long it's gonna take before they bring the fiber to the house?

WC> I'm not crowded here so I could easily go 640 x 480 but what would
WC> that do to the ladies of alt.binary.pictures.erotic.brunette ;-)

WC> Seems these artistic expressive types are now using some rather 
WC> high quality digital cameras or scanners to post as the images on
WC> this system are in many cases as good as chemical photography
WC> 8x10's.

RJT> Yeah,  the quality of that sort of image does seem to have improved
RJT> over the years.  :-)

WC> I wasn't even aware how much until this box came into my 
WC> possession. Blew me away.



WC> Someone sent me a PDF with just a short message and photo, around
WC> .5 meg, later sent same photo JPG, 66K and the image was larger.

RJT> The jpeg format is compact,  but the compression method is
"lossy" I'm
RJT> told. The thing is,  if I do a conversion from one to another and the
RJT> result looks okay to me,  then it doesn't matter.

WC> It is lossy but than you don't use that format if you require 
WC> ultimate detail, for what it's intended it's great.

Yeah,  it works for me and saves me on a heck of a lot of disk space.  Not
that it's as important now as it was at one time,  but still...

RJT> Those things you see on some of the tv shows really get me (CSI comes
RJT> to mind for example),  where they have a bit of video,  and
"zoom in"
RJT> over and over again until they get what they want out of it.  Must be
RJT> using some kinda "infinite-resolution" imaging technology
there,  or
RJT> something...   :-)

WC> MIT and NASA both have done a great deal on this as well as others.

Yeah,  but they're not being realistic with the technology.  Not at all. 
The example I'm thinking of involved a bit of surveillance video,  which is
below standard video quality to begin with.

WC> I need that. Looking at Barnes & Noble they had Redhat 7.3
WC> with a book but it said it required 128 Meg RAM :-(

RJT> I thought I might like to try RH a while back.  My brother had
RJT> 5.something, I forget what,  but that was real early,  and kinda crude
RJT> in some respects.  One person in the linux echo seems to favor 6.2,
RJT> which I haven't gotten a hold of yet.  I did get 7.1 on _two_ cdroms,
RJT> and it wouldn't install on the test fixture here,  which at that time
RJT> had 16M of ram in it.  I'm told now that 64M might not be enough for
RJT> the graphic install,  though it should be usable for the text install.
RJT> I'm not in so much of a hurry to try it out these days...

RJT> In fact,  I had Debian and SuSe installed on that box,  and just
RJT> tonight ripped them out to install the same version of Slackware that I
RJT> have running on the other box (the copying of files is progressing as I
RJT> type this,  currently in the middle of 133220K of kernel source),
RJT> figuring that I don't need the hassle of messing with more than one
RJT> distro or version at the moment. That box _did_ boot a cdrom to do
RJT> this.  :-)

WC> Cool.

Except that I haven't gotten the whole way through the install yet.  The
machine locks up solid...   I had this problem once before with this board,
 and with different ram,  and trying a different cpu,  so I can probably
rule out the ram and the cpu.  I'm not sure which box it was in,  so the
power supply is *possible*,  but I'm thinking it's something on the board. 
Locks it up solid,  it does.  The last time I couldn't even get it to
toggle the numlock on the keyboard.

WC> RE: Malware.

RJT> Seems to me you could pull it down with linux and still not have to
RJT> worry about too much...   It doesn't _run_ things that show up in mail,
RJT>  at least.  And most of that stuff seems to be aimed at the windoze
RJT> platform anyhow.

WC> Yup, that's why I'm hot to switch ISP's not that there isn't a
WC> workaround for my SMTP problem it's just I'm not proficient enough
WC> yet to find it and never will be if I don't get on it.

WC> I've filtered out a lot of malicious file attachments that way as 
WC> well as cut my spam now down to 10 percent of what it once was. 
WC> Norton's not too bad at 30 bucks after rebate but it's 60 out of
WC> pocket at CompUSA.

RJT> As far as I'm concerned they can keep it,  at that price.

WC> That's my feeling as well as after rebate the price is enough to
WC> cover difference between the more expensive RAM sticks here to run
WC> the latest and greatest Linux.

They want to sell you expensive software to help deal with the holes that
are in other expensive software that you're running...    Right.

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