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!!!

Wow.  Sorta puts a new meaning on the medium,  what with the 'net becoming
an alternate distribution method as compared to broadcast.  The one-to-many
crowd still hasn't got a clue,  though.

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 ;-)

RJT> Depends on the resolution of the original image,  and on what you are
RJT> using to view them in terms of software.  Sometimes with that sort of
RJT> thing color depth can be more important than resolution.  You'll have
RJT> to fiddle with settings and see what works for you.

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.

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

RJT> Once you get linux going,  you'll also have to play a little with 
RJT> "the gimp",  that's one hell of a powerful program,  and I haven't 
RJT> even begun to explore all of its capabilities,  though I am at 
RJT> this point getting some useful work done with it,  mostly cropping 
RJT> images that have absurd amounts of graphic "border" around them 
RJT> featuring names of companies that no longer exist,  bbs numbers 
RJT> that haven't existed for a number of years, and similar stuff.

There's also an article about using that program in the current issue of
Linux Journal about using it to remove "red-eye" from scanned
photographs...

RJT> Start out with a .gif file that's up around 600-700K,  and 
RJT> removing this sort of junk cuts the size in half.  Convert it to 
RJT> .jpg and the end result is down around 40-60k!  I guess that 
RJT> padding lets them look like they're filling up a cdrom,  when in
RJT> reality they're not doing anything close.

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.

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

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

RJT> One nice thing about the browser window that's currently on the screen
RJT> is a pair of magnifying glass icons on the toolbar,  one with a + next
RJT> to it,  and one with a -.  These will let you get real comfortable and
RJT> scale things to whatever works for you...

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 :-(

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

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

WC> I need to get back to the NEC which has Linux on it but I also need 
WC> to slow down for a bit. Definately will get Linux going when I 
WC> switch ISP's as I expect my authorization SMTP problem to vanish. 
WC> See post to me from paul Williams in last packet regarding an ISP 
WC> at 10 dollars a month where he claims nationwide numbers.

RJT> Yeah,  I noticed that...

WC> Just had a unpleasant thought I might _have_ to buy Norton's 
WC> firewall and virus package as I'm not certain Internet Junction 
WC> allows you to access the server directly to review mail before 
WC> downloading it locally. I would think they would though I'll have 
WC> to check into it.

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

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.

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

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