Posted by Bert Heise on June 03, 2000 at 01:31:50:
In Reply to: This forum... :-) posted by Bert Heise on June 03, 2000 at 01:01:43:
About one year ago, someone suggested (I don't know why I never replied to it) that it would be nice if you could post pictures right here in the forum.
Yes, that could be done for sure, but at two prices: The problem is that people send me their pictures in almost every picture format you can imagine, most of them uncompressed, within Nanosmooth Word files or whatever. Sitting in front of a Silicon Graphics unix machine, I myself couldn't see many of them in my Netscape! Naaah. Therefore, I'm converting all of them to one single, highly compressed but still high quality jpeg format, together with thumbnails of all the same dimensions (thanks to Alfred this is going on now much better). That way I can guarantee that *everyone* having *any* kind of WWW browser can see them. This would be impossible if everybody posts them directly.
The other thing is disk space and traffic load: The institute I'm working for is kindly hosting this site and asks nothing of me for doing so. I don't have exact numbers but I came to know that this site is actually by far the *most* accessed one of our whole institute and therfore is leading to a considerable traffic load! If I would have let every picture in the format it came to me, the gallery wouldn't take up about 23 MB of space but easily ten times more - most pictures I get are about 4-800 kBytes in size each which lead to 30-100 kByte JPEG's if compressed... And all of this data doesn't only have to be stored but also to be sent out via TCP if someone wants to see the pictures (which is the more important point)...
Therefore: Please be patient with me...
Yours!!
Bert.