Steve wrote:
>
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Clarence Verge wrote:
>
> > I went off half-cocked there: that included the download time !
> > But I was pretty sure it didn't when I wrote it. arrrrrgggh :-\
>
> Well, download times and display times are still irrelevant
> if only a select few can actually see the image.
Hi Steve;
Thanks for responding, as I wanted to add a further update anyway, now
that I am awake. <G>
We have placed ourselves in the "select" catagory just by using Arachne.
That unselect "majority" isn't taking part in any attempt to improve things.
They just go wherever the ride takes them. I have no personal interest in
reaching them with ZBMs. I use GIFs for that purpose. ;-)
Arachne does lots of things that NS doesn't, and IMHO these "extra" things
Arachne does/can do are a lot more important and useful than js, flash, and
shockwave - which just add more noise to the World Wide Wait.
For reasons similar to the above you have chosen to use Linux and are to be
commended for making what is to most, a hard choice. It is as hard to move
from DOS to Linux as it is to move from Windows to DOS. The direct step -
bypassing DOS - is damn near impossible for most. <G>
As far as image formats go, when each one comes into being there usually
are NO browsers that can display them. We, in the "A" group, are lucky in
that we can immediately exploit the benefits of ZBM at zero cost and near
zero effort.
ZBMs are zipped bitmaps. Anyone, anywhere, can zip and unzip files.
I agree that NS doesn't handle .bmps at all, but IE does, Opera does
slowly, and Arachne can handle them at great speed - which should be
important since much of Arachne's video processing is quite slow.
Last night I looked further into the long processing times I was getting
since I had earlier gone off half-cocked and failed to apply any logic.
After disabling virtual screens, I got both down to LOCAL conversion times
of 6 sec and could see no way to make the png2bmp faster.
ZBM to bmp was a different matter. I rewrote my mime.cfg line to eliminate
a 2.9 Mb file copy step and the .ZBM conversion was down to 4 sec.
I rewrote again to save the resultant .bmp in TEMP instead of cache and to
display from there and I had 1.5 sec total conversion and display time.:)
For perspective, the software required to convert .PNG to .BMP consists
of two files totalling 110kb of hard to compress .exes.
The .ZBM unzipper, PKUNZJR, is a 2916 *BYTE* .com.
By itself, that's a good reason to consider the .ZBMs I think.
Remember that Michael tries to keep the download under 1Mb.
Thanks Steve, for your arguments and patience, and All, for putting up
with this sales message. <g>
- Clarence Verge
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