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| Author |
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| 25 new of 69 responses total. |
keesan
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response 8 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:49 UTC 2001 |
What's difficult is first, not everyone has an ISP (which is why they have
a home page on grex) and second, the free websites don't work with the sort
of basic software which is all you need to access grex. (I tried several
different FTP programs and four different DOS-based browsers to upload images
to geocities and none worked. I finally got Netscape 3 for Win31 to upload
but it crashes about 3 attempts out of 4). The only image I had posted at
my website was a 15K gif, which was not even inline - is this excessive
bandwidth? Would grex be able to implement a policy of allowing only a
certain number of K per www directory rather than ruling out a specific class
of files? Or alloting all users a certain number of K to store images in some
other directory on grex that could be accessed via a website? (Can you link
to files not in www?). Or accessed via backtalk for those who want to refer
to an image in a conference item?
What is the largest website hosted on grex right now? Mine is about
12-15 K without that image, plus another linked file about 12K. Is a 50K
limit on total web space reasonable? Or a limit on home page size plus a
limit on total K?
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keesan
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response 9 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:52 UTC 2001 |
I just checked - home page 17K, a linked zip file 16K and a few other smaller
linked files (to access instead of the zip file) and some backup files which
could be somewhere else. 50K limit would work fine for me.
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other
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response 10 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:54 UTC 2001 |
People with sufficiently obsolete software to be unable to do as you
describe are self-selecting.
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malymi
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response 11 of 69:
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Nov 7 15:38 UTC 2001 |
re #3: many web servers can be configured to throttle bandwidth,
e.g., for apache there is mod_throttle.
re #8: your system must be b0rked. i upload content to a geocities
site frequently using only an command line ftp client, including
the one that is supplied with ms windows nt.
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aruba
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response 12 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:21 UTC 2001 |
Re #10: Part of Grex's mission is to provide a service to people of limited
means (and therefore limited software).
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keesan
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response 13 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:22 UTC 2001 |
I do not use Windows. I tried various FTP programs and none worked. They
all work for uploading to grex. Perhaps geocities is set up to only work with
Windows programs?
My software is not obsolete. It is all fairly new except for the Netscape
- Nettamer, Arachne, Newdeal are all frequently updated. IT is designed to
be much smaller and faster than the Windows stuff. I use Kermit to upload
to grex. I have used Nettamer's FTP program and the Clarkson U FTP which came
with Arachne to download from grex. They work fine, but not with geocities.
Is there some reason that a 15K .gif consumes more bandwidth than a 15K text
file?
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keesan
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response 14 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:29 UTC 2001 |
Thanks Mark. We set a lot of people up with 486s or older and grex, for email
and web browsing. I know of three still using grex for email, two of whom
type with one finger and none of whom had ever used a computer before. All
over 60. I made web pages for two of them and would like to take their photo
with our new used digital camera and put it at their site. I could reduce
the image size to whatever was deemed an appropriate upper limit.
Is there some way to access images not in www, by linking to a website?
What about allowing each grexer one image file in a central directory, of some
maximum size? Can you write software to limit file size in one directory?
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remmers
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response 15 of 69:
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Nov 7 18:09 UTC 2001 |
Re #13, last paragraph: Probably because gif is a compressed
format.
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keesan
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response 16 of 69:
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Nov 7 18:58 UTC 2001 |
zip is also a compressed format - is grex going to rule out zip files?
I suppose I could then unzip my 16K file into something larger and post that.
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mdw
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response 17 of 69:
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Nov 7 21:22 UTC 2001 |
People use text differently than images -- so yes, a 15k text file *is*
different than a 15K gif.
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keesan
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response 18 of 69:
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Nov 7 22:18 UTC 2001 |
I just checked and a 9K HTML file zips to about 3K. Does it take as long to
download from a website in either form?
Marcus, what do you mean by 'use text differently'? I use my zip file to
convey text and it is compressed, like a gif file is.
Drew and Mark were also interested in being able to post images at grex, if
I understood right. Drew wanted to be able to refer to technical drawings.
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janc
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response 19 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:00 UTC 2001 |
Yes, images take more bandwidth. As Marcus says, they are used differently.
Creating a 16K text file requires some effort. The only hard thing about
creaing a 16K image is triming it down to that size. If we enable images
people will much more casually create large files on their web sites. The
average size of a web page will increase vastly.
The other issue is that if we enable images, then it won't take long before
75% of the images on Grex are porn. You offer a free place where you can
anonymously put images on the web and you get lots of porn. Aside from the
question of how we feel about being a porn supplier, the problem is that
someone gets on IRC, announces their free new porn site, and Grex is suddenly
hit with armies of people downloaning images from the web server. So now
Grex's internet connection is completely jammed with porn, and nothing else
can be accessed. Suboptimal.
If we enable only small images, it is possible that we won't attract much
porn. Porn consumers are fairly snobbish and little teeny images probably
won't be of much interest. Since they like to download and save their porn,
they probably won't be attracted by big images made by tiling small images
either. So I'd guess small images would work out all right. It'd take some
work to figure out what the cut off should be and how to set a size limit on
images.
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mdw
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response 20 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:35 UTC 2001 |
I'd hate to decide where the cut-off for size in porn sites is; there
are some *very* weird economics at work there.
A 9K html file probably *will* download faster than a 9k jpeg. The jpeg
is already compressed internally using a lossy algorithm; that means
there's very little entropy left for a lossless compression algorithm to
work with. The html file is in ascii, which means there's much less
entropy, and there is a lot of opportunity for compression.
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spooked
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response 21 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:58 UTC 2001 |
You don't even need a phone line... internet connectivity is sufficient,
and phone calls to the USA are so cheap here these days, that I could
definately afford an hour/month phone call to the USA.
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keesan
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response 22 of 69:
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Nov 8 02:16 UTC 2001 |
Would it be fair, in the interest of discouraging use of grex for porn, to
limit images only to paying members? I doubt people would pay to put a
couple of small images on grex.
Would 20K be a fair upper limit for an image? Is there some way to
police this? Is there some way to set an upper limit for the amount of disk
space taken up by web pages per user? If the upper limit is 50K, you cannot
put a lot of images in www. You might also ask users to use links instead
of inline images so that the images would not be automatically downloaded.
Re compression of html, as I said my sample html file compressed from over
9K to under 3K when zipped, so if images are to be banned, you might want to
ban all compressed files. Would the 9K uncompressed html take up more or less
bandwidth than the 3K zip file?
Jim thinks people would not bother coming to a grex homepage to see one 20K
pornographic image, or at least they would not come back again. He had posted
a jpeg of his daughter's son, about 22K, but could presumably learn to trim
it to 20K. Linked, not inline.
Can grex be programmed to not display any inline images at grex websites?
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cmcgee
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response 23 of 69:
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Nov 8 02:32 UTC 2001 |
I really don't think we should start giving paying members the right to
post images.
This does not solve our problem of keeping porn off Grex.
It also makes a difference between paying members and nonpaying users
that is unnecessary.
I agree that limiting outbound telnet to people we can track down is a
good reason to give that capability only to paying members. But being
able to track down someone does not give us the right to censor their
images. So then what is the point of making them produce ID and pay $60?
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steve
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response 24 of 69:
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Nov 8 05:05 UTC 2001 |
If we could get a remote grex image machine up, we could offer it to only
those who know to ask, with a stern statement about not having porn, because
of the unique problems it raises. We could automatically monitor the traffic
every day and figure out what the top users were, and either automatically
shut them down or send messages, etc.
This isn't a trivial task, setting all this up, so it would have to be
another Grex project, which I fear would take months. But before we did that,
we'd have to find a place willing to host the machine. I'm wouldn't be too
worried about physical access, since an OpenBSD machine would work great, and
if it was down for a day or three, so what.
I don't know of any such place where we could put the machine however,
and I really don't know how much data we'd be passing each day. If enough
people were interested in this and someone stepped forward willing to talk
with places about hosting, this could work. It's certainly in keeping with
Grex's goals, but has to be enough automated that it isn't a staff burden.
I think it could be done, but not really soon because I think finding such
a site willing to host an imagine machine would be hard.
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other
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response 25 of 69:
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Nov 8 14:13 UTC 2001 |
Hmm... If this much-ballyhooed merging of Grex and M-Net ever happened
(yeah, right) we could make M-Net the image server.
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keesan
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response 26 of 69:
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Nov 8 14:14 UTC 2001 |
In theory, I could convert an image to a string of 0s and 1s and then zip that
and post it and instruct people how to unzip it into a BW image. Maybe I will
try that while people are discussing whether to allow images, just for fun.
I think I can get it from a bmp to a BW gif to a bmp, but what then?
Does anyone want to volunteer their ISP web space for use by other grexers
to post images sent them by e-mail? I could do this starting in January if
I decided to get another ISP then (30M space). I would accept only images
of a size that fits through grex email (under 70K). Posting on geocities is
just too much trouble.
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keesan
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response 27 of 69:
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Nov 8 14:15 UTC 2001 |
Does M-Net allow images in www? They give people 750K (?) disk space free.
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remmers
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response 28 of 69:
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Nov 8 17:31 UTC 2001 |
I think M-Net allows images, but I'm not 100% sure.
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pthomas
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response 29 of 69:
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Nov 8 18:28 UTC 2001 |
Yes, we do.
Furthermore, on the porn issue...there are better free places where people
can post/store their porn than this. Don't worry about it.
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dunne
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response 30 of 69:
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Nov 8 19:39 UTC 2001 |
#26: Posting to geocities too much trouble? Sindi, the time you've
taken to get all exercised about this issue here *could* have been
better used in learning how to use ftp. As an exercise, I took
time out, created a geocities account, and ftp'ed a file there.
Easy peasy. http://www.geocities.com/odoinn. Of course, there
are plenty of other web-hosting services if geocities don't suit:
try a google search for "free webhosting". I'm all in favour of not
taking the rules as carved in stone, but really, there are perfectly
good reasons for not having images on grex, and I can't see what your
problem is with that, given that there are plenty of alternatives.
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other
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response 31 of 69:
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Nov 8 19:48 UTC 2001 |
Ahh, but did you do all the steps of that account creation process in DOS
based software (non java/javascript browser, &c, &c &c?)
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dunne
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response 32 of 69:
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Nov 8 19:55 UTC 2001 |
#31: lynx 2.8.3 under linux 2.2.17. No javascript, no pack-drill.
You do have to look at a prety picture as part of opening the account,
but it's possible to download and view it. Actually, geocities rather
impressed me as being OS - neutral. Of course, if one insists on
using CP/M 2.2, one may have problems.... But all that's needed is
a broswer and an ftp client.
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