[66958] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Senie)
Thu Jan 29 19:45:26 2004
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 19:44:44 -0500
To: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>
From: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
Cc: "North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes" <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <00e701c3e6c9$53162100$6401a8c0@ssprunk>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 07:37 PM 1/29/2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>Thus spake "Kevin Loch" <kloch@gurunet.net>
> > Nicole wrote:
> > > In the past few days our AOL users have been reporting serious problems
> >
> > Several Brickshelf users have complained about the new "blurry images"
> > problem using AOL. I have not heard any reports of broken images or
> > upload problems yet.
>
>In the past, some ISPs have used a quality-reduction algorithm on images to
>"speed up" dialup users' experience; I assume that's what AOL has adopted.
Gotta use their lingo... your stuff's been optimized!
I have been thinking about whether the use of lossy compression methods
would constitute tampering with copyrighted material. After all, if a site
was carefully designed to provide optimized images of fine art, and AOL or
other ISPs mess with the quality, the value of the site content would be
decreased, and the site could lose business due to users thinking the
quality of the images is bad.
>This reminds me of an old saying, "you can make any computation go faster if
>you don't care if it gives the right answer."
Heh.
