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.