Cut your graphics down to size!
The Internet has ben very slow lately, no doubt due to the millions of E-mails being sent out by that virus that has been clogging up the works in a lot of places. But there are permanent irritations that slow up Web browsing, and they don't need to be there. One of them is the enormous size of graphics produced by digital cameras. The cameras take very high quality graphics that look fabulous on the front cover of a glossy magazine. But they're not meant to be used that way on the Web. There's no point. A computer screen can only display a limited resolution due to the number of available pixels, so that's why graphics companies developed optimizers. You can get freeware programs that will do the job just fine. Sometimes, depending on the size you want to display a graphic on a Web page, you can cut the size down to 10% of the original with no perceptible loss of quality on the screen. But a lot of people either don't know that, or can't be bothered. And I'm not just talking about personal Web sites. I've seen some quite major commercial sites where they haven't bothered to optimize their graphics. Result: slow loading of Web pages, longer online for each user, and less concurrent users because the server slows down to crawl trying to send out multiple copies of these oversize files. Please, if you run a Website, check that you're not wasting bandwidth - not to mention storage space on the server - by failing to optimize your graphics. I personally estimate that 75% of the bandwidth used on the Internet isn't necessary, if you add up all the waste caused by spam, oversize graphics, old-fashioned video formats like AVI, etc. etc.
9:32:56 PM 
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