[HSF] Test

[Mark Levinson]

On Aug 20, 2007, at 8:26 PM, psimha wrote:

> It won't . The server is set to allow only JPEG's and I think also  
> GIF's. The rest are stripped off.
> Prasanna

Let me remind the group once again about why we do this.     About 5  
years ago, in the hey-day of
email viruses, attachments were the mechanism for getting viruses  
into everyones computer.   We
blocked all but the essential attachments to reduce our risk of  
propogating a virus.

But there is another reason for not allowing movie file  
attachemnts.     A typical movie file
of 50 megs would simply take down our server.

Although it is not readily apparent, each person on the OpenHeart-L  
receives an exact duplicate of
the original message, including a copy of any attached file.     For  
a jpeg of 40 kbytes, making
2000 copies and sending them to everyone is not too big of a task for  
modern hardware.
However, making 2000 copies of a 50 meg movie would take all the CPU  
power we have, and
it would take so long that everyone would notice that their message  
volume had stopped while
our servers try to grind out several thousand copies of these huge  
files and still keep up with the
other emails.....not likely....

The better answer is the Web.... One movie file is posted in one  
place, and viewed by anyone
who logs on.    A temporary stream is opened to transfer blocks of  
movie data at a speed the
receiver is capable of handling...known as video streaming.

The HSF servers are set up for streaming QuickTime, and we are doing  
this now for the movies
we offer on the Web site.      However, not everyone has QuickTime  
installed on their machines.
and we may need to offer Flash at some point.

Just my thoughts.....


Mark M. Levinson, MD
Founder, Editor-in-Chief,
The Heart Surgery Forum
WWW: <http://www.hsforum.com>
Email: <mmLevinson at hsforum.com>