file formats and file transfers,was: Re: PAUP 4.0 Beta Release: MANUAL

[James at]

Thomas and all

I thought that this was an interesting question so I did a few
trials.  Results a follows:

The aquatic beetle bibliography (a text only 497 page document
was  1624 KB as a DOC file (Word 97)  1255 KB as an RTF file, and
1191 KB as a PDF file.

The NSF polar Research guide  (NSF9993) has one illustration and
a lot of active links.  It was 263 KB as a DOC file, 949 KB as a
RTF file and 165 KB as a PDF file.

Eppler's Water Beetles of Florida is 259 pages with lots of
illustrations.  It is 9,238 KB as a PDF file.  Maybe John can
tell us its size as a DOC file.

Based on this admittedly limited data the only general
conclusion I can draw is "It depends."

As far as download speed is concerned, we have a pretty good
Internet connection here as part of the State System of Higher
Education (PA) network.  Downloading the Water Beetles of Florida
took about 3 minutes with download speeds varying between 45 and
60 K/s.

Costs - we have about 7,000 students and about 1,000 faculty and
staff.  All have access to the Internet and most use it.  I am
told that it cost us about $9,000 a month.  That includes ISP
charges for all of our web pages as well as our user charges.

Jim Matta
jmatta at bloomu.edu