[SGVLUG] Insane message bloat & "hobbyist" routers

[Emerson, Tom (*IC)]

The other day when I was at Fry's, I saw a netgear router with a "price
reduced" tag on it (usually returned merchandise) -- what really caught
my attention, though, was the actual "name" of the router:
"Open-source Wireless-G router for hobbyists" -- is this the famous
"NLSU2" or whatever it was that was presented earlier this month?  There
wasn't any specific product number on the package, so I decided to take
a picture of the box to post to the list - I *did* cut down the photo
size to something I felt "reasonable", but got caught by the insane
amount of "message bloat" that comes from Microsoft's outlook -- the
photo has an on-disk size of 32k bytes.  The message itself wasn't much
longer than what I'm writing now, but per the "outbox", the message
ended up being over 70k.  When it got to the mailserver, however, it got
"bounced" because it was over the message limit of about 40k -- what was
strange, however, was that by then, the message had grown to over 90k!

I suspect that because I didn't reset the original to "plain text", the
message automatically doubled in size as outlook would have posted both
a "plain" and a "rich" version of the message [and don't get me started
on plain-vs-allthatothercrap -- in truth I prefer it as well, but I
received an "ultimatum" from my boss along the lines of "plain text
looks ugly, and it's hard for me to reply -- please use rich text or
else" -- so I do, and set my "rich text" format default to 12pt courier,
bold...]

Tom

Hmm... Looking at the photo, and "zooming in", I think I found a product
number: KWGR614 -- Also, there was "one left" priced at $66.49
(actually, it was the ONLY one I saw in the first place, so I don't know
what the original retail price was supposed to be, but I suspect it was
likely 69.99)