[Tutor] OT: need computer advice from wise Tutors

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:52:03 am Richard D. Moores wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 16:25, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> 
wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:07:47 am Richard D. Moores wrote:
> >> A "feature" very important to me
> >> is that with Gmail, my mail is just always THERE, with no need to
> >> download it
> >
> > You see your email without downloading it? You don't understand how
> > the Internet works, do you?
>
> I do, and I also know that you know what I meant.

No, I'm afraid that I don't. You log into Gmail and your browser 
downloads the Gmail page; you click on an email, and your browser 
downloads the contents of the email in order to display it. I'm afraid 
I have no idea what you mean by not downloading your email. Perhaps you 
should try reading a 50MB email over dial-up to drive home the fact 
that you *are* downloading?

The difference is that, with Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo mail), you have 
to download it each time you read the email instead of just once.

Particularly as this is a programming mailing list, I think it is very 
important to remember that fetching information over the Internet *is* 
downloading, and not just gloss over it as some sort of magic. There 
are Python libraries specifically for dealing with all this, and apart 
from the ability to execute Javascript, Python can do pretty much 
everything your browser does.

There are two sorts of people in the world: those who think that (e.g.) 
watching a streaming video in your browser over the Internet is 
fundamentally different from "downloading", and those who know that the 
only difference is that with streaming, the browser deletes the video 
after you've watched it. I would think that, as programmers, we should 
be in the second group rather than the first.


-- 
Steven D'Aprano