[Tutor] OT: need computer advice from wise Tutors

[Richard D. Moores]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 17:32, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 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.

I think you should have.

> You log into Gmail and your browser downloads the Gmail page;

Yes, of course. But I'm always logged into Gmail.  With Eudora I would
have to manually *download* new email to see what was new (as I
recall, there was a way to set Eudora to check for new mail at an
interval I could set -- but I often found this an annoying
interruption); with Gmail this is done for me (with no annoyance).
That's what I meant by "my mail is just always THERE", and because you
know the difference between OE and Gmail you knew what I meant, even
if I may have expressed it incorrectly. I really don't need your
lecture on this. I'm sure there's plenty for me to learn from you, but
not this.

> you click on an email, and your browser
> downloads the contents of the email in order to display it.

Of course. Just like anything else which has to get from a Gmail
server to me. If text, that's a small fraction of a second for me. So
small that it appears to be instantaneous.  If there are images, it's
still a small fraction of a second, and images are usually there by
the time I can scroll down to them.

> 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?

Sure, but I have broadband access, as do many. My fault for not
mentioning this -- but you should not pretend to not have inferred
that I did have such access.

> 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.

Not a problem. See above.

> 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.

NOW you're talking about stuff I'd like to learn here.

> 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.

Hear, hear! But also to not be so quick when classifying others.

Dick