[Tutor] OT: need computer advice from wise Tutors

[Richard D. Moores]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 01:06, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
> "Richard D. Moores" <rdmoores at gmail.com> wrote
>
>>> You log into Gmail and your browser downloads the Gmail page;
>>
>> Yes, of course. But I'm always logged into Gmail.
>
> But it is still continually downloading. The same applies to a
> desktop client, if you leave it running it can continually poll the
> server, just like gmail.

Well, as I said, I found having Eudora do that was quite annoying (I'm
afraid I've forgotten the particulars). Gmail is not. In any event,
There are many, many reasons to choose to use Gmail over Eudora or OE
and their ilk.

>> 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,
>
> But its exactly wrong because in gmail your mail is never there.

No, I meant what Gmail shows in the inbox continually because I'm
always logged on.

> It has to be fetched each and every time you read it.

And it IS there in a usually not noticeable instant.

> In OE/Eudora/TB
> it is really there on your PC. You can read it even when offline.

If I needed to do that, I'd look up Gears. To quote Marc Tompkins in
this thread, "Gears enables offline reading [with Gmail]."

> Web mail is fantastically inefficient and a huge waste of bandwidth.

I have no reason to be concerned with bandwidth.  Much, much worse in
your book should be all those Netflix subscribers who watch a subset
of its available films online. Wouldn't it take thousands of Gmail
always-logged-on users like me to use the bandwidth of one online film
watcher? Then there are the YouTubers, etc., etc.  Sorry -- didn't
mean to be parochial -- Netflix is not available outside the U.S. -- I
just called them to check. <http://www.netflix.com/>

> One of the big problems with the move towards "Cloud Computing"
> is the massive amount of extra bandwidth required - who is going to
> pay for it? The telcos can't afford to keep on giving unlimited bits to
> everyone, there will need to be new charging models introduced to
> make the whole thing viable. This is a very big and important issue
> and as Steven says we as programmers need to understand the wider
> implications of the programming solutions we build.

Fine.

>> 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.
>
> You must have very fast broadband!

I do, but nothing special for this area.

>Images general take several
> seconds over my 2M (nominally 8M) connection (on a good day,
> often it slows to under 1M if the neighbours are watching IP TV...)

I see no noticeable neighbor effect. I'm sorry about your image
loading times. Reminds me of my dial-up days of 10+ years ago. I
continued to use a shell account as long as they were available -- a
tc shell, pine, with vi or vim as an editor, sendmail for complex mail
filters, lynx for a browser. I continued with those even after most
people were using, what, Netscape? Mosaic? Then there were all those
cool UNIX tools that some ISP's made available.

> But that is still a shared resource and even if you have high
> speed ADSL+ (20M+) it is still a performance bottleneck that
> you need to be conscious of.

No, I don't think so. Not where I am.

Dick