On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 17:32, Steven D'Aprano <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> > 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 _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
