Jargons of Info Tech industry

[John Bokma]

Chris Head <chris2k01 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> John Bokma wrote:

>> And workplaces. Some people have more then one computer in the house.
>> My partner can check her email when I had her over the computer. When
>> I want to check my email when she is using it, I have to change the 
>> session, fire up Thunderbird (which eats away 20M), and change the 
>> session back.
>> 
>> [ .. ]
> 
> Hmm. That would just be a matter of preference. Personally I moved my
> Thunderbird profile into a shared directory and pointed everyone at
> it. Now only one login session can run Thunderbird at a time, but any
> login can see everyone's mailboxes.

She uses hotmail, yahoo!, etc. and I don't want her accidently delete my 
email.

>> Most people who use Thunderbird, yes. Different with OE, I am sure.
>> With a thin client *everybody*.
> 
> True. As a programmer I don't usually think about the people who never
> download updates. The way I look at it, if somebody doesn't have the
> latest version, they shouldn't be complaining about a bug.

A lot of non-programmers have no idea that there are bugs in their 
software other then the crashing ones.
 
>> Maybe because a lot of users aren't really heavy users. A nice
>> example (IMO) of a web client that works quite good: webmessenger ( 
>> http://webmessenger.msn.com/ ). It has been some time since I used it
>> the last time, but if I recall correctly I hardly noticed that I was 
>> chatting in a JavaScript pop up window.
> 
> Haven't ever needed to use that program.

Some of my customers use it. It has its uses, especially the block 
option :-D. (I don't believe that being available 24/7 has a positive 
effect on my work).

>> I rather have my email stored locally :-) But several webmail
>> services offer a form to download email.

s/form/way/

> I've not seen a service that allows that. Sounds nice.

IIRC gmail does it.

[ reducing traffic ]
> Eventually you reach the point where it's not bandwidth any more, it's
> server load. All these things like mod_gzip, deltas, and so on add
> server load.

True. On the other hand, servers get more and more powerful.

> As to the point about "page not modified", it's not in the HTML spec,

Hence I wrote:

>> RSS (I have the impression that there is no "page has not been 
>> modified" thing like with HTML,

> content. For best results (due to clock mismatches etc), the client
> should set the If-Modified-Since header to the value of the
> Last-Modified header sent by the server when the page was first
> requested and cached. 

But feed readers, at least the one I have had a look at, seem not to 
support this...

> I think we can agree that in some cases, Webmail is better, and in
> others, clients are better. Much of this will be personal preference,
> and I would like to see ISPs offering both methods of accessing e-mail
> (as mine in fact does - POP3 and Webmail).

Agreed.

-- 
John                   Small Perl scripts: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
               Perl programmer available:     http://castleamber.com/
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