[Tutor] OT: need computer advice from wise Tutors

[David Hutto]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 8:32 PM, 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. 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.

But this only matters if a)you're paying for it, not the boss b) that
there are unlimited plans available for a single monthly price, or c)
you have an 'egotistical'(meaning a professional ego/rep to maintain)
perspective on minimizing your code.

 I would think that, as programmers, we should
> be in the second group rather than the first.
>
>
> --
> Steven D'Aprano
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